Who enjoyed a better life: hunters or farmers?
Agricultural revolution bore a lot of fruit but came with its side effects exposing humans to
multiple unprecedented challenges, whereas hunters enjoyed a better life.
As the evidence indicates, with the rise of farming and agricultural revolution, deterioration in
health had started showing signs – more tooth decay, malnutrition, and anemia; a shorter
physical stature; and diminished life expectancy. Agricultural revolution gained pace after the
end of the Ice Age. People had already started farming and domesticating animals. Living close
to animals subjected humans to new diseases – smallpox, flu, measles, chicken pox, malaria,
tuberculosis, rabies – while living in larger communities generated epidemics for the first time
in human history (Strayer, Textbook, p. 39). These people did not have a lot of resources at that
time and their numbers had started to rise drastically. They had not faced such circumstances
before, and started to face difficulties with respect to their health issues. Humankind had
started to dominate nature and domesticate it according to their own needs, and not only
nature but it enabled some people to dominate others as well (Strayer, Textbook, p. 46).
Distinctions amongst people such as rich and poor, chiefs and commoners, landowners and
dependent peasants, rulers and subjects, slaves and free people – evolved. Lives before this
revolution were easier because people didn’t have to worry about their status within a society,
they weren’t disposed to these new diseases, and lived a healthy happy life. According to an
interview taken by Marjorie Shostak an anthropologist in 1971, people living in the bushes were
happy with their simple lifestyle (Strayer, Sourcebook, p. 3).
The farmers did not have resources to overcome the pandemics due to the newly borne
diseases, they had a smaller lifespan than their ancestors who were involved in hunting, and
had to also worry about the growing population and expansion of their agricultural land
because they had to sustain the lifestyle of the people. Although hunters enjoyed a better life,
but without the agricultural revolution we might not have accomplished as humanity all the
technological development and medical breakthroughs.
All the historical evidence proves that the agricultural revolution which led to where we are
now came at the expense of life expectancy, destruction of nature’s resources, and new animal
borne diseases which we are still facing. Thus, the hunters lived a better life than that of the
farmers.