Agriculture Equals Death

My daughter, newly minted as a high school student, is taking world history, beginning with prehistory. Yesterday she told us about an article she'd read in class, which made the provocative claim that the invention of agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened in human history.

What? I said. Why would that be?

She proceeded to explain that hunter gatherers lived longer, were healthier, and worked substantially fewer hours per week than their farmer counterparts. We would all have been better off if agriculture had never been invented.

I thought perhaps it was a parody, somewhat akin to Swift's "A Modest Proposal," but she assured me it was not. Farming created inequality, she reported, including gender inequality, since women had held important roles as gatherers among nomadic peoples, and spaced their children more because they could only carry one at a time (and so had to wait until one child could keep up with adults before having another). It created infectious disease through some mechanism she couldn't recall, but which sounded familiar from reading Jared Diamond.

Finally I asked her if she could bring the article home, to which she replied, "I have it in my bag." And voila, she produced a copy of Jared Diamond's 1987 Discover magazine article "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race."

Suddenly it all became clear.

Jared Diamond is a girl's best friend

Early in my addiction to Discover magazine, I read Diamond's 1992 article, "The Arrow of Disease," which later was expanded into the book Guns, Germs and Steel. It explained why Europeans brought epidemic disease to the Western Hemisphere, but the Western Hemisphere didn't send disease back. And part of that picture was a direct result of agriculture -- farmers lived in close quarters with their animals, and over time diseases jumped the species barrier to infect humans. Europeans had immunities built up to these diseases, but the native people of North and South America did not.

"The Arrow of Disease" was a media clipping that I kept in the filing cabinet for years. In fact, I may still have it tucked away somewhere.

Well, it turns out that five years before, Diamond had published "The Worst Mistake" in Discover as well.

Why was agriculture a mistake?

Diamond realizes that his contention that agriculture was a mistake stands in stark contrast with the common assumption of progressivism in the study of history -- basically, the idea that humans are on an ever-improving path toward a better life. Many historians have assailed this assumption, but Diamond's basic premise -- that agriculture itself was the mistake of all mistakes, and we have been devolving since then -- is pretty much mind-blowing.

Diamond implies that a hunter-gatherer system does no or little damage to the planet and provides for the greatest happiness for the greatest number (of the much smaller number of people who would be born). As evidence, he lists some facts from the recent archaeological record that are indeed surprising.

For instance, Greek and Turkish pre-agriculture skeletal remains are 5'9" for men and 5'5" for women; after agriculture, their heights crashed to 5'3" for men and 5'0" for women, and to this day have not recovered their pre-agricultural heights. Skeletons from the mounds along the Illinois and Ohio river valleys show that farmers "had a nearly fifty percent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia..., [and] a threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general." Their life expectancy was 19, versus 26 for the hunter-gatherers. And the fact that farming caused people to clump together more led to more communicable disease -- one of the things I remember from "The Arrow of Disease" is that epidemics require density, or they die out before they get started.

Diamond also provides information on the few remaining hunter-gatherer peoples today, such as the Kalahari Bushmen, who "have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors," and whose diets are much more varied and balanced than their farming counterparts nearby.

Class divisions, patriarchy and art

Because there was little stored food among hunter-gatherers, there was no class of people who could live off the work of others. Again, the skeletal record shows that agricultural peoples were shorter than their rulers, with worse teeth, and more bone lesions that indicate disease, a clear indication that the rulers had it better than the common people. For women, agriculture led to more frequent pregnancies, which sapped their health (women had more bone lesions than men), and probably to a diminished role in the life of the family and community.

The idea that farmers had more free time for art or other pursuits is also not correct, at least when considering modern hunter-gatherers. Ancient hunter-gatherers created art, Diamond argues, it just hasn't been preserved for the most part. Of course, there was no or little division of labor that could allow for a person whose sole job was "artist" or "musician." But everyone would have had time to pursue whatever artistic impulses they had, if so inclined. This reminds me of Wendell Berry's ideal world (despite the fact that Berry's world is, of course, agrarian), where each man and woman is connected to the land they live in, and many make art in the place they are from.

Why haven't I heard of this before?

From what I can tell by perusing the Web, "The Worst Mistake" is used as a conversation-starter or thought-provoker in colleges and schools (as my daughter's teacher used it), but it doesn't appear anyone has made a cogent argument against its chilling indictment of all we hold as the way things "must" be.

But neither does anyone carry Diamond's argument forward to any recommendations for how we live our lives today.

The idea that the pre-agricultural model provided the greatest good for the greatest number is key to Diamond's thesis. Yes, yes, we (I) think, that's right, it's easy to admit. But, but, but... What is the but? I think it's that -- just as most people who believe they are reincarnated seem to think they used to be Cleopatra or Alexander the Great rather than some average peasant -- we all think that we would have been one of the elite few who actually were better off after agriculture, rather than one of the many farmers who were worse off. And we can't deal with the idea of giving up our many comforts.

Gee, that even sounds a bit like the debate about national health insurance, now that I think of it. Piles of evidence show that average health outcomes are significantly better in Canada, Britain or France. But if I -- a member of the upper middle class with good health insurance -- need some procedure done, I will get it faster in the U.S. because of our free market system, even though my uninsured cousin probably would not get it at all, or would go into debt.

What to do with the hunter-gatherer idea?

What would it mean for people today to try to create a life that was at least partly based on a hunter-gatherer model? There's an inkling of this in the last section of Michael Pollen's The Omnivore's Dilemma. And in some ways, the development of permaculture is more like it than anything else, despite the fact that permaculture is still an agricultural model. Guess I'll have to look into that some more.

Also, as a person with a love of science fiction and particularly alternate histories, I wonder if anyone has written such a history of an alternate Earth, based on the premise that agriculture was not invented. Would it mean a permanent state of no technology, no writing, no permanent settlements with indoor plumbing (one of my favorite post-agriculture inventions)? Is there a way to conceive of a different type of social order that could arise from an economy based on hunting and gathering?

If anyone knows of such a book, let me know. Meanwhile, I have a feeling Diamond's challenge to progressivist history is going to be occupying my mind for some time to come.