I stumbled on a link to this article and with a title that unusual I just had to read it -
Jared Diamond on Agriculture
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
agron.iastate.edu
I can't say I really agree with the title. Clearly agriculture has helped us develop complex societies and technology that results in a much higher standard of living than our hunter-gatherer ancestors had.
If you take the weaker claim that agriculture was a mistake of a long time, that primitive farming societies had it worse than primitive hunter gatherers things get more interesting but still in the end I find the arguments unconvincing. For one thing people aren't that big of fools. You wouldn't have gotten mass conversion to agriculture if hunter-gathering was so much better. (Edit - The author does provide some explanation. The farmers out bred the hunters, and killed them or pushed them to the margins. That probably did happen a lot, but being able to support a larger population (and not having to engage in frequent infanticide) is a plus not a minus.)
From the article -
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 bettter 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.
The problem with this is it only looks at groups that have remained hunter-gatherers and really only looks at one of them. It might be that in the Kalahari hunting and gathering do better than primitive farming. That doesn't mean it would be better in other climates. Also it looks only at the most primitive farming societies. Its true that looking at modern societies would mean looking at societies where technology and complex social and economic networks have vastly changed the trade offs that early people would have faced between farming and a hunter-gather lifestyle, but the most primitive farming societies are probably primitive for a reason. They aren't the shining examples of the lifestyle that societies that get food from farming and ranching sustain.
Or to put it another way, it seems likely to me that only relatively successful hunter-gatherers stayed as hunter-gatherers, while only the less than typically successful farming societies remained very primitive. So looking for primitive hunter-gatherers and primitive farmers provides a biased sample. Also note that there are primitive and advanced farmers. There are no advanced hunter-gather societies. Modern people may hunt and gather. Some of them may even get most of their food that way. But they do so by choice, they are a small minority, and the society that created the items that allow them to live any but the most privative of lives is based much more on agriculture than hunting and gathering.
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 disease-ridden masses.
There is some truth to this idea. Not that there can be no social parasites but their number, and the extent of there parasitical activity are limited. OTOH the fact that there is no stored food, and few people who can live without getting the food themselves means that there is less opportunity for complex social and economic activities that have little to do with getting food. Also the higher density allowed for by farming (which produces much more food per acre), allows for higher populations, which in turn also allows for more division of labor. The "social parasites" are just the downside of the larger gain from division of labor. The article takes the "grey lining" of the "silver cloud" and projects it as the whole cloud. |
