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The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

111 points by gnosis 16y ago

iwwr 16y ago
The hunter-gatherers did not necessarily chose a farming lifestyle, they were likely displaced by the sheer numbers of the farmers. However, modern agriculture requires very few people (proportionally), under 5%. The second worst mistake in human history would be to stifle agricultural and industrial development. There is the great opportunity to lift the other 2/3 of the world out of "farm slavery". Not only to just feed them, but raise their standard of living too. You could interpret a pre-industrial economy as working on a flat per-capita capital increase. People grew as fast as capital, so there was little opportunity for accumulation (outside the very small ruling class). That is no longer the case, although there are powerful ideologies that would undo it.
- stretchwithme 16y ago
  Exactly. When farmers outnumber you, guess who's winning any land disputes? Even if land changes hands peacefully, a farmer can give you more food for your land than you could possibly gather on it. As Diamond points out, today's gatherers live on land that's not good for farming.
- TomOfTTB 16y ago
  I'm not sure the point is to stifle industrial development as much as it's to show we've built our society on several "facts" that might not be entirely accurate. Further I think the author is trying to say people in our society don't question these supposed facts and that society is worse off because of it. In this case his point is that modern society takes hunter/gatherer cultures that still exist and tries to change them to agriculture based cultures without questioning whether it's best for them. In your very reply you proved the second point. Let me lay it out... - His central argument is against the assumption that agriculture is proven to be better than hunting and gathering. He showed evidence of hunter/gatherers spending less time acquiring food and getting a better balanced diet in spite of that. - You replied that agriculture is great without giving any evidence to refute his argument. The fact that modern agriculture requires fewer people than it once did is only relevant to his point if you have numbers that say modern agriculture's time to acquire food has fallen below that of hunter/gatherers. Otherwise it's irrelevant. Plus you didn't even address the balanced diet argument. So you've proven the author's main point in that you fell back on the assumption that agriculture automatically equals the best solution.
- Umalu 16y ago
  The article is based on a false dichotomy. Hunter/gatherers farmed, and farmers hunted and gathered. Some did more hunting and gathering, while others did more farming, but for most early societies the labels "hunter/gatherer" and "farmer" describe the same people. See a fantastic (and fantastically short) book on this by Colin Tudge: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300080247 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300080247.
edoloughlin 16y ago
1987: simpler times. I can't help but wonder what to author would have written today given the order-of-magnitude larger mistakes we've made since then, such as reality TV.
simonsarris 16y ago
I was expecting the burning of the Library of Alexandria or the Library of Baghdad ("House of Wisdom"). I love Jared Diamond's work, but I think that this essay is incomplete at best and only raises more questions. If agriculture was a last-resort method, why didn't smaller fractions splinter off from the groups and continue their hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Diamond writes, "Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to." I don't think that's true. Very little engineering was done before agrarian societies, and I'm fairly certain that most ancient wonders required no small amount of engineering chops. And while great sculptures may have arose 15,000 years ago by hunter-gatherer societies, no violins or pianos certainly came about. I think he is downplaying the effect that art and engineering have had here. In the last paragraph Diamond calls the hunter-gatherer lifestyle the "longest lasting" lifestyle, which is trivially true (it was there first). But he also calls it the "most successful in human history." Successful how? In terms of happiness? In terms of overcoming various maladies? If they were almost all completely crushed by agrarian societies, as he illustrates in Guns, Germs & Steel, wouldn't that be considered unsuccessful?
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  Successful in that humans survived that way without major issue for 98% of their existence. We've only been industrialized for a tiny period of our racial history, and we already have and had a host of problems. (the human race is estimated to be 200,000 years old. Egypt arose at best 5,000 years ago.) By the way- I don't think you can assume ancient man was unhappy. It's been shown in the past that wealth and higher standards of living do not directly correlate to greater happiness, and frankly our species would have had a hell of a problem if we were chronically depressed for 195,000 years.
  - simonsarris 16y ago
    I certainly don't disagree with your last point, but I take issue with your first one. "We've only been doing this for a short while and already all these issues arose" isn't necessarily an argument against something. It could be said about a lot of things, for instance: The early automobile was only out for a short while but already had a host of problems: It was loud, it required hard-to-get petrol, it couldn't go all the places horses could go, it was more expensive than a horse, and horses could be traded more easily than automobiles (more liquid of an asset). And yet we worked through these problems. We built roads, autos are quieter and less polluting. They still have their problems, but they far outpace horses in utility. I think civilization will be the same way. It has troubles at first, sure. Worse nutrition, class divisions, disease. I'll give that. But its getting better. And my optimistic self hopes it will continue to get better as time goes on. If industrialization has only been a tiny period of history, well, give it a while!
johnconroy 16y ago
tripe
larrik 16y ago
It's funny, just a couple of hundred years ago, the belief was that the human race used to be happy and successful, and then declined. For intellectuals: Greece, Rome, even the Central/South American civilizations. For every one else: Eden or Atlantis, etc. Progress isn't always a straight line. Early automobiles were poor replacements for horses or horse-powered vehicles, but the potential was there.
- 5teev 16y ago
  > It's funny, just a couple of hundred years ago, the belief was that the human race used to be happy and successful, and then declined. This statement can be applied recursively all the way back to the dawn of civilization.
  - gnosis 16y ago
    "The young people of today love luxury. They have bad manners, they scoff at authority and lack respect for their elders. Children nowadays are really tyrants, they no longer stand up when their elders come into the room where they are sitting, they contradict their parents, chat together in the presence of adults, eat gluttonously and tyrannise their teachers." -- Socrates, 470-399BC
mckoss 16y ago
tl;dr
noodle 16y ago
i tend to think that agriculture was a necessity based on population density and the formation of towns/cities. too many people in one place means there needs to be a renewable source of food. hunting and gathering for hundreds would eventually result in too little to feed everyone.
- kahawe 16y ago
  A lot of people here seemed to have missed the fact that this was indeed one of the points brought up in this interesting read.
  - noodle 16y ago
    perhaps i could've worded it better -- the mistake (imo) wasn't choosing agriculture, agriculture was a necessary byproduct required to facilitate living in cities. chicken/egg problem
    - fanboy123 16y ago
      I think Diamond is pointing out that it may be a misconception to think of hunting/gathering as a "terrible" quality of life to indicate that population pressure might have forced us into ag. This suggests an order to the chicken/egg problem. Basically the population grew to a large enough size where the game they were hunting and the berries they were gathering weren't enough (or went extinct) so they had to switch to a agrarian lifestyle, which needed more work and yielded less.
      - noodle 16y ago
        and i suppose what i'm trying to say is that if you have a group large enough to outgrow hunting/gathering, its likely to be large enough to generate at least some of the issues described in the article attributed to large groups of people.
    - scott_s 16y ago
      I don't think we would have lived in cities without developing agriculture - that is, I think you're putting the carriage before the horse. Agriculture not only enables us to feed many more mouths, but it required us to settle in one place. We had no incentive to settle in one place before agriculture.
michaelochurch 16y ago
Farming beat out hunting and gathering because it was more fit. That doesn't mean it was "better". Evolution is not necessarily progressive. Evolution is "survival by that which can spread its genes", and agricultural people are better at that. Agricultural peoples simply out-populated their nomadic, hunter-gatherer brethren. Both groups of populations stole from the other (and within their group) but agricultural people could raise more soldiers. Nomadic warriors were individually superior (better nutrition, more battle experience, more likely to have up-to-date battle technologies due to mobility) but were no match when outnumbered 20:1 by armed peasants. Also, to rob a farming population, one has to leave some of them alive, and that means that, 14 years later, they have a fresh crop of soldiers. It's (probably) true that the average quality of life declined during 15-4k BC as agriculture spread throughout Eurasia and North Africa-- agriculture made severe and persistent social inequalities possible-- but the quantity grew, as did "energy capture", or the ability of humans to draw energy out of the environment. Thus, agriculture won. It couldn't have happened any other way. Also, it wasn't a single choice that happened suddenly. The transitions from nomadic to semi-nomadic to semi-agricultural to fully agricultural lifestyles happened over centuries. Agriculture probably began as a "last resort" in event of an ecological catastrophe (Younger Dryas) that depleted game but, as rising human population became a "constant catastrophe", overtook hunting and gathering outright. At any rate, until one has agriculture (and religion, as a motivating force) one is very unlikely to see the written word, which is a necessary precursor for modern society. Whether one is better off in 15000 BC vs. 1500 AD, I would honestly call a toss-up, but I'd much rather be alive in 2011 AD than 15000 BC.
- FrojoS 16y ago
  Great post! However, do you have any sources to back your claim on religion? Not sure if you are saying, that religion is required 'as a motivating force' for building a stable society or for writing thoughts down. Both developments can be explained well without religion, no?
  - michaelochurch 16y ago
    No one knows for sure, and it's a running joke in anthropology that anything poorly understood among ancient peoples is declared "religious", but it's probable that religion emerged at the same time as law (the real motivator behind inventing writing) and that they were deeply intertwined. Belief in the supernatural exists for genetically hard-wired reasons, but the first truly organized religions were probably not the live-and-let-live shamanic practices that began among hunter-gatherers, but ancestral cults with some coercive intent. The most important question of law has generally been: who should own what? This is where the ancestors (cum deities) come in. A king will just have you killed if you steal his possessions. What happens when he dies and his less charismatic son wants the same power and privilege? His son says, "If you don't show the same loyalty to me as you showed my father, he will possess a lion and that lion will eat you." This raises the possibility of an afterlife. A generation later, the grandson says, "If you disobey me, my grandfather will torment you forever in the afterlife." Eventually, these ancestors became gods and their accomplishments are magnified to supernatural levels of achievement. Three thousand years of oral tradition later, with a human ancestor morphed into a fictional character and no one able to determine who the "real" descendants were, priests (people of high social class) become the intermediaries. Divination, religion, and law were intertwined at this time. Law began from the question, "How do we organize our society to keep the gods happy?" And it needed written tradition to keep track of what worked and what didn't. Most of what was being divined at first was who "rightfully" owns land, possessions, and people-- and gambling, for the record, probably has the same roots: Let's ask the gods who should have these resources. This is not to say that pragmatic, civil law could have emerged in the absence of religion, and I'm sure that half the architects of ancient law were thinking, "I don't really believe in this supernatural shit, but these ideas work", but it seems not to have happened that way. Modern philosophy didn't even exist until 700 BC at the earliest, by which point the ancestors and divine-kings and gods were well-established. By the way, I don't mean to disparage religious belief outright with this summary. I'm a skeptic who generally finds organized religion silly, but I'm actually a deistic Buddhist, not an atheist or agnostic. That, however, is a discussion for another time.
pandeiro 16y ago
I'm definitely sympathetic to this argument; I might even fall into the primitivist hippie camp. Whatever. Yes, I do think I'd be happier running through the jungle naked than sitting here debugging JavaScript to pay off the insurance, banking, and real estate cartels, so I can continue to occupy a 200 sq-foot box inside an ugly human anthill in a pollution-choked, overcrowded, violence-and-poverty-plagued megalopolis.
- wladimir 16y ago
  Whereas hunter-gatherers were dependent on keeping the environment in a healthy state to survive. The agricultural lifestyle has caused many to regard nature as superfluous, unnecessary. It's the origin of "humanity is the superior race" thinking. So we can bulldoze everything, kill what we can't use and don't find "fuzzy and cute". Because it's all about the "economic value" for us... I'm not a hippie and am not preoccupied with restoring things as they were 100,000 years ago. But I'm also not sure what we're doing now is the right way. I wish we were behaving less like a plague.
jfoutz 16y ago
In a hyperbole like this, access to alcohol, anytime you want it, should get more credit.
- adolph 16y ago
  So true. As I read the article, I couldn't help thinking of the latest Less Wrong post about "Levels of Action." In particular: Studies have shown that there is a significant positive correlation between alcohol use, and income in life. Why would that be? Drinking alcohol doesn't make you smarter. Nor does it make you work harder, or become more skilled, or gain additional knowledge. I think the reason is that alcohol is disinhibitory. http://lesswrong.com/lw/58g/levels_of_action/#more http://lesswrong.com/lw/58g/levels_of_action/#more
  - michaelochurch 16y ago
    On the positive correlation between alcohol use and income: I think it's because alcohol is socially disinhibitory, and expected to be that way, and this makes it socially useful for, e.g., getting information out of people that they'd usually guard. Most office politics is learned at the bar. If you ask someone, at 3:00 pm, certain pointed questions, you're a creep and a gossip. If you ask those questions after-hours at the bar when everyone's "supposed" to be drunk and loose-lipped, no one gives a shit.
  - tcarnell 16y ago
    well if you sampled the 6 billion people in the world, yes, rich people drink alcohol. I think its a bit like saying 'rich people drive Ferraris' - yes, of course! having a lot of disposable income will obviously lead to the ability to purchase luxury, non-essential items like alcohol.
    - adolph 16y ago
      That is an interesting statement. I'd estimate that the sample would show that alcohol was used by people with a broad range of income levels. However, the only way a hunter-gatherer (as described by Diamond) would obtain alcohol is to trade with a farmer or someone who can do the meta-work required for alcohol and supported by farming.
diego_moita 16y ago
I liked this. The cool thing about reading intelligent people is that you do learn a lot, even when you don't agree with them.
Jun8 16y ago
The basic question, as Prof. Diamond puts it is: "How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming?" One can extend this: How do you know the Industrial Revolution made people lives better (read Dickens to see the inhuman conditions), or the nuclear revolution (Chernobyl, Japan), or the Internet revolution (the ADD generation texting, sexting, etc). Prof. Diamond thesis seems to be that we made a huge mistake by moving from hunter gatherer to agricultural society, which, inevitably, brought about most of the evils we are fighting with now. Proof? Just look at the idyllic life of current hunter gatherers. To back his claim, he puts forth arguments ranging from absurd "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." to anecdotal, i.e. no proof at all "Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well... 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 ..." And the final stroke, the masterful FUD-laden last paragraph: "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? " Setting aside that there is no global shortage of food (does not mean that nobody's is hungry, but the reasons are complex and food shortage is not one of them), most of this is, at best speculative. If you liked his point of view, than you may also like Prof. Eric Pianka's thesis that there are too many people on earth and if an airborne Ebola virus kills 90% it would be a good thing (http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Everybody.html http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Everybody.html). The problem with these views is that they resonate with a certain mindset, people who think we have too much science and technology in our lives and it would have been better to live like the "so-called" primitive people. One recent example that comes to mind is the movie Babies (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020938/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020938/). Here, the life of the two babies living in primitive (not so-called, really primitive) conditions in Africa and Kazakhstan is discreetly shown to be better and more free than their counterparts in the US and Japan.
- 16y ago
tcarnell 16y ago
If we take 'happiness' to be the fitness function of human evolution and a driver for adaption then I think it highly unlikey humans would ever change to become less happy. Infact, I might suggest that human happiness (amount of) is likely to be the one thing in common to modern civilizations as to those 200,000 years ago. In addition, be careful to use the word 'evolution' with timeframes as miniscule as 200,000 years - the author correctly uses the word 'adoption'.
neutronicus 16y ago
I don't think the mistake was agriculture per se so much as breeding. The biggest prisoner's dilemma in human history.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
This is not such a good essay. I understand where the author is trying to go and I was rooting for him, but it looked like he lacked the depth to do the analysis, so he kind of meandered around. Some parts were better, some parts were worse. This kind of counter-factual discussion (what would the world be like if Hitler had won? How about if the Neanderthals hadn't died out?) has a tendency to get fluffy pretty quickly. Fun for a paragaph or two, or a tweet, but very tough to pull off in essay or longer format.
VladRussian 16y ago
progress is maximizing the carrying capacity in that equation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory#Overview http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory#Overview >"How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming?" there is no "better" in progress. Using the same analysis, the Industrial Revolution made working peoples life worse than lives of farmers. So what? It isn't about better. It is about species survival and dominance. Humans are predators with extremely high killing instinct. Wait until the interstellar space annihilation drive invented. Any intelligent species which doesn't have photonic torpedoes may start learning history of Incas and Native Americans. It is easy to imagine how human emission of green house interstellar dust will increase the ratio of Galaxy kernel's X-rays kept inside the Galaxy and causing global galaxy warming and slow down of its rotation.
protomyth 16y ago
For an interesting historical perspective of the interaction, check "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World" by Jack Weatherford http://www.amazon.com/Genghis-Khan-Making-Modern-World/dp/0609809644/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1302795893&sr=8-7 http://www.amazon.com/Genghis-Khan-Making-Modern-World/dp/06...
imcdowell 16y ago
I have a hard time sympathizing with those pining for the days of high infant mortality and periodic semi-starvation. While I don't argue that many people now are unhappy and working too hard, if you're privileged enough to be reading hacker news in your free time you have a shot at a significantly better outcome. e.g. I went to a public school, worked for 2.5 years out of college, then saved enough to pay off debts and take a year and a half off to go travel. I'm in great health, I have a beautiful wife that I love dearly, my house is never cooler than 65 degrees, and when it rains I don't have to get wet. You can keep your hunting and gathering. Just because most people now are suckers doesn't mean you have to be one. Smart fiscal and dietary choices open a world of possibilities totally inaccessible to pre-agrarian (or even pre-industrial) humans.
extension 16y ago
This is a bit like saying "we are happier as babies than as adults so growing up is the worst mistake we ever make". A charming thought perhaps, but not literally true. Trying to compare the happiness of cavemen with modern people demolishes whatever vague definition of "happiness" we might already have. And if we fall back on "do modern people want to be cavemen?" then the answer is no. Agriculture has profoundly changed every aspect of human existence many times over. Can we label the last few millenia of human history collectively as "good" or "bad"? Compared to what?
espeed 16y ago
Overpopulation is the elephant in the room that no one talks about, and I believe that most of the issues today have it at its core. Much of propaganda is designed to dance around the issue of population control -- "the primary responsibility of government is to project the minority of the opulent from the majority" (listen this Harvard talk on "Propaganda and Control of The Public Mind" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0OnTHz--7I&playnext=1&list=PL20B9B966EB3640B7I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0OnTHz--7I&playnext=1&#3...). In the 1960s Henry Kissinger completed National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), which is more commonly referred to as the "Kissinger Report" (http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PCAAB500.pdf http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PCAAB500.pdf). Kissinger says that the greatest threat to America is not the proliferation of nuclear weapons, but the overpopulation of third-world countries. NSSM 200 discusses several mechanisms that control population growth, such as war, famine, disease, pestilence, poverty and immigration. Dr. Al Bartlett's (http://www.albartlett.org/ http://www.albartlett.org/) says, "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function" (you can watch his famous lecture on population growth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9znsuCphHUU&playnext=1&list=PL63DAFCD223C29352 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9znsuCphHUU&playnext=1&#3...). He then goes through the stark reality of what will happen if we continue our exponential growth against finite natural resources. Research by economists John Donohue and Steven Levit at the University of Chicago (http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittTheImpactOfLegalized2001.pdf http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittT...) showed that the legalizing of abortion started to reduce violent crime by the 1980s because would-be impoverished people weren't growing up to be criminals. You may have read about this is Levit's book, Freakonomics (http://freakonomicsbook.com/ http://freakonomicsbook.com/). Abortion, one of our most controversial issues, is primarily about population control, but this rarely gets talked about. It's the establishment's pink elephant that's been sitting in the room since the 1970s (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12ginsburg-t.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12ginsburg-t.html...). We argue about "right to life" and "right to choose" and most have never even considered the bigger issue because that's the way the issue has been framed. The question we should be asking is, "Do you believe that population control is a good thing or a bad thing?" At the end of Dr. Bartlett's lecture on population growth, he presents the "Great Challenge." He asks, "Can you think of any problem on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted or advanced by having larger populations at the local level, the state level, the national level, or globally?" My answer to his challenge is: Yes, larger populations mean we have more of our greatest resource -- ourselves. Our creativity and ingenuity has developed solutions to our greatest problems, but we need true and accurate information so that we make better decisions and work toward a solution.
pumpmylemma 16y ago
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has a good book called Civilization: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature that talks a lot about this, among other things. http://www.amazon.com/Civilizations-Culture-Ambition-Transformation-Nature/dp/074320249X http://www.amazon.com/Civilizations-Culture-Ambition-Transfo... (Not an affiliate link.)
dennyabraham 16y ago
what this article does not mention is that the viability of hunter-gatherer lifestyles may have eroded significantly during the (ongoing) quaternary extinction event that began in the late pleistocene. the proliferation of hunter gatherers and their comparative excellence at hunting may have in fact caused this extinction (see overkill theory). furthermore, declining game reserves places strong incentive on creating reliable alternative food sources, so agriculture may be a direct consequence of this success of our ancestors' lifestyle. when considered as an alternative to sudden, significant population decline as a result of collapsing prey biomass rather than to a literal (and possibly the mythological origin of) eden, the choice to live agriculturally is the best mistake we've ever made.
ohmygodel 16y ago
His arguments suggest that optimal nutrition is close to what we ate as hunter-gatherers. I wonder if Diamond believes in the paleo diet.
zeteo 16y ago
There is a very good reason why hunter gatherers never built the Parthenon, and in general why their technological development is sorely lacking: they lack specialists. Masons, blacksmiths, and later scientists, engineers, and professors are only able to make a living because other people engage in agriculture.
bfe 16y ago
I have learned a great deal from Diamond's books and articles, but even he shows elsewhere that the two leading causes of death across hunter-gatherer societies are combat between tribes and homicide within tribes. Agricultural civilization didn't introduce cruelty and ignorance into the human race. As smart and creative a thinker as he is, I don't think he adequately corrects, when he compares overall human well-being today with that of 10,000 years ago, for his perspective as someone who has never gone hungry with no idea of when he would eat again, and who is able to study the sweep of human history only because of the human advances in physical and intellectual resources of the past tens of thousands of years.
tomelders 16y ago
Not IPv6 then?
patrickgzill 16y ago
My first question upon looking at this article: is there really enough evidence available to presume the ability to make a conclusive judgment / argument?
- hackinthebochs 16y ago
  There is enough to begin a discussion about it. What is one of the top 2-3 things everyone wishes for? Health. He makes a convincing argument that hunter-gatherers were considerably more healthy than agriculturalists.
ajscherer 16y ago
"Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural 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." Life expectency is now 67 years. I'll take the extra 40 years and deal with the lack of "essential" amino acids. Of course the real problem with this essay is the nonsensical premise. Agriculture can't be a mistake because it wasn't a decision. There may have been some individual people who decided to switch from hunting to agriculture, but there was no species-wide vote. There is no reason to imagine that there could've been such a vote, or that today there could be a decision for humanity to switch back. Of course individual people can decide to embrace the hunter gatherer life. I find it interesting that the author is reaching for pen & paper and not loin cloth & spear.
dusklight 16y ago
About sexism .. there were many hunter-nomad cultures where rape and kidnapping was the normal way of acquiring a bride. The writer talks about deaths caused by disease and overcrowding from agriculture but he neglects to mention that those people would not have been born in the first place because there wouldn't have been enough food to support them using the hunter-gatherer model. If agriculture causes + 1k births and -100 deaths then it's still net beneficial. This may seem like callous mathematics but would it not be even more cruel to deny existence for those other 900 souls?
duopixel 16y ago
It takes me around two hours per week to put food on my table. The rest of my money goes to splurging on the niceties of modern life.
gojomo 16y ago
I'd take the risks and rewards of agriculture over billions of years of repetitive nomadic hunter-gathering, where no generation does anything different than its ancestors.
3am 16y ago
The worst mistake in human history was me reading this terrible article. The author doesn't think hierarchical societies are possible in hunter/gatherer societies?
- 3am 16y ago
  Gah! "Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history." And since then, all we've managed to do is construct the entirety of human knowledge. Atoms, DNA, trips to space.. I mean I'm sitting in air-conditioning write this over the Internet. On a mid-tier laptop that exceeds every scientific capability that hunter gatherer societies ever had. But, the author makes a fair point that "Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to." And yes, hunter gathers did make scrimshaw and paint ochre on rocks. This article is like a hookworm in my brain. I wish I could un-read it. So awful in so many ways.
  - hackinthebochs 16y ago
    Come now, you can provide a better analysis than this. >And since then, all we've managed to do is construct the entirety of human knowledge. Atoms, DNA, trips to space.. What does that really do for any individual person. Does simply knowing about atoms, DNA, space make your average happiness strictly greater than that of a hunter-gatherer? Of course not. Unless you can show that technology strictly makes the average happiness for humans greater, it is completely irrelevant to the discussion. What your post comes down to is: "I have all this cool stuff, so clearly we're better off now". How self-centered of you.
    - 3am 16y ago
      Why would I need to provide a better analysis than this? The benefits of scientific advancement to the individual are so numerous and ubiquitous that only an idiot would dismiss them.
      - hackinthebochs 16y ago
fictorial 16y ago
"I don't think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to..." Is there a term that describes a typo like this, wherein a word relevant to the context is used instead of the "correct" word for the sentence?

111 points by gnosis 16y ago

iwwr 16y ago

The hunter-gatherers did not necessarily chose a farming lifestyle, they were likely displaced by the sheer numbers of the farmers. However, modern agriculture requires very few people (proportionally), under 5%. The second worst mistake in human history would be to stifle agricultural and industrial development. There is the great opportunity to lift the other 2/3 of the world out of "farm slavery". Not only to just feed them, but raise their standard of living too. You could interpret a pre-industrial economy as working on a flat per-capita capital increase. People grew as fast as capital, so there was little opportunity for accumulation (outside the very small ruling class). That is no longer the case, although there are powerful ideologies that would undo it.

stretchwithme 16y ago
Exactly. When farmers outnumber you, guess who's winning any land disputes? Even if land changes hands peacefully, a farmer can give you more food for your land than you could possibly gather on it. As Diamond points out, today's gatherers live on land that's not good for farming.
TomOfTTB 16y ago
I'm not sure the point is to stifle industrial development as much as it's to show we've built our society on several "facts" that might not be entirely accurate. Further I think the author is trying to say people in our society don't question these supposed facts and that society is worse off because of it. In this case his point is that modern society takes hunter/gatherer cultures that still exist and tries to change them to agriculture based cultures without questioning whether it's best for them. In your very reply you proved the second point. Let me lay it out... - His central argument is against the assumption that agriculture is proven to be better than hunting and gathering. He showed evidence of hunter/gatherers spending less time acquiring food and getting a better balanced diet in spite of that. - You replied that agriculture is great without giving any evidence to refute his argument. The fact that modern agriculture requires fewer people than it once did is only relevant to his point if you have numbers that say modern agriculture's time to acquire food has fallen below that of hunter/gatherers. Otherwise it's irrelevant. Plus you didn't even address the balanced diet argument. So you've proven the author's main point in that you fell back on the assumption that agriculture automatically equals the best solution.
Umalu 16y ago
The article is based on a false dichotomy. Hunter/gatherers farmed, and farmers hunted and gathered. Some did more hunting and gathering, while others did more farming, but for most early societies the labels "hunter/gatherer" and "farmer" describe the same people. See a fantastic (and fantastically short) book on this by Colin Tudge: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300080247 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300080247.

edoloughlin 16y ago

1987: simpler times. I can't help but wonder what to author would have written today given the order-of-magnitude larger mistakes we've made since then, such as reality TV.

simonsarris 16y ago

I was expecting the burning of the Library of Alexandria or the Library of Baghdad ("House of Wisdom"). I love Jared Diamond's work, but I think that this essay is incomplete at best and only raises more questions. If agriculture was a last-resort method, why didn't smaller fractions splinter off from the groups and continue their hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Diamond writes, "Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to." I don't think that's true. Very little engineering was done before agrarian societies, and I'm fairly certain that most ancient wonders required no small amount of engineering chops. And while great sculptures may have arose 15,000 years ago by hunter-gatherer societies, no violins or pianos certainly came about. I think he is downplaying the effect that art and engineering have had here. In the last paragraph Diamond calls the hunter-gatherer lifestyle the "longest lasting" lifestyle, which is trivially true (it was there first). But he also calls it the "most successful in human history." Successful how? In terms of happiness? In terms of overcoming various maladies? If they were almost all completely crushed by agrarian societies, as he illustrates in Guns, Germs & Steel, wouldn't that be considered unsuccessful?

sliverstorm 16y ago
Successful in that humans survived that way without major issue for 98% of their existence. We've only been industrialized for a tiny period of our racial history, and we already have and had a host of problems. (the human race is estimated to be 200,000 years old. Egypt arose at best 5,000 years ago.) By the way- I don't think you can assume ancient man was unhappy. It's been shown in the past that wealth and higher standards of living do not directly correlate to greater happiness, and frankly our species would have had a hell of a problem if we were chronically depressed for 195,000 years.
- simonsarris 16y ago
  I certainly don't disagree with your last point, but I take issue with your first one. "We've only been doing this for a short while and already all these issues arose" isn't necessarily an argument against something. It could be said about a lot of things, for instance: The early automobile was only out for a short while but already had a host of problems: It was loud, it required hard-to-get petrol, it couldn't go all the places horses could go, it was more expensive than a horse, and horses could be traded more easily than automobiles (more liquid of an asset). And yet we worked through these problems. We built roads, autos are quieter and less polluting. They still have their problems, but they far outpace horses in utility. I think civilization will be the same way. It has troubles at first, sure. Worse nutrition, class divisions, disease. I'll give that. But its getting better. And my optimistic self hopes it will continue to get better as time goes on. If industrialization has only been a tiny period of history, well, give it a while!

johnconroy 16y ago

tripe

larrik 16y ago

It's funny, just a couple of hundred years ago, the belief was that the human race used to be happy and successful, and then declined. For intellectuals: Greece, Rome, even the Central/South American civilizations. For every one else: Eden or Atlantis, etc. Progress isn't always a straight line. Early automobiles were poor replacements for horses or horse-powered vehicles, but the potential was there.

5teev 16y ago
> It's funny, just a couple of hundred years ago, the belief was that the human race used to be happy and successful, and then declined. This statement can be applied recursively all the way back to the dawn of civilization.
- gnosis 16y ago
  "The young people of today love luxury. They have bad manners, they scoff at authority and lack respect for their elders. Children nowadays are really tyrants, they no longer stand up when their elders come into the room where they are sitting, they contradict their parents, chat together in the presence of adults, eat gluttonously and tyrannise their teachers." -- Socrates, 470-399BC

mckoss 16y ago

tl;dr

noodle 16y ago

i tend to think that agriculture was a necessity based on population density and the formation of towns/cities. too many people in one place means there needs to be a renewable source of food. hunting and gathering for hundreds would eventually result in too little to feed everyone.

kahawe 16y ago
A lot of people here seemed to have missed the fact that this was indeed one of the points brought up in this interesting read.
- noodle 16y ago
  perhaps i could've worded it better -- the mistake (imo) wasn't choosing agriculture, agriculture was a necessary byproduct required to facilitate living in cities. chicken/egg problem
  - fanboy123 16y ago
    I think Diamond is pointing out that it may be a misconception to think of hunting/gathering as a "terrible" quality of life to indicate that population pressure might have forced us into ag. This suggests an order to the chicken/egg problem. Basically the population grew to a large enough size where the game they were hunting and the berries they were gathering weren't enough (or went extinct) so they had to switch to a agrarian lifestyle, which needed more work and yielded less.
    - noodle 16y ago
      and i suppose what i'm trying to say is that if you have a group large enough to outgrow hunting/gathering, its likely to be large enough to generate at least some of the issues described in the article attributed to large groups of people.
  - scott_s 16y ago
    I don't think we would have lived in cities without developing agriculture - that is, I think you're putting the carriage before the horse. Agriculture not only enables us to feed many more mouths, but it required us to settle in one place. We had no incentive to settle in one place before agriculture.

michaelochurch 16y ago

Farming beat out hunting and gathering because it was more fit. That doesn't mean it was "better". Evolution is not necessarily progressive. Evolution is "survival by that which can spread its genes", and agricultural people are better at that. Agricultural peoples simply out-populated their nomadic, hunter-gatherer brethren. Both groups of populations stole from the other (and within their group) but agricultural people could raise more soldiers. Nomadic warriors were individually superior (better nutrition, more battle experience, more likely to have up-to-date battle technologies due to mobility) but were no match when outnumbered 20:1 by armed peasants. Also, to rob a farming population, one has to leave some of them alive, and that means that, 14 years later, they have a fresh crop of soldiers. It's (probably) true that the average quality of life declined during 15-4k BC as agriculture spread throughout Eurasia and North Africa-- agriculture made severe and persistent social inequalities possible-- but the quantity grew, as did "energy capture", or the ability of humans to draw energy out of the environment. Thus, agriculture won. It couldn't have happened any other way. Also, it wasn't a single choice that happened suddenly. The transitions from nomadic to semi-nomadic to semi-agricultural to fully agricultural lifestyles happened over centuries. Agriculture probably began as a "last resort" in event of an ecological catastrophe (Younger Dryas) that depleted game but, as rising human population became a "constant catastrophe", overtook hunting and gathering outright. At any rate, until one has agriculture (and religion, as a motivating force) one is very unlikely to see the written word, which is a necessary precursor for modern society. Whether one is better off in 15000 BC vs. 1500 AD, I would honestly call a toss-up, but I'd much rather be alive in 2011 AD than 15000 BC.

FrojoS 16y ago
Great post! However, do you have any sources to back your claim on religion? Not sure if you are saying, that religion is required 'as a motivating force' for building a stable society or for writing thoughts down. Both developments can be explained well without religion, no?
- michaelochurch 16y ago
  No one knows for sure, and it's a running joke in anthropology that anything poorly understood among ancient peoples is declared "religious", but it's probable that religion emerged at the same time as law (the real motivator behind inventing writing) and that they were deeply intertwined. Belief in the supernatural exists for genetically hard-wired reasons, but the first truly organized religions were probably not the live-and-let-live shamanic practices that began among hunter-gatherers, but ancestral cults with some coercive intent. The most important question of law has generally been: who should own what? This is where the ancestors (cum deities) come in. A king will just have you killed if you steal his possessions. What happens when he dies and his less charismatic son wants the same power and privilege? His son says, "If you don't show the same loyalty to me as you showed my father, he will possess a lion and that lion will eat you." This raises the possibility of an afterlife. A generation later, the grandson says, "If you disobey me, my grandfather will torment you forever in the afterlife." Eventually, these ancestors became gods and their accomplishments are magnified to supernatural levels of achievement. Three thousand years of oral tradition later, with a human ancestor morphed into a fictional character and no one able to determine who the "real" descendants were, priests (people of high social class) become the intermediaries. Divination, religion, and law were intertwined at this time. Law began from the question, "How do we organize our society to keep the gods happy?" And it needed written tradition to keep track of what worked and what didn't. Most of what was being divined at first was who "rightfully" owns land, possessions, and people-- and gambling, for the record, probably has the same roots: Let's ask the gods who should have these resources. This is not to say that pragmatic, civil law could have emerged in the absence of religion, and I'm sure that half the architects of ancient law were thinking, "I don't really believe in this supernatural shit, but these ideas work", but it seems not to have happened that way. Modern philosophy didn't even exist until 700 BC at the earliest, by which point the ancestors and divine-kings and gods were well-established. By the way, I don't mean to disparage religious belief outright with this summary. I'm a skeptic who generally finds organized religion silly, but I'm actually a deistic Buddhist, not an atheist or agnostic. That, however, is a discussion for another time.

pandeiro 16y ago

I'm definitely sympathetic to this argument; I might even fall into the primitivist hippie camp. Whatever. Yes, I do think I'd be happier running through the jungle naked than sitting here debugging JavaScript to pay off the insurance, banking, and real estate cartels, so I can continue to occupy a 200 sq-foot box inside an ugly human anthill in a pollution-choked, overcrowded, violence-and-poverty-plagued megalopolis.

wladimir 16y ago
Whereas hunter-gatherers were dependent on keeping the environment in a healthy state to survive. The agricultural lifestyle has caused many to regard nature as superfluous, unnecessary. It's the origin of "humanity is the superior race" thinking. So we can bulldoze everything, kill what we can't use and don't find "fuzzy and cute". Because it's all about the "economic value" for us... I'm not a hippie and am not preoccupied with restoring things as they were 100,000 years ago. But I'm also not sure what we're doing now is the right way. I wish we were behaving less like a plague.

jfoutz 16y ago

In a hyperbole like this, access to alcohol, anytime you want it, should get more credit.

adolph 16y ago
So true. As I read the article, I couldn't help thinking of the latest Less Wrong post about "Levels of Action." In particular: Studies have shown that there is a significant positive correlation between alcohol use, and income in life. Why would that be? Drinking alcohol doesn't make you smarter. Nor does it make you work harder, or become more skilled, or gain additional knowledge. I think the reason is that alcohol is disinhibitory. http://lesswrong.com/lw/58g/levels_of_action/#more http://lesswrong.com/lw/58g/levels_of_action/#more
- michaelochurch 16y ago
  On the positive correlation between alcohol use and income: I think it's because alcohol is socially disinhibitory, and expected to be that way, and this makes it socially useful for, e.g., getting information out of people that they'd usually guard. Most office politics is learned at the bar. If you ask someone, at 3:00 pm, certain pointed questions, you're a creep and a gossip. If you ask those questions after-hours at the bar when everyone's "supposed" to be drunk and loose-lipped, no one gives a shit.
- tcarnell 16y ago
  well if you sampled the 6 billion people in the world, yes, rich people drink alcohol. I think its a bit like saying 'rich people drive Ferraris' - yes, of course! having a lot of disposable income will obviously lead to the ability to purchase luxury, non-essential items like alcohol.
  - adolph 16y ago
    That is an interesting statement. I'd estimate that the sample would show that alcohol was used by people with a broad range of income levels. However, the only way a hunter-gatherer (as described by Diamond) would obtain alcohol is to trade with a farmer or someone who can do the meta-work required for alcohol and supported by farming.

diego_moita 16y ago

I liked this. The cool thing about reading intelligent people is that you do learn a lot, even when you don't agree with them.

Jun8 16y ago

The basic question, as Prof. Diamond puts it is: "How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming?" One can extend this: How do you know the Industrial Revolution made people lives better (read Dickens to see the inhuman conditions), or the nuclear revolution (Chernobyl, Japan), or the Internet revolution (the ADD generation texting, sexting, etc). Prof. Diamond thesis seems to be that we made a huge mistake by moving from hunter gatherer to agricultural society, which, inevitably, brought about most of the evils we are fighting with now. Proof? Just look at the idyllic life of current hunter gatherers. To back his claim, he puts forth arguments ranging from absurd "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." to anecdotal, i.e. no proof at all "Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well... 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 ..." And the final stroke, the masterful FUD-laden last paragraph: "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? " Setting aside that there is no global shortage of food (does not mean that nobody's is hungry, but the reasons are complex and food shortage is not one of them), most of this is, at best speculative. If you liked his point of view, than you may also like Prof. Eric Pianka's thesis that there are too many people on earth and if an airborne Ebola virus kills 90% it would be a good thing (http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Everybody.html http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Everybody.html). The problem with these views is that they resonate with a certain mindset, people who think we have too much science and technology in our lives and it would have been better to live like the "so-called" primitive people. One recent example that comes to mind is the movie Babies (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020938/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020938/). Here, the life of the two babies living in primitive (not so-called, really primitive) conditions in Africa and Kazakhstan is discreetly shown to be better and more free than their counterparts in the US and Japan.

16y ago

tcarnell 16y ago

If we take 'happiness' to be the fitness function of human evolution and a driver for adaption then I think it highly unlikey humans would ever change to become less happy. Infact, I might suggest that human happiness (amount of) is likely to be the one thing in common to modern civilizations as to those 200,000 years ago. In addition, be careful to use the word 'evolution' with timeframes as miniscule as 200,000 years - the author correctly uses the word 'adoption'.

neutronicus 16y ago

I don't think the mistake was agriculture per se so much as breeding. The biggest prisoner's dilemma in human history.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

This is not such a good essay. I understand where the author is trying to go and I was rooting for him, but it looked like he lacked the depth to do the analysis, so he kind of meandered around. Some parts were better, some parts were worse. This kind of counter-factual discussion (what would the world be like if Hitler had won? How about if the Neanderthals hadn't died out?) has a tendency to get fluffy pretty quickly. Fun for a paragaph or two, or a tweet, but very tough to pull off in essay or longer format.

VladRussian 16y ago

progress is maximizing the carrying capacity in that equation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory#Overview http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory#Overview >"How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming?" there is no "better" in progress. Using the same analysis, the Industrial Revolution made working peoples life worse than lives of farmers. So what? It isn't about better. It is about species survival and dominance. Humans are predators with extremely high killing instinct. Wait until the interstellar space annihilation drive invented. Any intelligent species which doesn't have photonic torpedoes may start learning history of Incas and Native Americans. It is easy to imagine how human emission of green house interstellar dust will increase the ratio of Galaxy kernel's X-rays kept inside the Galaxy and causing global galaxy warming and slow down of its rotation.

protomyth 16y ago

For an interesting historical perspective of the interaction, check "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World" by Jack Weatherford http://www.amazon.com/Genghis-Khan-Making-Modern-World/dp/0609809644/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1302795893&sr=8-7 http://www.amazon.com/Genghis-Khan-Making-Modern-World/dp/06...

imcdowell 16y ago

I have a hard time sympathizing with those pining for the days of high infant mortality and periodic semi-starvation. While I don't argue that many people now are unhappy and working too hard, if you're privileged enough to be reading hacker news in your free time you have a shot at a significantly better outcome. e.g. I went to a public school, worked for 2.5 years out of college, then saved enough to pay off debts and take a year and a half off to go travel. I'm in great health, I have a beautiful wife that I love dearly, my house is never cooler than 65 degrees, and when it rains I don't have to get wet. You can keep your hunting and gathering. Just because most people now are suckers doesn't mean you have to be one. Smart fiscal and dietary choices open a world of possibilities totally inaccessible to pre-agrarian (or even pre-industrial) humans.

extension 16y ago

This is a bit like saying "we are happier as babies than as adults so growing up is the worst mistake we ever make". A charming thought perhaps, but not literally true. Trying to compare the happiness of cavemen with modern people demolishes whatever vague definition of "happiness" we might already have. And if we fall back on "do modern people want to be cavemen?" then the answer is no. Agriculture has profoundly changed every aspect of human existence many times over. Can we label the last few millenia of human history collectively as "good" or "bad"? Compared to what?

espeed 16y ago

Overpopulation is the elephant in the room that no one talks about, and I believe that most of the issues today have it at its core. Much of propaganda is designed to dance around the issue of population control -- "the primary responsibility of government is to project the minority of the opulent from the majority" (listen this Harvard talk on "Propaganda and Control of The Public Mind" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0OnTHz--7I&playnext=1&list=PL20B9B966EB3640B7I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0OnTHz--7I&playnext=1&#3...). In the 1960s Henry Kissinger completed National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), which is more commonly referred to as the "Kissinger Report" (http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PCAAB500.pdf http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PCAAB500.pdf). Kissinger says that the greatest threat to America is not the proliferation of nuclear weapons, but the overpopulation of third-world countries. NSSM 200 discusses several mechanisms that control population growth, such as war, famine, disease, pestilence, poverty and immigration. Dr. Al Bartlett's (http://www.albartlett.org/ http://www.albartlett.org/) says, "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function" (you can watch his famous lecture on population growth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9znsuCphHUU&playnext=1&list=PL63DAFCD223C29352 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9znsuCphHUU&playnext=1&#3...). He then goes through the stark reality of what will happen if we continue our exponential growth against finite natural resources. Research by economists John Donohue and Steven Levit at the University of Chicago (http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittTheImpactOfLegalized2001.pdf http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittT...) showed that the legalizing of abortion started to reduce violent crime by the 1980s because would-be impoverished people weren't growing up to be criminals. You may have read about this is Levit's book, Freakonomics (http://freakonomicsbook.com/ http://freakonomicsbook.com/). Abortion, one of our most controversial issues, is primarily about population control, but this rarely gets talked about. It's the establishment's pink elephant that's been sitting in the room since the 1970s (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12ginsburg-t.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12ginsburg-t.html...). We argue about "right to life" and "right to choose" and most have never even considered the bigger issue because that's the way the issue has been framed. The question we should be asking is, "Do you believe that population control is a good thing or a bad thing?" At the end of Dr. Bartlett's lecture on population growth, he presents the "Great Challenge." He asks, "Can you think of any problem on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted or advanced by having larger populations at the local level, the state level, the national level, or globally?" My answer to his challenge is: Yes, larger populations mean we have more of our greatest resource -- ourselves. Our creativity and ingenuity has developed solutions to our greatest problems, but we need true and accurate information so that we make better decisions and work toward a solution.

pumpmylemma 16y ago

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has a good book called Civilization: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature that talks a lot about this, among other things. http://www.amazon.com/Civilizations-Culture-Ambition-Transformation-Nature/dp/074320249X http://www.amazon.com/Civilizations-Culture-Ambition-Transfo... (Not an affiliate link.)

dennyabraham 16y ago

what this article does not mention is that the viability of hunter-gatherer lifestyles may have eroded significantly during the (ongoing) quaternary extinction event that began in the late pleistocene. the proliferation of hunter gatherers and their comparative excellence at hunting may have in fact caused this extinction (see overkill theory). furthermore, declining game reserves places strong incentive on creating reliable alternative food sources, so agriculture may be a direct consequence of this success of our ancestors' lifestyle. when considered as an alternative to sudden, significant population decline as a result of collapsing prey biomass rather than to a literal (and possibly the mythological origin of) eden, the choice to live agriculturally is the best mistake we've ever made.

ohmygodel 16y ago

His arguments suggest that optimal nutrition is close to what we ate as hunter-gatherers. I wonder if Diamond believes in the paleo diet.

zeteo 16y ago

There is a very good reason why hunter gatherers never built the Parthenon, and in general why their technological development is sorely lacking: they lack specialists. Masons, blacksmiths, and later scientists, engineers, and professors are only able to make a living because other people engage in agriculture.

bfe 16y ago

I have learned a great deal from Diamond's books and articles, but even he shows elsewhere that the two leading causes of death across hunter-gatherer societies are combat between tribes and homicide within tribes. Agricultural civilization didn't introduce cruelty and ignorance into the human race. As smart and creative a thinker as he is, I don't think he adequately corrects, when he compares overall human well-being today with that of 10,000 years ago, for his perspective as someone who has never gone hungry with no idea of when he would eat again, and who is able to study the sweep of human history only because of the human advances in physical and intellectual resources of the past tens of thousands of years.

tomelders 16y ago

Not IPv6 then?

patrickgzill 16y ago

My first question upon looking at this article: is there really enough evidence available to presume the ability to make a conclusive judgment / argument?

hackinthebochs 16y ago
There is enough to begin a discussion about it. What is one of the top 2-3 things everyone wishes for? Health. He makes a convincing argument that hunter-gatherers were considerably more healthy than agriculturalists.

ajscherer 16y ago

"Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural 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." Life expectency is now 67 years. I'll take the extra 40 years and deal with the lack of "essential" amino acids. Of course the real problem with this essay is the nonsensical premise. Agriculture can't be a mistake because it wasn't a decision. There may have been some individual people who decided to switch from hunting to agriculture, but there was no species-wide vote. There is no reason to imagine that there could've been such a vote, or that today there could be a decision for humanity to switch back. Of course individual people can decide to embrace the hunter gatherer life. I find it interesting that the author is reaching for pen & paper and not loin cloth & spear.

dusklight 16y ago

About sexism .. there were many hunter-nomad cultures where rape and kidnapping was the normal way of acquiring a bride. The writer talks about deaths caused by disease and overcrowding from agriculture but he neglects to mention that those people would not have been born in the first place because there wouldn't have been enough food to support them using the hunter-gatherer model. If agriculture causes + 1k births and -100 deaths then it's still net beneficial. This may seem like callous mathematics but would it not be even more cruel to deny existence for those other 900 souls?

duopixel 16y ago

It takes me around two hours per week to put food on my table. The rest of my money goes to splurging on the niceties of modern life.

gojomo 16y ago

I'd take the risks and rewards of agriculture over billions of years of repetitive nomadic hunter-gathering, where no generation does anything different than its ancestors.

3am 16y ago

The worst mistake in human history was me reading this terrible article. The author doesn't think hierarchical societies are possible in hunter/gatherer societies?

3am 16y ago
Gah! "Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history." And since then, all we've managed to do is construct the entirety of human knowledge. Atoms, DNA, trips to space.. I mean I'm sitting in air-conditioning write this over the Internet. On a mid-tier laptop that exceeds every scientific capability that hunter gatherer societies ever had. But, the author makes a fair point that "Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to." And yes, hunter gathers did make scrimshaw and paint ochre on rocks. This article is like a hookworm in my brain. I wish I could un-read it. So awful in so many ways.
- hackinthebochs 16y ago
  Come now, you can provide a better analysis than this. >And since then, all we've managed to do is construct the entirety of human knowledge. Atoms, DNA, trips to space.. What does that really do for any individual person. Does simply knowing about atoms, DNA, space make your average happiness strictly greater than that of a hunter-gatherer? Of course not. Unless you can show that technology strictly makes the average happiness for humans greater, it is completely irrelevant to the discussion. What your post comes down to is: "I have all this cool stuff, so clearly we're better off now". How self-centered of you.
  - 3am 16y ago
    Why would I need to provide a better analysis than this? The benefits of scientific advancement to the individual are so numerous and ubiquitous that only an idiot would dismiss them.
    - hackinthebochs 16y ago

fictorial 16y ago

"I don't think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to..." Is there a term that describes a typo like this, wherein a word relevant to the context is used instead of the "correct" word for the sentence?