Excerpted from “Back of History (Man in the Beginning) by within their radius of action around the camp, or the

on around the camp, or the band itself will not be

able to move fast enough and far enough to tap the resources it needs. Only
William Howells once in a while can bands come together in tribal meetings, and then perhaps
when a natural crop—a cactus pear or a kind of grub — comes into season,
This brings us . . . to the meaning of the so-called Neolithic revolution. If you
and for a while creates plenty for everybody. The rest of the time the bands
generalize, and take the typical effects on culture of hunting life on the one
must keep their distance, and the number of each will be something like fifty
hand and of farming life on the other, you can see that something stupendous
souls, more or less.
took place . . . it was a breaking of one of nature’s bonds, the freeing of man
from the limits of the natural supply of food.
These laws of nature have teeth in them: many such peoples accept
the necessity of killing some of their infants at birth because the mother
…simple hunter-gatherers.. . . have a few crude ideas about conservation and
already has all the young children she can cope with on the march; and most
some…exerted themselves in pious rites1 to make the game more plentiful.
of them ruthlessly abandon the sick or the helplessly old to freeze or starve.
But that is wishful thinking; nature is in control, not they. Nature goads them
If, rarely, they put forth efforts on the aged one’s behalf, these efforts are
about from spot to spot like howling monkeys, and there is nothing they can
visibly strenuous. Such action is not subhuman callousness. Even though
do about it. They cannot stockpile their food: when they have eaten, it is high
they may appear to take it calmly, the people have no choice at all in what
time to start thinking about the next meal. Around any camp there are only so
they do, or even the face they put upon it.
many wild animals and so many edible plants, because of the balance of
nature. When these have been hunted or picked beyond a given point, the
We see, in fact, human beings like ourselves trapped, without knowing it, in
supply becomes too short and cannot recover, perhaps, for that season. What
a life which prevents them from having higher material inventions and social
do the people in the camp do? They pick up and move on, to a place where
combinations. Small nomadic bands can hardly become civilized if they
the game is untouched. So this band must have enough territory to keep
cannot even set up substantial households. They must find some escape from
rebuilding the supply, it must preserve the supply against poachers, and it
nomadism first, and from isolation and the limits of small numbers. They
must move, move, move.
must find some escape from the tread-mill of food-getting, which has them
almost always either hunting or getting ready to hunt, and so keeps them
What about the numbers of people? Since they are actually part of the
from having any specialization of their energies, and makes the only division
balance of nature themselves, they will be limited to a number which their
of labor that between the animal-hunting man and the plant-hunting woman.
territory can support in its worst (not its best) years. So the whole human
This escape was found with domestication, when the ordinary balance of
population must be relatively sparse and spread out.
nature was broken and food was made to grow not by nature but by man.
Camps changed to villages, and dozens of people to hundreds.
And the size of the band? Actually the simplest family can carry on this kind
of a life, the man to hunt and the woman to collect vegetables, insects, water
and firewood and to tend to odd jobs. But this leaves them with no help if
they have need of it, while larger groups may not only protect themselves
better but hunt more effectively, whether by co-operating in a rabbit drive or
by multiplying the chances of finding and killing a large animal on which all
can feed. However, the size of the band soon reaches a point at which it
presses too hard on the food supply. There will simply not be enough food

1
I.e. religious rituals designed to increase the amount of animals to hunt.
 hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a better balance of other
nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen’s average daily food intake
Excerpted from “The Worst Mistake in the History of the (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93
Human Race” by Jared Diamond grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily
allowance for people of their size. It’s almost inconceivable that
… recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way
supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during
ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With the potato famine of the 1840s.
agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and
despotism that curse our existence. (As for prehistoric gatherer-hunter peoples versus agriculturalists)
usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but
…While the case for the progressivist2 view seems overwhelming, it’s they permit a surprising number of deductions. To begin with, a
hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years skeleton reveals its owner’s sex, weight, and approximate age. In the
ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for few cases where there are many skeletons, one can construct mortality
farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, tables like the ones life insurance companies use to calculate expected
whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. life span and risk of death at any given age. Paleopathologists can also
Here’s one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth-century hunter- calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages,
gatherers really worse off than farmers? examining teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition),
and recognizing scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy,
Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so called and other diseases.
primitive people, like the Kalahari Bushmen, continue to support
themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and
leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming Illinois Rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that
neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-
obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize (corn) farming around
hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when A.D. 1150…Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the
asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting farmers had a nearly 50 percent increase in malnutrition, a fourfold
agriculture, replied, “Why should we, when there are so many increase in iron- deficiency anemia, a threefold rise…in infectious
mongongo nuts in the world?” disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the
spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor.
While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and
potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that
agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied
2 diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few
Progressivist: Someone who believes that human history is a history of constant
progress and improvement of the human condition, usually due to technological starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor
advances. nutrition… Second, because of dependence on a limited number of
crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample
mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to. While
crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other post- agricultural technological advances did make new art forms
crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures
disease…Epidemics couldn’t take hold when populations were were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago…
scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp (as in the
gatherer-hunter lifestyle). Thus with the advent of agriculture an elite became better off, but most
people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the progressivist party
Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask
helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls.
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 farming populations could a healthy, non- producing
elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek
tombs at Mycenae c.3 1500 BCE. 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. CE. 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.

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…

…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

3
c. means “circa” or “approximately”. Used to indicate when a precise date is
unavailable.