He seems to overlook two facts:

1. Agriculture supports a higher population density. Hunter-gatherer cultures are strictly limited by food availability, just like animal populations. In bad years, the population is trimmed back brutally by starvation.
2. Agriculture supports industry. If you want to smelt and work bronze or iron, you cannot do this on any useful scale without permanent installations.

A few excerpts

"With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence."

I'm sure they all exist to one degree or another in H/G societies as well

"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."

Recommended by who? The same US government who spent millions and changed its mind nearly a dozen time on the health benefits/risks of the egg?

"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."

Wouldn’t that make overpopulation and lack of a reasonable birth/population control policy the bigger mistake? If agriculture was indeed a necessity?

"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."

Apparently the man has never heard of religion or tribal chiefs, the rest of the article up til this point was good, but that last statement was nothing but horseshit.

"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."

They were also distinguished by the fact that they did a good enough job of running the society that is wasn’t overthrown in a peasant revolt as so many others were; could they have done a better job overall? Probably yes, but that’s another debate entirely

"Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden"

$20 bucks says men were, far, far more often.

"Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history"

I'm not sure he's really made his case

"Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny"

As opposed to? H/G tribes still face starvation and warfare, and a whole host of other problems we don’t; like dying from a simple cut and lack of antibiotics.

Plus we live in a world of computers and cars, where a man can write an article about how horrible his life is completely missing the irony that he wouldn’t be around to write it had humanity gone another way - not only because of the fact that he wouldn’t have been born, but also that writing wouldn’t have existed

"Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history"

And mindless bacteria have survived for billions of years, and fish for hundreds of millions of years, and dinosaurs for tens of millions of years, and australopitheci for millions of years, and homo habilis for hundreds of thousands of years. Just because something lasts along time doesn’t make it objectively 'better'

"Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us?"

Now this just pisses me off, sure it was written in 1987, but compare what we knew about the world even 25yrs ago vs. 100,000 years ago. H/G tribes never would have invented telescopes, computers, rockets, electricity. They never would have conceived that lightning wasn’t the 'gods' fighting each other. Medicine, physics, architecture, all of it wiped from existence. One cant deny the horrible things that arose due to the coalescing of society. But misanthrope and advocate of deadly plague pandemics that I am, I still think the good outweighs the bad. Good that never would have come about without communities growing in to towns, in to cites, in to world spanning empires.

Now, I like the guy, I think some of his theories about environment being a massive factor in the development of societies are sound. But in this case I think he’s suffering from ‘the road not traveled’ envy and hasn’t bothered to think out the logical conclusions of the point he is trying to make. We’re it not for ever growing societies and the resultant arms race in technology we’d be little more then exceptionally bright, dexterous, and self aware animals with better facial recognition and communication

This guy gets it wrong out of the gate. First paragraph:

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.

Hunter gatherers outside the subtropics most definitely stored food against the long, cold winter.

In addition, the whole spiel - and the wildman/farmer dichotomy - ignores that agriculture began with the domestication of ruminant animals, not plants.

Civilization didn't begin with wheat and barly - it began because herding was much more efficient than hunting. Originally it was paired with foraging - the word "paradise" comes from a Semitic root that means "enclosure" and later meant "orchard" (modern Hebrew: pardes).

So: you herded your goats in a limited range, and because you stuck around, you improved the mix of trees and shrubs in the area. The goats ate the grass and weeds, and you also harvested fruit. Getting multiple yields and food sources in a small area was indeed a "paradise" compared with nomadic foraging.

This is the original "Garden of Eden" method of cultivation - dating back to the Fertile Crescent and now being revived under the banner of "sustainable agriculture".

Large-scale grain-based agriculture starts later with the Sumerians and others who ventured from the hills down to the reedy marshes of the Tigris and Euphrates, and then out into the floodplains.

It's fair to say that agriculture has not been an unmitigated good for humans. It's led to a lot of the more negative aspects of human civilization that we bitch about here. On the other hand, we don't have civilization as we know it without it.

Amy, have you read Sex at Dawn? The authors make a reasonable case that human sexual relationships were healthier before agriculture. (And they mention you by name.)

One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-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.

This paragraph without footnotes presupposes that weather conditions were favorable for all. It also doesn't take into account the mortality rate of the gatherer infants that would have only been 5'3" but died and were left along the trail. There are many other factors that making a blanket statements across the whole human population is useless.

I will grant that it makes for an interesting read.

"I'm not down with the socialist view that property ownership (whether of bits of hand-held property or of land) is a negative -- in fact, I think it's quite the contrary"

Hi Amy, I'm not sure what you're getting at here. IIRC (and I probably don't), Adam Smith had some pretty nasty things to say about property ownership (of land) and landlords.

They don't provide much and get in the way of people he did admire: capitalists and laborers.

"As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce."

There's more beyond that one too....

"For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen..."

How much do you spend on groceries every week, Amy? If you were cleaning toilets for minimum wage instead of writing columns & books, would you need to slave away for 19 hours just to be able to buy enough food to keep from starving?

What we have here is someone with all the comfort and convenience of the modern world at his fingertips idealizing & romanticizing severe poverty. Rather than putting on a loin cloth and grabbing a spear to join the Bushmen in the Kalahari, I prefer to do my hunting & gathering at the fresh produce & deli sections of my local supermarket, and to spend my evenings browsing the books in my private library rather than sitting around the campfire listening to Uncle Mokutu.

If farm land in Iowa that is growing wheat and corn was productive and cost effective as grazing land for cattle and sheep, the farmers would already be doing it. I think you would be amazed at how much of the corn and wheat in the midwest is already being used to feed livestock rather than human beings directly.
In fact one of the arguments for using corn for ethanol production was that it was a better use of agriculture than the wasteful inefficiency of feeding it to cattle.
If we were to convert this entire country to grazing land, my guess is we could support maybe one tenth or less of the population we currently have.
Oh, and that bacon you love so much? Pigs don't do well on a grass diet because they are not ruminants. They pretty much need to eat what humans eat.

http://www.wheatbellyblog.com/2011/09/the-grain-foods-foundation-fights-back/

Billions in subsidies, hundreds of billions in profit. The grain and seed oil pushers won't go down without a fight. Then again, like all second and third generation welfare whores, they're terrified at the idea of actually having to compete in a free market.

If you want beer, wine and whiskey, you need agriculture.

False dichotomy. You can have agriculture without destructive, unsustainable monocropping and welfare whores.

I'll add here that the line between healthy, hunter-gatherer paleo-diets and carby, starchy modern diets wasn't as sharp as it's been made out to be. Take those Bushmen, for instance. Yes they ate a great variety of wild plants, but most of these were seasonal, limited to small geographical areas, or otherwise only available in small quantities. A big portion of those 12 to 19 hours would have been spent digging in the sand for various tubers, which were loaded with carbs & starch. But they were the most reliable, widespread, and abundant edible plants available in the Kalahari, and hunter-gatherers had no choice but to take what Nature offered.

Agriculture, like cities, democracy, and the internal combustion engine, opened up endless new possibilities for mankind, both good (beer, wine, whiskey) and bad (high fructose corn syrup, food pyramids). Calling it a mistake, let alone the worst mistake in the history of the human race, is hysterical foolishness.

Sure the African bushmen had more leisure time than we did, they weren't being taxed up to 40-50% of every last thing they hunted, gathered or traded, for starters.

Also, their lifestyle doesn't allow them to afford even the basics of modern medical care, or the benefits of electricity or video games. These groups are actually dying out because the young generation are making a conscious choice that they would rather have the benefits of modernization.

"I'm not saying we should be Bushmen. But, turning that corn- and wheat-growing land into cattle ranching land seems like a fantastic idea, vis a vis how unhealthy starchy/surgary carbohydrates seem to be for the human body."

I get this point, but unfortunately the reality is carb-y foods are cheaper to produce than high-protein foods for a given piece of land. We might be better off trying to engineer grains with better nutritional content, or perhaps cheaper protein.

> they weren't being taxed up to 40-50% of every
> last thing they hunted, gathered or traded, for
> starters

Um... Dood... I hear where you're coming from, truly. I'm on the team, OK? But I'm not sure that's true.

I used to go scuba diving in gorgeous Third World places, which is where nature's hidden the best coral reefs. The best of the best are in Papua New Guinea, which is where I spent Y2K. On the dive boat, there's always a bronze, muscular teenager to help the divers in and out of the water with their clumsy gear... A friendly kid who will wink at the optometrist's middle-aged wife to make sure she's enjoying the trip.

On about the third day of the trip, you'd be sitting with captain having wine after dinner, asking him how he came to work there (from Australia or wherever), and how he financed the boat, and what it was like to hire natives for the crew. And then someone would say "And now (the deck boy) is learning how business works, so he'll be able to have his own scuba boat some day!"

And the captain would say no, that's not how it works. In the third world, when the teenage boy comes home to his village after two weeks with a pocket full of twenties, every cousin he's ever met (and a couple more he hasn't) will stand there with a hand out, expecting a slice. And he has to give it away... Otherwise, he's trying to pretend to be a bigger person than they are.

I'm not saying the modern third world is exactly like what the primitive world is like. But in olden days, there may have been no modern fees or schemes of taxation... But you probably weren't going to be keeping what you'd earned.

Ten (twelve!) years ago, George Will put it like this in a book review about Y1K: "[W]hen people had no money to forfeit in fines, labor was what could be taken from them."


Death and taxes are always with us.

In other words— Before modernity: No modern banking, no modern investment, no modern capital markets....

Agriculture enabled civilization, which I for one approve of. Also, the idea that hunter-gatherer societies were less warlike is outdated. War Before Civilization by Lawrence Keeley has a nice writeup on this.

Also, last I checked the average life span for an African Bushman was somewhere between 40 and 50 years.
Ill take the 75 plus years we get in the US. Might it be that a paleo diet isn't the only answer to longivity but only a small factor when compared to other things that make a larger difference to your overall health?

What Izzy said. Yeah, the obese, impoverished children who drink Big Gulps for breakfast are getting a bad shake from our ag policy.

But neither should coastal hipsters (ahem) imagine that everyone else in the world shares, or should aspire to share, their own dietary choices, no matter how organic and attractively packaged they might be.

ARG nailed it in one, and luljp kicked it while it was down.

Yes, things are not Perfect now, but Hunter/Gatherers have it worse off in every significant way - we can see this via revealed preference; their kids join the modern world, and not even hippies become hunter/gatherers in Papua New Guinea.

(Indeed, it's only agriculture that lets us have the luxury of complaining on the internet about how bad grains are for us.)

Crid, your long-winded story about visiting 3rd-world countries that somehow makes you an expert on hunter-gatherer societies, doesn't negate the facts of how Bushmen live. They don't get taxed on their huntings and gatherings. 100% fact. End of story, case closed. Seriously. You can look it up. Honestly. Bushmen don't live anything like Papua New Guineans. Hunter/gatherer societies have almost completely died out. Hunter/gatherer is not "third world". Lol - do you really think begging = hunter/gathering? Seriously? Are you joking? That's actually simultaneously amusing and sad. Then, why I am debating someone whose intellectual level is to address people as "dood".

> They don't get taxed on their huntings and
> gatherings. 100% fact.

Fine, buttercup... Take off your clothes and go live in the bush. 100%.

(Was that too lengthy?)

> it's only agriculture that lets us have the
> luxury of complaining on the internet about
> how bad grains are for us.

Yeah">http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/3222/5697z.jpg">Yeah

Loved the cartoon Crid.

Another thing not brought up yet. Ireland isn't exactly on Mars. It is right next door to a prosperous and well fed country.
The Irish potato famine could have been easily remedied with food shipments from England but wasn't, because the famine served vital political purposes for the British. Got rid of a lot of troublemakers. Most of the ones that starved were the bottom of the bottom, the ones without the resources for a boat ticket to America. The ones that could, got the hell out.

> They don't get taxed on their huntings and
> gatherings. 100% fact.

Yet another person whos never heard of religion and tribal cheifs

One classic observation about hunter gathers is that farming lets you have a higher population density.

In other words: farms place a larger limit on the number of friends you can have than hunter/gatherer communities do.

How does this happen? Is it that more babies get born when people farm? Or is it that they tend to live longer? Or, both? It can't be neither, otherwise you would not have the increased population...

Now, granted, in today's world we have gotten to much higher population densities than you could have had back then, and almost everyone in Manhattan is a stranger. But I do not want to even contemplate how many people would have to have died, to make hunter/gatherer existence viable for "the bulk of the [remaining] world's population".

So, anyways, I am prepared to believe that people may have had some health problems that stemmed from "the farming lifestyle". But I am not prepared to believe that this was not true for "the hunter/gather lifestyle".

Oh, and "lifestyle" encompasses major health-related issues. It's not just fuel for jokes.

Then again, and while I'm talking about population densities and lifestyles and such, most of the U.S.A. is nearly uninhabited and we depend on immigration from other countries to prevent our population from shrinking. And, personally, I'm not quite sure what I think about that.