Could it be possible that archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress? In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, disease and despotism that curse our existence.
Evidence against this revisionist interpretation might strike us as irrefutable. We're better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. Who would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape? A few of us might feel like it at times!
Most of human existence was spent by hunting and gathering. We brutishly hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. Since no food was grown or stored there was no respite from the struggle that repeated each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread until today it's nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive.
Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had.
Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of primitive people such as the Kalahari Bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It appears that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep lots and work no more than their farming neighbours. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a better balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.
There are a number of reasons to suggest why agriculture was detrimental to human health.
Hunter gatherers enjoyed a varied diet while early fanners obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops only. Farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. In present day three high-carbohydrate plants; wheat, rice, and corn provide the bulk of calories consumed by the human species, however, each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.
Dependence on a limited number of crops meant that farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies leading to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities.
As a result, besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, might farming have helped bring another curse upon humanity? Deep class division. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they lived off the wild plants and animals from the days hunt. No kings to grow fat on food seized from others.........................
GiselaGina 2012 ©
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