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Jared Diamond, "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race," mod.

Central Historical Question:


Was the decision to become an agricultural society the Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race?

____________________________________________________________ Today we enjoy the best foods, tools and material goods. We have some of ____________________________________________________________ the longest and healthiest lives in history. Most of us are safe from starvation ____________________________________________________________ and predators. We get our energy from machines, not from our sweat. Before ____________________________________________________________ agriculture we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering. It's a life that ____________________________________________________________
philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short.

____________________________________________________________ Recent discoveries actually suggest that the use of farming was in many ways ____________________________________________________________ a ____________________________________________________________ catastrophe from which we have never recovered. They argue agriculture led to the social and sexual inequality, diseases and despots that curse our existence. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ Modern hunter-gatherer societies seem to do well in comparison to farmers. ____________________________________________________________ They have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their ____________________________________________________________ farming neighbors. For example, they only spend 12 to 19 hours a week finding ____________________________________________________________ food. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't adopted agriculture, replied, ____________________________________________________________ "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?" ____________________________________________________________
But, how can one prove ancient hunter-gatherers were healthier?

? Archaeologists have found well preserved mummies whose medical


conditions at time of death could be determined by autopsy. Skeletons reveal their owner's sex, weight, and approximate age. With some skeletons scientists can calculate expected lifespan; they can use bones to find growth rates and evidence of diseases. They can examine teeth for signs of childhood malnutrition. "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."

There are at least three sets of reasons why agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet that farmers did not have. Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, agriculture led to people living in crowded societies, and through trade with other crowded areas, 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 had little or no stored food, this meant no class of social parasites or kings could grow fat on food seized from others. Only in farming societies could healthy, non-producing elite set themselves above the disease-ridden masses. Farming may also have encouraged inequality between the sexes. Under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, women tended to have more pregnancies, draining their health. Often, women in agricultural societies were treated as beasts of burden. 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. Thus, agriculture not only made the elite become better off, but most people became worse off. We're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it. Will the struggles of sick and starving peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those advantages we imagined agriculture's would give us which have so far eluded us? However, in the end, if one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?

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