The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race | Discover Magazine
The story of the luxury trap carries with it an important lesson. Humanity’s search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted. Nobody plotted the Agricultural Revolution or sought human dependence on cereal cultivation. A series of trivial decisions aimed mostly at filling a
... See moreYuval Noah Harari • Sapiens
Contrary to earlier assumptions, hunters and gatherers—even today in the marginal refugia they inhabit—are nothing like the famished, one-day-away-from-starvation desperados of folklore. Hunters and gathers have, in fact, never looked so good—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure. Agriculturalists, on the contrary, have never look
... See moreJames C. Scott • Against the Grain
Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking c
... See moreYuval Noah Harari • Sapiens
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. Th... See more
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
When scholars like Marshall Sahlins or Jared Diamond contrast hunter-gatherers to pastoralists, they do so with the suggestion that hunter-gatherers were in many ways healthier than us. Diamond reaches the conclusion that the Neolithic agricultural revolution was “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”
palladiummag.com • The Modern Diet Is a Biosecurity Threat
A puzzling and counterintuitive finding, based on archeological and anthropological evidence, is that hunters and gatherers seem to have had better nutrition, fewer diseases, more varied diets, less strenuous labor, and longer lives than contemporaneous farm households.2 The evidence includes the larger stature of nomadic populations compared with
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