
Agriculture may have been humanity’s greatest blunder (1987) - elmar
http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race
======
carapace
Did not expect to see this story in a mainstream publication, and from
--twenty-- er, thirty years ago!

For more details, and options for the future, I recommend "How Permaculture
Can Save Humanity and the Planet – But Not Civilization" and the sequel
"Redesigning Civilization with Permaculture"

[http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/how-permaculture-can-save-
hum...](http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/how-permaculture-can-save-humanity-and-
the-planet-but-not-civilization/)

[http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization-
with...](http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization-with-
permaculture/)

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moneytide1
Makes me think of "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn. This book interprets the "Garden
of Eden" as a metaphor for the hunter/gather phase. The "tree of knowledge of
good and evil" is symbolic of the choice of a population to settle down on one
spot and develop agriculture instead of staying on the move.

The amount of controlled agriculturally productive land correlates to more
food to raise a larger army which in turn can be used to forcefully acquire
more land.

I specifically remember a sentence from the book, to paraphrase: "The hungry
lion does not kill the entire herd of antelope, but rather takes what it needs
and the herd replenishes."

To quote Ayn Rand (channeled through her character Dominique): "Religion is
class exploitation."

From the article: "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 elite set itself
above the disease-ridden masses."

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pizlonator
But the article does point out that agriculture was a response - folks didn’t
farm until they had to.

So maybeagriculture wasn’t the blunder. The blunder was hunting and gathering
so hard that you had no choice but to farm. Agriculture itself was probably
the best thing our ancestors could have done given the scarcity they created
for themselves.

But I don’t know anything about this, I’m just a computer programmer.

~~~
ajross
> hunting and gathering so hard that you had no choice but to farm

That's not really how it worked. No one culture made a decision to stop
hunting. Even ignoring the costs in leisure time, agriculture allows for much
(MUCH) higher population densities and a life in a fixed location that allows
for development technologies using equipment that can't easily be carried with
you (like walls, long term food storage, arsenals full of spears, etc...).

Eventually someone learned how to do it, and discovered after a generation or
two that they outnumbered their competitors, who were either pushed aside or
borrowed the same techniques to survive.

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mcguire
" _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._"

"during a month when food was plentiful"

Don't know if the article discusses the other 11 months, since the next page
button doesn't seem to work on Firefox Android.

Oh, and what was that early childhood mortality rate?

~~~
carapace
In re: the San†, it's not exactly an anthropological study but the movie "The
Gods Must Be Crazy"‡ shows a life of relative happiness despite what seems
like abject poverty. They don't know they are poor, and so it doesn't bother
them. They have problems, but in their world all their problems are people-
sized, if that makes sense. In contrast, our modern civilization seems
Brutalist (as in the architectural style.)

Their way of life is _stable_ , "A set of tools almost identical to that used
by the modern San and dating to 42,000 BCE was discovered at Border Cave in
KwaZulu-Natal in 2012."†

†[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_people)

‡[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Must_Be_Crazy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Must_Be_Crazy)

~~~
mcguire
Discernment of mortality risk associated with childbirth in archaeologically
derived forager skeletons±:

" _This research explores the idea that if excess mortality is associated with
first pregnancy, females will outnumber males among young adult skeletons. The
sample is of 246 skeletons (119 males, 127 females) representing Later Stone
Age (LSA) foragers of the South African Cape. Young adults are distinguished
through incomplete maturation of the medial clavicle, iliac crest and
vertebral bodies. With 26 women and 14 men in the young category, a higher
mortality risk for women is suggested, particularly in the Southern Cape
region. Body size does not distinguish mortality groups; there is evidence of
a dietary protein difference between young and older women from the Southern
Cape. Possible increased mortality associated with first parturition may have
been linked to morphological or energetic challenges, or a combination of
both._ "

±
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187998171...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1879981714000643)

" _During times of deprivation, infanticide was permitted to preserve
resources._ "

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C7%83Kung_people?wprov=sfla...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C7%83Kung_people?wprov=sfla1)

~~~
carapace
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. I can't access the science article and
the abstract doesn't exactly spell out any conclusions from what I can tell.

As for infanticide "during times of deprivation" that is not unique to the
Juǀʼhoansi people. Nor death in childbirth.

FWIW famine has been a feature of agricultural societies to within living
memory.

In any event, if the movie is anything to go by, they are happy. Like, really
happy.

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badfutureahead
Since author is so preoccupied with class, sexism and progressive issues, I
wonder how consent culture was in hunter gatherer communities. If a women said
no to big-muscle-abe, did it mean no?

Good thing author doesn't need to worry about their next meal, and has time to
write such bullshit.

~~~
PorterDuff
Betcha that women tend to be protein deprived in hunter-gatherer groups, at
least the ones where they don't get to run a bunch of buffalo off of a cliff.
I should look around for a study based on dental remains.

I've always been amused by the concept of egalitarianism in tribal societies.
Prison (or high school) should teach you otherwise

~~~
woodandsteel
Those women were all nursing the children they had with the men, so the men
had a strong motivation to keep them well fed.

Besides that, the gathering side of the equation, which the women were in
charge with, is generally a lot more reliable on a daily basis than hunting.

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robotron
The book Sapiens explored some of this. I can see how agriculture has shaped
us and the planet negatively. Not sure what the alternative would have been,
other than remaining foragers.

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HNLurker2
Anarchism.

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RodgerTheGreat
This article successfully supports an intriguing assertion that hunter-
gathering societies existed on a fitness plateau, and for humanity to achieve
improvements upon that quality of life it was necessary to cross a deep
valley. To extend this to making the claim that human beings were and are
universally better off as hunter-gatherers than they are today is absurd.

Publishing this article in a magazine, with later distribution online, is a
very special kind of irony given that hunter-gatherer societies rarely if ever
developed writing systems.

~~~
PorterDuff
It seems to me that it would be difficult to separate those valleys from the
valleys you see from long term cycles in mass human behavior...under/over
population of labor for example (or under/over supply of prey animals and food
plants).

