Jared Diamond and the Worst Mistake Humans Ever Made
The pre-expansionist hunter-gatherer age in Europe and elsewhere (Asia and Africa) was one of coexistence with other hominins and the Gaian system (Nature). Whether or not they all sang kumbaya while hunting and gathering, they competed with other species as K-strategists, displacing other hominins (e.g. Neanderthal) by being better adapted, e.g. in the Levant where they lived for 30k years until ice age cooling favored Neanderthal who spread back into the cooling Levant 60k years ago, where the African form of Homo sapiens interacted with them for thousands of years, exchanging memes and genes on occasion, until out of Africa expansionists rapidly, aggressively ‘displaced’ both forms of human. Where, after all, are the Neanderthals and all other non-expansionist humans today (only a few San and Hadza persist, for a time)?
[Disclaimer: The unpublished author has no expertise in any field of inquiry, has no relevant academic credentials nor employment history, and knows nothing. Sources of claims that can be highlighted, right clicked on, and ‘search for…’ clicked tend to not be cited unless below the fold. Alternative opinions are assumed, but not alternative evidence. All evidence I cite could be wrong and so disconfirming evidence would be of interest. Believe nothing and don’t share any claims that do not check out per your best guess, which is all I endeavor (and often fail) to do. All interpretations, based on fifty years of autodidactic inquiry, should be viewed as having an implied “per my best guess based on possible misinformation” added.]
Jared Diamond (1987): The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race: Discover (May), pp. 64–66: “Archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress…
…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…. 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…. 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…. 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…. 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 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 better balance of other nutrients…. The lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren’t nasty and brutish, even though farmers have pushed them into some of the world’s worst real estate…. 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….
Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit a surprising number of deductions…. skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunter-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…. Burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys… a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150…. 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 iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a threefold 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 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.’ 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… a varied diet… [vs] one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition…. 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… led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease….
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, non-producing 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…. 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 hunter-gatherer counterparts — with consequent drains on their health….
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.)… 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… 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….
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?
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I knew that agriculture supports a larger population than foraging, but how much more assuming no fossil fuel inputs (direct or indirect)? I was looking for a credible answer when I noted Diamond’s offering and reread it. But for an answer, preindustrial agricultural societies occurred at densities on the order of 10 to 100 times higher than the most abundant hunter-gatherers, even in the absence of fossil fuels [History of Agriculture].Most forms of agriculture producing high yields are not sustainable, so a 100x increase is for a time, while long term viability gives low-intensity (sustainable) agriculture about a 10x increase over foraging (with cost of higher labor and lower nutrition). With fossil fueled industrial production (turning fossil fuel into food), a 15x increase has allowed for continued population growth, for a time (8 billion/15= 533 million and to leave room for Nature, <100 million is to consider).
Diamond misses a chance to emphasis the importance of the dominant Malthusian relationship between food and population — more food = more people who can take what they want (need) and steal the rest (and did because they “needed” to feed their hungry babies).
The invention of agriculture and the domestication of animals provided an enormous increase in terms of the number of calories that can be harvested by an hour’s work and the ability of a empire building society (elites) to increase the number of hours peasants/serfs/commoners work to grow the economy (and feed their babies to provide cannon fodder).
So what goes wrong with quality of life among agriculturalists? Well, pre-expansionist human populations and living standards tend to settle at a point where every mother has on average one daughter who herself reproduces. K-strategists can increase their population until the lower limit of carrying capacity is approached, and to stop population growth and descend below the lower limits to avoid the collapse that always follows (after a time delay) overshooting the upper limit of carrying capacity.
The standard of living will be whatever standard of living makes that happen. And, for settled agriculturalists — without the hazards to adults of travel and hunting, and without the hazards a nomadic lifestyle imposes on the very young — normally about half die in childhood, maximizing adult fitness among hunter-gatherers.
Lifespan of adults looks about the same looking across hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists. Biomedical and fitness indicators, however, are much much higher for hunter-gatherers than among agrarians whose gene pool is not cleansed, and so multiplies non-fitness enhancing forms and functions. And don’t get me started listing all the diseases of civilization (e.g. acne, Alzheimer’s, arthritis, atherosclerosis, asthma, cancer [e.g. lung, breast, colorectal], carpal-tunnel syndrome, chronic liver disease/cirrhosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, malnutrition, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, metabolic syndrome, chronic kidney failure, osteoporosis, PCOD, diverticulitis, gallstones, rickets, stress…and a rapidly growing list of mental/cognitive/psychosocial civilizational disorders).
Whether this is a “disaster” or not depends on whether it is better to have a few people who live very well or a lot of people (e.g. about 8 billion) who live very poorly. This may be an open question in philosophy and among neoclassical economists, but in biology it is a closed one.
It could be adaptive if only a high-density population that comes with agriculture can generate enough human brains thinking away to allow us to transcend our Malthusian limits and create a truly human world in the long run. Note the word “if”.
This too may be an open question among Modern Techno-Industrialized humans (the 99.999%), but in systems ecology it is a closed question as humans are obviously not exceptional, cannot “transcend” Malthusian limits by acts of clever apeness (e.g. turning fossil fuels into food — for a time) no matter how many members of the HUbris MAN Swarm bang away on the Cosmic Typewriter for an infinity of time (because time too is limited to far, almost infinitely far, less time than infinity).
There really are limits to growth, population density, complexity, and the population of humans, crops, livestock, and pets that a region, from a small farm or island (e.g. North Sentinel Island) to a planet (or Dyson sphere) can support.
Oh, and if agriculture was only the second greatest mistake humans ever made, what was the first? Allowing conventional neoclassical economists to live and teach (even give them Nobel Prizes) at all universities. Delaying the end of technoindustrial society may well have human extinction as the outcome .
And worse, delay recovery of the Gaian system (aka planetary life-support system). If humans were to again become Agents of the Earth, perhaps work to enable respeciation of the biosphere in only 10 million years instead of 20 million years, that may be viewed by Klaatu as a better outcome.
Oh, and since humanity’s “not even wrong” moment came well before agriculture, it cannot be the first — domestication by technology, then ideology.