The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race Jared ...

1 The Worst Mistake in theHistory of the Human RaceJared Diamond*May 1987 To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn t thecenter of the universe but merely one of billions ofheavenly bodies. From biology we learned that weweren t specially created by God but evolved along withmillions of other species. Now archaeology isdemolishing another sacred belief: that Human historyover the past million years has been a long tale ofprogress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest thatthe adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisivestep toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophefrom which we have never recovered. With agriculturecame the gross social and sexual inequality, the diseaseand despotism, that curse our first, the evidence against this revisionistinterpretation will strike twentieth century Americans asirrefutable.

2 We re better off in almost every respect thanpeople of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier thancavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Justcount our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant andvaried foods, the best tools and material goods, some ofthe longest and healthiest lives, in History . Most of us aresafe from starvation and predators. We get our energyfrom oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of amedieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?For most of our History we supported ourselves byhunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals andforaged for wild plants. It s a life that philosophers havetraditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Sinceno food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view)no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day tofind wild foods and avoid starving.

3 Our escape from thismisery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when indifferent parts of the world people began to domesticateplants and animals. The agricultural revolution spreaduntil today it s nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers the progressivist perspective on which I wasbrought up, to ask Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture? is silly. Of coursethey adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way toget more food for less work. Planted crops yield far moretons per acre than roots and berries. Just imagine a bandof savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasingwild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at afruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How manymilliseconds do you think it would take them toappreciate the advantages of agriculture?

4 The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far asto credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of artthat has taken place over the past few thousand crops can be stored, and since it takes less time topick food from a garden than to find it in the wild,agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers neverhad. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build theParthenon and compose the B-minor the case for the progressivist view seemsoverwhelming, it s hard to prove. How do you show thatthe lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when theyabandoned hunting and gathering for farming?Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirecttests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support theprogressivist view. Here s one example of an indirect test:Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse offthan farmers?

5 Scattered throughout the world, severaldozen groups of so-called primitive people, like theKalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves thatway. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisuretime, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than theirfarming neighbors. For instance, the average timedevoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for theHadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when askedwhy he hadn t emulated neighboring tribes by adoptingagriculture, replied, Why should we, when there are somany mongongo nuts in the world? While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate cropslike rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animalsin the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides moreprotein and a better balance of other nutrients.

6 In onestudy, the Bushmen s average daily food intake (during amonth when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and93 grams of protein, considerably greater than therecommended daily allowance for people of their size. It salmost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or sowild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds ofthousands of Irish farmers and their families did duringthe potato famine of the the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherersaren t nasty and brutish, even though farms have pushedthem into some of the world s Worst real estate. Butmodern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbedshoulders with farming societies for thousands of yearsdon t tell us about conditions before the agriculturalrevolution. The progressivist view is really making aclaim about the distant past: that the lives of primitivepeople improved when they switched from gathering tofarming.

7 Archaeologists can date that switch bydistinguishing remains of wild plants and animals fromthose of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbagemakers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view?That question has become answerable only in recentyears, in part through the newly emerging techniques ofpaleopathology, the study of signs of disease in theremains of ancient some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almostas much material to study as a pathologist today. Forexample, archaeologists in the chilean deserts found wellpreserved mummies whose medical conditions at time ofdeath could be determined by autopsy (Discover,October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in drycaves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to beexamined for hookworm and other the only Human remains available for study areskeletons, but they permit a surprising number ofdeductions.

8 To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner ssex, weight, and approximate age. In the few cases wherethere are many skeletons, one can construct mortalitytables like the ones life insurance companies use tocalculate expected life span and risk of death at any givenage. Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates bymeasuring bones of people of different ages, examineteeth for enamel defects (signs of childhoodmalnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones byanemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other straight forward example of what paleopathologistshave learned from skeletons concerns historical changesin height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show thatthe average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end ofthe ice ages was a generous 5 9" for men, 5 5" forwomen. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed,and by 3000 B.

9 C. had reached a low of only 5 3" formen, 5 for women. By classical times heights were veryslowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turkshave still not regained the average height of their example of paleopathology at work is the studyof Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinoisand Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located nearthe confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers,archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons thatpaint a picture of the health changes that occurred whena hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maizefarming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagosand his colleagues then at the University ofMassachusetts show these early farmers paid a price fortheir new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative ofmalnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiencyanemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotichyperostosis), a threefold rise in bone lesions reflectinginfectious disease in general, and an increase indegenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflectinga lot of hard physical labor.

10 Life expectancy at birth inthe pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-sixyears, says Armelagos, but in the post-agriculturalcommunity it was nineteen years. So these episodes ofnutritional stress and infectious disease were seriouslyaffecting their ability to survive. The evidence suggests that the Indians at DicksonMounds, like many other primitive peoples, took upfarming not by choice but from necessity in order to feedtheir constantly growing numbers. I don t think mosthunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and whenthey switched to farming they traded quality forquantity, says Mark Cohen of the State University ofNew York at Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, ofone of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology atthe Origins of Agriculture. When I first started makingthat argument ten years ago, not many people agreedwith me.