The Worst Mistake in
the History of the Human Race By Jared Diamond,
To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug
self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the
universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned
that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions
of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that
human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In
particular, recent discoveries suggest that 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.
At first, the
evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century
Americans as irrefutable. We’re better off in almost every respect than
people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn
were better off than apes. Just count our advantages. We enjoy the most
abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the
longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation
and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat.
What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant,
a caveman, or an ape?
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. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no
respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and
avoid starving. 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.
From the
progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask "Why did
almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is silly. Of
course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food
for less work. 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 that has taken place over the past few thousand
years. Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food
from a garden than to find it in the wild, 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
While the case for the progressivist view
seems overwhelming, it’s hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of
people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering
for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests,
whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view.
Here’s one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century
hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world,
several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns
out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work
less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted
each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14
hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he
hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied,
"Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"
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 bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the
Bushmen’s average daily food intake (during a month when food was
plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater
than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It’s
almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of
starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families
did during the potato famine of the 1840s.
So the lives of at
least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren’t nasty and brutish, even
though farmes have pushed them into some of the world’s worst real
estate. But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with
farming societies for thousands of years don’t tell us about conditions
before the agricultural revolution. 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.
How can one
deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby directly test
the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in recent
years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology, the
study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.
In some lucky
situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to study as a
pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts found
well preserved mummies whose medical conditions at time of death could be
determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians who
lived in dry caves in
Usually the only
human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit a surprising
number of deductions. To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner’s sex,
weight, and approximate age. In the few cases where there are many skeletons,
one can construct mortality tables like the ones life insurance companies use
to calculate expected life span and risk of death at any given age. Paleopathologists
can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages,
examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and
recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other
diseases.
One straight forward
example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns
historical changes in height. Skeletons from
Another example
of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds
in the
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. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers
obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained
cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. (today just three
high-carbohydrate plants–wheat, rice, and corn–provide the bulk of
the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in
certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, 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 in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with
other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease.
(Some archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that
promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding
encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn’t take hold when
populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp.
Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles
and bubonic plague the appearnce of large cities.
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 élite
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 élite were distinguished not only by ornaments
and gold hair clips but also by a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by
disease.
Similar contrasts
in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people in rich
countries like the
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. Among the Chilean mummies for example, more women than men had bone lesions from
infectious disease.
Women in
agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In
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. While post-agricultural technological advances did make new art forms
possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures were
already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and were still being
produced as recently as the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some
Eskimos and the Indians of the
Thus with the
advent of agriculture and élite 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 eperson per ten square miles,
while farmers average 100 times that.) Partly, this is because a field planted
entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with
scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it’s because nomadic
hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by
infanticide and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it’s old enough to keep up with the adults. Because
farm women don’t have that burden, they can and often do bear a child
every two years.
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, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the
transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased
food production. Such bands 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. It’s not that hunter-gatherers
abandonded their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it
were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn’t want.
At this point
it’s instructive to recall the common complaint that archaeology is a
luxury, concerned with the remote past, and offering no lessons for the
present. Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a
crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to
choose between limiting population or trying to
increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation,
warfare, and tyranny.
Hunter-gatherers
practiced the most successful and logest-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