Headed downhill for 12,000 years?
The Economist takes the long view of man’s downfall, in the manner of Jared Diamond:
About 12,000 years ago people embarked on an experiment called agriculture and some say that they, and their planet, have never recovered. Farming brought a population explosion, protein and vitamin deficiency, new diseases and deforestation. Human height actually shrank by nearly six inches after the first adoption of crops…
Take a snapshot of the old world 15,000 years ago. Except for bits of Siberia, it was full of a new and clever kind of people who had originated in Africa and had colonised first their own continent, then Asia, Australia and Europe, and were on the brink of populating the Americas. They had spear throwers, boats, needles, adzes, nets. They painted pictures, decorated their bodies and believed in spirits. They traded foods, shells, raw materials and ideas. They sang songs, told stories and prepared herbal medicines.
They were “hunter-gatherers”. On the whole the men hunted and the women gathered: a sexual division of labour is still universal among non-farming people and was probably not shared by their Homo erectus predecessors. This enabled them to eat both meat and veg, a clever trick because it combines quality with reliability.
Why change? In the late 1970s Mark Cohen, an archaeologist, first suggested that agriculture was born of desperation, rather than inspiration. Evidence from the Fertile Crescent seems to support him. Rising human population density, combined perhaps with a cooling, drying climate, left the Natufian hunter-gatherers of the region short of acorns, gazelles and wild grass seeds…
Willingly or not, humanity had embarked 50,000 years ago on the road called “progress” with constant change in habits driven by invention mothered by necessity. Even 40,000 years ago, technology and lifestyle were in a state of continuous change, especially in western Eurasia. By 34,000 years ago people were making bone points for spears, and by 26,000 years ago they were making needles. Harpoons and other fishing tackle appear at 18,000 years ago, as do bone spear throwers, or atlatls. String was almost certainly in use then—how do you catch rabbits except in nets and snares…
The idea that agriculture was a step back for humanity is ridiculous. However, such a dim opinion of farm country might dovetail rather nicely with Christopher Hitchens’ view of the Iowa caucuses.
January 1st, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Declaring the world wrong is transparently equivalent to admitting that your theory of the world is wrong but you can’t face that. At least it allows you to avoid changing your theory or considering that someone else had been right.
Like when communism went poof. When it turned out Marxism did not lead to more industrialization and consumer goods than capitalism, suddenly industrialization and consumer goods were global poison. Not the goal of social organization after all.
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:46 pm
The author forgot to mention that the life expectancy in his Utopian hunter-gatherer society was around 25 years, IF you made it past childhood.