4 ms·

Agriculture was a mistake.

by cesarvarela 3y ago

myshpa 3y ago
Our biggest mistake.
- anthk 3y ago
  The big three religions of Middle East were built around praising sun and wheat harvesting.
  - aitchnyu 3y ago
    Tuber farmers who can't do anything but eat the day's harvest get by on much simpler culture than grain farmers. Landlords with granaries? Tubers can't be stored, so the idiot building palaces is wasting time. Kings and armies marching to claim faraway fertile lands? Rich city ruling over neglected grain basket region? They can't eat anything from faraway land. Festivals, astrology? Those won't help for perennial crops. Accounting? Not helpful for food.
    - anthk 3y ago
      And that's how religions got spreaded over. Also, I think as bread was taken as "sacred", at least in Christianism, I think that could be related to the fungus (or mold) in some cereal/bread such as ergotism releasing hallucinations and "visions" of virgins/daemons and so on.
Barrin92 3y ago
Yuval Noah Harari had a good quote on wheat farming in Sapiens Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of miles without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 870,000 square miles of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.
mandmandam 3y ago
Hmm. I feel like if we moved to sustainable permaculture, and made the rules of land ownership more equitable, we'd solve a lot of the problems that get blamed on 'agriculture'. Seems we either manage to do that, or we become a permanent underclass in a toxic dustbowl within decades.
thworp 3y ago
Would you say the same about all the other benefits of modern life (especially medicine, on-demand energy supply and the degrees of freedom)? Because those are a direct consequence of the kinds of social organization that followed from agriculture. You might think differently if someone teleported you into a Papuan clan whose patriarch/matriarch exiled you for some arbitrary reason.
clydethefrog 3y ago
See this book for an argumentation for this claim. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_History_of_the_Earliest_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_Hist...

Agriculture was a mistake.

myshpa 3y ago

Our biggest mistake.

anthk 3y ago
The big three religions of Middle East were built around praising sun and wheat harvesting.
- aitchnyu 3y ago
  Tuber farmers who can't do anything but eat the day's harvest get by on much simpler culture than grain farmers. Landlords with granaries? Tubers can't be stored, so the idiot building palaces is wasting time. Kings and armies marching to claim faraway fertile lands? Rich city ruling over neglected grain basket region? They can't eat anything from faraway land. Festivals, astrology? Those won't help for perennial crops. Accounting? Not helpful for food.
  - anthk 3y ago
    And that's how religions got spreaded over. Also, I think as bread was taken as "sacred", at least in Christianism, I think that could be related to the fungus (or mold) in some cereal/bread such as ergotism releasing hallucinations and "visions" of virgins/daemons and so on.

Barrin92 3y ago

Yuval Noah Harari had a good quote on wheat farming in Sapiens Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of miles without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 870,000 square miles of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight. Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.

mandmandam 3y ago

Hmm. I feel like if we moved to sustainable permaculture, and made the rules of land ownership more equitable, we'd solve a lot of the problems that get blamed on 'agriculture'. Seems we either manage to do that, or we become a permanent underclass in a toxic dustbowl within decades.

thworp 3y ago

Would you say the same about all the other benefits of modern life (especially medicine, on-demand energy supply and the degrees of freedom)? Because those are a direct consequence of the kinds of social organization that followed from agriculture. You might think differently if someone teleported you into a Papuan clan whose patriarch/matriarch exiled you for some arbitrary reason.

clydethefrog 3y ago

See this book for an argumentation for this claim. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_History_of_the_Earliest_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_Hist...