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The Worst Mistake in the
History of the Human Race
Jared Diamond*
May 1987
To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug selfimage.
Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the
center of the universe but merely one of billions of
heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we
weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with
millions of other species. Now 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, the disease
and despotism, that curse our existence.
At first, the evidence against this revisionist
interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans 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. Just
count our advantages. 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. What neo-
Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a
medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?
For most of our history we supported ourselves by
hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and
foraged for wild plants. It’s a life that philosophers have
traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Since
no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view)
no respite from the struggle that starts anew 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 huntergatherers
survive.
From the progressivist perspective on which I was
brought up, to ask “Why did almost all our huntergatherer
ancestors adopt agriculture?” is silly. Of course
they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to
get more food for less work. Planted crops yield far more
tons per acre than roots and berries. Just imagine a band
of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing
wild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a
fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many
milliseconds do you think it would take them to
appreciate the advantages of agriculture?
The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as
to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art
that has taken place over the past few thousand years.
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. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the
Parthenon and compose the B-minor Mass.
While the case for the progressivist view seems
overwhelming, it’s hard to prove. How do you show that
the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they
abandoned hunting and gathering for farming?
Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect
tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the
progressivist view. Here’s one example of an indirect test:
Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off
than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several
dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the
Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that
way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure
time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their
farming neighbors. 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. One Bushman, when asked
why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting
agriculture, replied, “Why should we, when there are so
many mongongo nuts in the world?”
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 (during a
month when food was plentiful) 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.
So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers
aren’t nasty and brutish, even though farms have pushed
them into some of the world’s worst real estate. But
modern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed
shoulders with farming societies for thousands of years
don’t tell us about conditions before the agricultural
revolution. The progressivist view is really making a
claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive
people improved when they switched from gathering to
farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by
distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from
those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps.
How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage
makers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view?
That question has become answerable only in recent
years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of
paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the
remains of ancient peoples.
In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost
as much material to study as a pathologist today. For
example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts found well
preserved mummies whose medical conditions at time of
death could be determined by autopsy (Discover,
October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry
caves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be
examined for hookworm and other parasites.
Usually the only human remains available for study are
skeletons, but they permit a surprising number of
deductions. To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner’s
sex, weight, and approximate age. In the few cases where
there are many skeletons, one can construct mortality
tables like the ones life insurance companies use to
calculate expected life span and risk of death at any given
age. Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by
measuring bones of people of different ages, examine
teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood
malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by
anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.
One straight forward example of what paleopathologists
have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes
in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that
the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of
the ice ages was a generous 5’ 9" for men, 5’ 5" for
women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed,
and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5’ 3" for
men, 5’ for women. By classical times heights were very
slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks
have still not regained the average height of their distant
ancestors.
Another example of paleopathology at work is the study
of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois
and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near
the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers,
archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that
paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when
a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize
farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos
and his colleagues then at the University of
Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for
their new-found livelihood. Compared to the huntergatherers
who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly
50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of
malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency
anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic
hyperostosis), a threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting
infectious disease in general, and an increase in
degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting
a lot of hard physical labor. “Life expectancy at birth in
the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six
years,” says Armelagos, “but in the post-agricultural
community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of
nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously
affecting their ability to survive.”
The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson
Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up
farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed
their constantly growing numbers. “I don’t think most
hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when
they switched to farming they traded quality for
quantity,” says Mark Cohen of the State University of
New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, of
one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology at
the Origins of Agriculture. “When I first started making
that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed
with me. Now it’s become a respectable, albeit
controversial, side of the debate.”
There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the
findings that agriculture was bad for health. First,
hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early
farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few
starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the
cost of poor nutrition. (Today just three highcarbohydrate
plants –wheat, rice, and corn– provide the
bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet
each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids
essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a
limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of
starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that
agriculture encouraged people to clump together in
crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade
with other crowded societies, led to the spread of
parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists
think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that
promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg
argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and
vice versa.) 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.
Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases,
farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep
class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored
food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard
or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and
animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no
kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food
seized from others. Only in a farming population could a
healthy, non-producing élite set itself above the diseaseridden
masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae
c. 1500 B. C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet
than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or
three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average,
one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among
Chilean mummies from c. A. D. 1000, the élite were
distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips
but also by a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by
disease.
Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a
global scale today. To people in rich countries like the U.
S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and
gathering. But Americans are an élite, dependent on oil
and minerals that must often be imported from countries
with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose
between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a
bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think
would be the better choice?
Farming may have encouraged inequality between the
sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their
babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to
produce more hands to till the fields, farming women
tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their
hunter-gatherer counterparts–with consequent drains on
their health. Among the Chilean mummies for example,
more women than men had bone lesions from infectious
disease.
Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made
beasts of burden. In New Guinea farming communities
today I often see women staggering under loads of
vegetables and firewood while the men walk emptyhanded.
Once while on a field trip there studying birds, I
offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an
airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a
110-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and
assigned to a team of four men to shoulder together.
When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men
were carrying light loads, while one small woman
weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it,
supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.
As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the
flowering of art by providing us with leisure time,
modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time
as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a
critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had
ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they
wanted to. While post-agricultural technological
advances did make new art forms possible and
preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures
were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000
years ago, and were still being produced as recently as
the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some
Eskimos and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.
Thus with the advent of agriculture and élite became
better off, but most people became worse off. Instead of
swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose
agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how
we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls.
One answer boils down to the adage “Might makes right.”
Farming could support many more people than hunting,
albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities
of hunter-gatherers are rarely over one person per ten
square miles, while farmers average 100 times that.)
Partly, this is because a field planted entirely in edible
crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with
scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it’s because nomadic
hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at
four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since
a mother must carry her toddler until it’s old enough to
keep up with the adults. Because farm women don’t have
that burden, they can and often do bear a child every two
years.
As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at
the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between
feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward
agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some
bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the
evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance
they enjoyed until population growth caught up with
increased food production. Such bands outbreed and
then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain
hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished
farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It’s not that
hunter-gatherers abandoned their life style, but that
those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out
of all areas except the ones farmers didn’t want.
At this point it’s instructive to recall the common
complaint that archaeology is a luxury, concerned with
the remote past, and offering no lessons for the present.
Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have
reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst
mistake in human history. Forced to choose between
limiting population or trying to increase food production,
we chose the latter and ended up with starvation,
warfare, and tyranny.
Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and
longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast,
we’re still struggling with the mess into which agriculture
has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can solve it.
Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer
space were trying to explain human history to his fellow
spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a
24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000
years of real past time. If the history of the human race
began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the
end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for
nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through
dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we
adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches,
will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually
spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve
those seductive blessings that we imagine behind
agriculture’s glittering façade, and that have so far eluded
us?
Courtesy of Ricardo J. Salvador, Associate Professor of Agronomy
Iowa State University of Science and Technology
Ames, Iowa 50011-1010.
In, Course Syllabus Agronomy 342, World Food Issues: Past and Present:
Jared Diamond on Agriculture.
See original at <
http://www.agron.iastate.edu/courses/agron342/diamondmistake.html >.
Originally published in Discover Magazine, May 1, 1987. Pages 64-66.
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