The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race | Discover Magazine
by human brain power. Evolution gradually produced ever more intelligent people. Eventually, people were so smart that they were able to decipher nature’s secrets, enabling them to tame sheep and cultivate wheat. As soon as this happened, they cheerfully abandoned the gruelling, dangerous and often spartan life of hunter-gatherers, settling down to
... See moreYuval Noah Harari • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Village life certainly brought the first farmers some immediate benefits, such as better protection against wild animals, rain and cold. Yet for the average person, the disadvantages probably outweighed the advantages. This is hard for people in today’s prosperous societies to appreciate. Since we enjoy affluence and security, and since our affluen
... See moreYuval Noah Harari • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Once upon a time, the story goes, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a prolonged state of childlike innocence, in tiny bands. These bands were egalitarian; they could be for the very reason that they were so small. It was only after the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and then still more the rise of cities, that this happy condition came to an end, ush
... See moreDavid Graeber • The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
Once this transition had begun, a ratchet effect took hold: The more farming was relied on as a means of food production by a particular community, and the more its population grew, the harder it was to go back to the old nomadic lifestyle based on hunting and gathering.
Tom Standage • A History of the World in 6 Glasses
There is no evidence that people became more intelligent with time. Foragers knew the secrets of nature long before the Agricultural Revolution, since their survival depended on an intimate knowledge of the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered. Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with
... See moreYuval Noah Harari • Sapiens
Their economic life was organized around the presumption of abundance rather than a preoccupation with scarcity. And this being so, there is good reason to believe that because our ancestors hunted and gathered for well over 95 percent of Homo sapiens’ 300,000-year-old history, the assumptions about human nature in the problem of scarcity and our a... See more