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The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race The advent of agriculture was a watershed moment for the human race. It  may also have been our greatest blunder. 

By ​Jared Diamond​ April 30, 1999 10:00 PM 

 

 

(Credit: Gajus/Shutterstock)   

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught  us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of  heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by 

God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is  demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years  has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the  adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life,  was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With  agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and  despotism, that curse our existence. At first, the evidence against this revisionist  interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We're better  off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it  easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our  advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and  material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are  safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not  from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a  medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape? 

For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we 

hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It's a life that philosophers have 

traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. 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. Our escape from this misery was 

facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people 

began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread until 

today it's nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive. 

From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask "Why did 

almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is silly. Of course 

they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less 

work. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries. Just 

imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild 

animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture 

full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to 

appreciate the advantages of agriculture? 

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. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the 

Parthenon and compose the B-minor Mass. 

While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. 

How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they 

abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had 

to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the 

progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century 

hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, 

several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, 

continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have 

plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming 

neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is 

only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza 

nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated 

neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there 

are so many mongongo nuts in the world?" 

While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the 

mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides 

more protein and a better balance of other nutrients. 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. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, 

who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of 

thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 

1840s. 

So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren't nasty and brutish, 

even though farmers have pushed them into some of the world's worst real 

estate. But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with 

farming societies for thousands of years don't tell us about conditions before the 

agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the 

distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from 

gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing 

remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in 

prehistoric garbage dumps. 

How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby 

directly test the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in 

recent years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology, 

the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples. 

In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to 

study as a pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts 

found well preserved mummies whose medical conditions at time of death could 

be determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians 

who lived in dry caves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be 

examined for hookworm and other parasites. 

Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit 

a surprising number of deductions. To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner's 

sex, weight, and approximate age. In the few cases where there are many 

skeletons, one can construct mortality tables like the ones life insurance 

companies use to calculate expected life span and risk of death at any given age. 

Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people 

of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood 

malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, 

and other diseases. 

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 hunter-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. 

Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from 

burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located 

near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have 

excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that 

occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming 

around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the 

University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their 

new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the 

farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of 

malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone 

condition called porotic hyperostosis), a threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting 

infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the 

spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in 

the pre-agricultural community was about 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." 

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. "I don't think most hunter-gatherers 

farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality 

for quantity," says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at 

Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, 

Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. "When I first started making that 

argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it's become a 

respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate." 

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture 

was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early 

farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers 

gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition, (today just three 

high-carbohydrate plants — wheat, rice, and corn — provide the bulk of the 

calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain 

vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a 

limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. 

Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in 

crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded 

societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some 

archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted 

disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages 

agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were 

scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal 

disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the 

appearance of large cities. 

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming 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. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set 

itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae 

c. 1500 B. C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the 

royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the 

average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among Chilean mummies 

from c. A. D. 1000, 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. 

Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people 

in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting 

and gathering. But Americans are an elite, dependent on oil and minerals that 

must often be imported from countries with poorer health and nutrition. 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? 

Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from 

the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under 

pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have 

more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts — with 

consequent drains on their health. Among the Chilean mummies for example, 

more women than men had bone lesions from infectious disease. 

Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New 

Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of 

vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field 

trip there studying birds, I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an 

airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a 110-pound bag of rice, 

which I lashed to a pole and assigned to a team of four men to shoulder together. 

When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, 

while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, 

supporting its weight by a cord across her temples. 

As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us 

with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do 

farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me 

misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had 

they wanted to. While post-agricultural technological advances did make new art 

forms possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures 

were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and were still 

being produced as recently as the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some 

Eskimos and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest. 

Thus with the advent of agriculture the elite became better off, but most people 

became worse off. Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we 

chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped 

by it despite its pitfalls. 

One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming could support 

many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population 

densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over one person per ten square miles, 

while farmers average 100 times that.) Partly, this is because a field planted 

entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered 

edible plants. Partly, too, it's because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep 

their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since 

a mother must carry her toddler until it's old enough to keep up with the adults. 

Because farm women don't have that burden, they can and often do bear a child 

every two years. 

As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice 

ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first 

steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose 

the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the 

transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with 

increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the 

bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished 

farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It's not that hunter-gatherers 

abandoned their lifestyle, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were 

forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn't want. 

At this point it's instructive to recall the common complaint that archaeology is a 

luxury, concerned with the remote past, and offering no lessons for the present. 

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. 

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

human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which 

agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose 

that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain 

human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs 

by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. 

If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost 

at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of 

that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we 

adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of 

famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow 

achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering 

facade, and that have so far eluded us?