Reading 1:
Jared Diamond, "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race," Discover Magazine,
May 1987, pp. 64-66.
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
By Jared Diamond
University of California at Los Angeles Medical School
To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. 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 hunter-gatherers survive.
From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask "Why did almost all our
hunter-gatherer 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 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.
So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren't nasty and brutish, even though
farmes 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 hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50
per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in irondeficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold 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 preagricultural 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 fanners 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 high-carbohydrate 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 appearnce
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, nonproducing elite set itself above the disease-ridden 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 elite 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 elite, 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 huntergatherer 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 empty-handed. 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 elite 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 on 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 outbred 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
facade, and that have so far eluded us?
Reading 2:
Hunter-gatherers:
Noble or savage?
The era of the hunter-gatherer was not the social and environmental Eden that some
suggest
Dec 19th 2007
"Hunter-Gatherers: Noble of Savage?." The Economist. December 19, 2007. p 129-34.
HUMAN beings have spent most of their time on the planet as hunter-gatherers. From at least
85,000 years ago to the birth of agriculture around 73,000 years later, they combined hunted
meat with gathered veg. Some people, such as those on North Sentinel Island in the Andaman
Sea, still do. The Sentinelese are the only hunter-gatherers who still resist contact with the
outside world. Fine-looking specimens—strong, slim, fit, black and stark naked except for a
small plant-fibre belt round the waist—they are the very model of the noble savage. Genetics
suggests that indigenous Andaman islanders have been isolated since the very first expansion out
of Africa more than 60,000 years ago.
About 12,000 years ago people embarked on an experiment called agriculture and some say that
they, and their planet, have never recovered. Farming brought a population explosion, protein
and vitamin deficiency, new diseases and deforestation. Human height actually shrank by nearly
six inches after the first adoption of crops in the Near East. So was agriculture “the worst mistake
in the history of the human race”, as Jared Diamond, evolutionary biologist and professor of
geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, once called it?
Take a snapshot of the old world 15,000 years ago. Except for bits of Siberia, it was full of a new
and clever kind of people who had originated in Africa and had colonised first their own
continent, then Asia, Australia and Europe, and were on the brink of populating the Americas.
They had spear throwers, boats, needles, adzes, nets. They painted pictures, decorated their
bodies and believed in spirits. They traded foods, shells, raw materials and ideas. They sang
songs, told stories and prepared herbal medicines.
They were “hunter-gatherers”. On the whole the men hunted and the women gathered: a sexual
division of labour is still universal among non-farming people and was probably not shared by
their Homo erectus predecessors. This enabled them to eat both meat and veg, a clever trick
because it combines quality with reliability.
Why change? In the late 1970s Mark Cohen, an archaeologist, first suggested that agriculture
was born of desperation, rather than inspiration. Evidence from the Fertile Crescent seems to
support him. Rising human population density, combined perhaps with a cooling, drying climate,
left the Natufian hunter-gatherers of the region short of acorns, gazelles and wild grass seeds.
Somebody started trying to preserve and enhance a field of chickpeas or wheat-grass and soon
planting, weeding, reaping and threshing were born.
Quite independently, people took the same step in at least six other parts of the world over the
next few thousand years: the Yangzi valley, the central valley of New Guinea, Mexico, the
Andes, West Africa and the Amazon basin. And it seems that Eden came to an end. Not only had
hunter-gatherers enjoyed plenty of protein, not much fat and ample vitamins in their diet, but it
also seems they did not have to work very hard. The Hadza of Tanzania “work” about 14 hours a
week, the !Kung of Botswana not much more.
The first farmers were less healthy than the hunter-gatherers had been in their heyday. Aside
from their shorter stature, they had more skeletal wear and tear from the hard work, their teeth
rotted more, they were short of protein and vitamins and they caught diseases from domesticated
animals: measles from cattle, flu from ducks, plague from rats and worms from using their own
excrement as fertiliser.
They also got a bad attack of inequality for the first time. Hunter-gatherers' dependence on
sharing each other's hunting and gathering luck makes them remarkably egalitarian. A successful
farmer, however, can afford to buy the labour of others, and that makes him more successful still,
until eventually—especially in an irrigated river valley, where he controls the water—he can
become an emperor imposing his despotic whim upon subjects. Friedrich Engels was probably
right to identify agriculture with a loss of political innocence.
Agriculture also stands accused of exacerbating sexual inequality. In many peasant farming
communities, men make women do much of the hard work. Among hunter-gathering folk, men
usually bring fewer calories than women, and have a tiresome tendency to prefer catching big
and infrequent prey so they can show off, rather than small and frequent catches that do not rot
before they are eaten. But the men do at least contribute.
Recently, though, anthropologists have subtly revised the view that the invention of agriculture
was a fall from grace. They have found the serpent in hunter-gatherer Eden, the savage in the
noble savage. Maybe it was not an 80,000-year camping holiday after all.
In 2006 two Indian fishermen, in a drunken sleep aboard their little boat, drifted over the reef and
fetched up on the shore of North Sentinel Island. They were promptly killed by the inhabitants.
Their bodies are still there: the helicopter that went to collect them was driven away by a hail of
arrows and spears. The Sentinelese do not welcome trespassers. Only very occasionally have
they been lured down to the beach of their tiny island home by gifts of coconuts and only once or
twice have they taken these gifts without sending a shower of arrows in return.
Several archaeologists and anthropologists now argue that violence was much more pervasive in
hunter-gatherer society than in more recent eras. From the !Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in
the Arctic and the aborigines in Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of
almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once a year. War is a big word
for dawn raids, skirmishes and lots of posturing, but death rates are high—usually around 2530% of adult males die from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0.5% of the population per year
that Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois calculates as typical of hunter-gatherer
societies would equate to 2 billion people dying during the 20th century.
At first, anthropologists were inclined to think this a modern pathology. But it is increasingly
looking as if it is the natural state. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University says that
chimpanzees and human beings are the only animals in which males engage in co-operative and
systematic homicidal raids. The death rate is similar in the two species. Steven LeBlanc, also of
Harvard, says Rousseauian wishful thinking has led academics to overlook evidence of constant
violence.
Not so many women as men die in warfare, it is true. But that is because they are often the object
of the fighting. To be abducted as a sexual prize was almost certainly a common female fate in
hunter-gatherer society. Forget the Garden of Eden; think Mad Max.
Constant warfare was necessary to keep population density down to one person per square mile.
Farmers can live at 100 times that density. Hunter-gatherers may have been so lithe and healthy
because the weak were dead. The invention of agriculture and the advent of settled society
merely swapped high mortality for high morbidity, allowing people some relief from chronic
warfare so they could at least grind out an existence, rather than being ground out of existence
altogether.
Notice a close parallel with the industrial revolution. When rural peasants swapped their hovels
for the textile mills of Lancashire, did it feel like an improvement? The Dickensian view is that
factories replaced a rural idyll with urban misery, poverty, pollution and illness. Factories were
indeed miserable and the urban poor were overworked and underfed. But they had flocked to
take the jobs in factories often to get away from the cold, muddy, starving rural hell of their
birth.
Eighteenth-century rural England was a place where people starved each spring as the winter
stores ran out, where in bad years and poor districts long hours of agricultural labour—if it could
be got—barely paid enough to keep body and soul together, and a place where the “putting-out”
system of textile manufacture at home drove workers harder for lower pay than even the
factories would. (Ask Zambians today why they take ill-paid jobs in Chinese-managed mines, or
Vietnamese why they sew shirts in multinational-owned factories.) The industrial revolution
caused a population explosion because it enabled more babies to survive—malnourished,
perhaps, but at least alive.
Returning to hunter-gatherers, Mr. LeBlanc argues (in his book “Constant Battles”) that all was
not well in ecological terms, either. Homo sapiens wrought havoc on many ecosystems as Homo
erectus had not. There is no longer much doubt that people were the cause of the extinction of
the megafauna in North America 11,000 years ago and Australia 30,000 years before that. The
mammoths and giant kangaroos never stood a chance against co-ordinated ambush with stonetipped spears and relentless pursuit by endurance runners.
This was also true in Eurasia. The earliest of the great cave painters, working at Chauvet in
southern France, 32,000 years ago, was obsessed with rhinoceroses. A later artist, working at
Lascaux 15,000 years later, depicted mostly bison, bulls and horses—rhinoceroses must have
been driven close to extinction by then. At first, modern human beings around the Mediterranean
relied almost entirely on large mammals for meat. They ate small game only if it was slow
moving—tortoises and limpets were popular. Then, gradually and inexorably, starting in the
Middle East, they switched their attention to smaller animals, and especially to warm-blooded,
fast-breeding species, such as rabbits, hares, partridges and smaller gazelles. The archaeological
record tells this same story at sites in Israel, Turkey and Italy.
The reason for this shift, say Mary Stiner and Steven Kuhn of the University of Arizona, was that
human population densities were growing too high for the slower-reproducing prey such as
tortoises, horses and rhinos. Only the fast-breeding rabbits, hares and partridges, and for a while
gazelles, could cope with such hunting pressure. This trend accelerated about 15,000 years ago
as large game and tortoises disappeared from the Mediterranean diet altogether—driven to the
brink of extinction by human predation.
In times of prey scarcity, Homo erectus, like other predators, had simply suffered local
extinction; these new people could innovate their way out of trouble—they could shift their
niche. In response to demographic pressure, they developed better weapons which enabled them
to catch smaller, faster prey, which in turn enabled them to survive at high densities, though at
the expense of extinguishing many larger and slower-breeding prey. Under this theory,
the atlatl or spear-throwing stick was invented 18,000 years ago as a response to a Malthusian
crisis, not just because it seemed like a good idea.
What's more, the famously “affluent society” of hunter-gatherers, with plenty of time to gossip
by the fire between hunts and gathers, turns out to be a bit of a myth, or at least an artefact of
modern life. The measurements of time spent getting food by the !Kung omitted food-processing
time and travel time, partly because the anthropologists gave their subjects lifts in their vehicles
and lent them metal knives to process food.
Agriculture was presumably just another response to demographic pressure. A new threat of
starvation—probably during the millennium-long dry, cold “snap” known as the Younger Dryas
about 13,000 years ago—prompted some hunter-gatherers in the Levant to turn much more
vegetarian. Soon collecting wild grass seeds evolved into planting and reaping crops, which
reduced people's intake of proteins and vitamins, but brought ample calories, survival and
fertility.
The fact that something similar happened six more times in human history over the next few
thousand years—in Asia, New Guinea, at least three places in the Americas and one in Africa—
supports the notion of invention as a response to demographic pressure. In each case the early
farmers, though they might be short, sick and subjugated, could at least survive and breed,
enabling them eventually to overwhelm the remaining hunter-gatherers of their respective
continents.
It is irrelevant to ask whether we would have been better off to stay as hunter-gatherers. Being a
niche-shifting species, we could not help moving on. Willingly or not, humanity had embarked
50,000 years ago on the road called “progress” with constant change in habits driven by
invention mothered by necessity. Even 40,000 years ago, technology and lifestyle were in a state
of continuous change, especially in western Eurasia. By 34,000 years ago people were making
bone points for spears, and by 26,000 years ago they were making needles. Harpoons and other
fishing tackle appear at 18,000 years ago, as do bone spear throwers, or atlatls. String was almost
certainly in use then—how do you catch rabbits except in nets and snares?
Nor was this virtuosity confined to practicalities. A horse, carved from mammoth-ivory and
worn smooth by being used as a pendant, dates from 32,000 years ago in Germany. By the time
of Sungir, an open-air settlement from 28,000 years ago at a spot near the city of Vladimir,
north-east of Moscow, people were being buried with thousands of laboriously carved ivory
beads and even little wheel-shaped bone ornaments.
Incessant innovation is a characteristic of human beings. Agriculture, the domestication of
animals and plants, must be seen in the context of this progressive change. It was just another
step: hunter-gatherers may have been using fire to encourage the growth of root plants in
southern Africa 80,000 years ago. At 15,000 years ago people first domesticated another
species—the wolf (though it was probably the wolves that took the initiative). After 12,000 years
ago came crops. The internet and the mobile phone were in some vague sense almost predestined
50,000 years ago to appear eventually.
There is a modern moral in this story. We have been creating ecological crises for ourselves and
our habitats for tens of thousands of years. We have been solving them, too. Pessimists will point
out that each solution only brings us face to face with the next crisis, optimists that no crisis has
proved insoluble yet. Just as we rebounded from the extinction of the megafauna and became
even more numerous by eating first rabbits then grass seeds, so in the early 20th century we
faced starvation for lack of fertiliser when the population was a billion people, but can now look
forward with confidence to feeding 10 billion on less land using synthetic nitrogen, genetically
high-yield crops and tractors. When we eventually reverse the build-up in carbon dioxide, there
will be another issue waiting for us.
Task:
Argument 1: The Neolithic Revolution (introduction of farming) was a tremendous mistake for
humanity and our ancestors would have been better off if they remained Hunter-Gatherers.
Argument 2: The Hunter-Gatherer lifestyle was far too dangerous, violent, and unpredictable for
our ancestors to maintain and farming was the wiser choice.
After reading the two attached articles, choose the argument that you think is the most correct.
Then create a 2-3 page argument defending your position with evidence. Each response should
include:
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An introduction that clearly outlines the two positions presented in the readings AND
states your position on the subject
At least three (3) relevant points presented to support your claim
All three points must have evidence from the readings to support them
A presentation of the opposing article’s argument and why it is incorrect for each of the
three chosen points
A conclusion that sums up your argument coherently
This essay should be typed and approximately 2-3 pages in length, with a 12 point font,
double spaced with one inch margins. It is important that you use evidence from the
readings to support your points. The essay will only be accepted through
www.turnitin.com