Plants, fonts, and the art of the heel
The best reads of the week
In this week’s top pick John Lanchester considers the case against civilization, asking whether we’re really better off than our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
So why did our ancestors switch from this complex web of food supplies to the concentrated production of single crops? We don’t know, although Scott speculates that climatic stress may have been involved. Two things, however, are clear. The first is that, for thousands of years, the agricultural revolution was, for most of the people living through it, a disaster. The fossil record shows that life for agriculturalists was harder than it had been for hunter-gatherers. Their bones show evidence of dietary stress: they were shorter, they were sicker, their mortality rates were higher.
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