To science we owe dramatic changes in our self-image. Astronomy taught that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. Now archaeology is breaking up 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, which we have assumed was 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 tyranny that curse our existence.* T
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. Who among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?* T
For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is no break from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving.* Our escape from this misery happened only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution gradually spread until today it's nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive.T
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. T
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 for art production that hunter-gatherers never had.T
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 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. T
While farmers concentrate on growing crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of modern hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a better balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily 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 hard to imagine 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. T
But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have lived next to 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.T
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 study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.T
One straightforward example of what scientists 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 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 and 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.* T
Another example is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio River Valleys. At Dickson Mounds, archaeologists have found some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive corn farming around A.D. 1150. Studies show that these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood.* Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a large increase in various diseases and physical defects. Furthermore, life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was about twenty-six years, but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years." T
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. T
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 crops of poor nutrition. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. 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 live together in crowded societies led to the spread of para Sorry, your browser doesn't support Java(tm). sites and infectious disease.T
Besides poor nutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions.* Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs 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.T
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 as a critical factor in the development of art seems to me misguided.* Great paintings and sculptures were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago.T
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.T
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