Read Online Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live by Marlene Zuk - Free Book Online
Authors: Marlene Zuk
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politics were bad for us, as Jared Diamond 4 and others do, isn’t the same thing as saying we are trapped in an agriculture-induced cage—and an obese, sickly, socially stratified cage at that.
The curse or blessing—or both—of agriculture
Once the human species had spread out of Africa, people probably lived as hunter-gatherers in small groups until the rise of agriculture, which anthropologists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending call the Big Change. 5 No one denies that it was a major milestone, but several scientists go further and claim that it was the beginning of a downward spiral. In 1987, Jared Diamond, who later wrote such best-selling and influential books about the history of humans on Earth as Guns, Germs, and Steel , titled an article on the establishment of agriculture “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.” In it he says, “With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.” 6 An article in the British newspaper the Telegraph about Diamond’s and others’ work is similarly gloomily headlined “Is Farming the Root of All Evil?” 7
Spencer Wells of the National Geographic Society goes even further: “Ultimately, nearly every single major disease affecting modern human populations—whether bacterial, viral, parasitic or noncommunicable—has its roots in the mismatch between our biology and the world we have created since the advent of agriculture.” 8 And environmental writer and activist John Feeney pulls out all the stops with, “As hunter-gatherers, we blended gracefully into Earth’s ecosystems. Then everything changed. Civilization is made possible by agriculture. Agriculture is unsustainable. If it weren’t obvious already, you can see where this is going.” 9
The first point to clear up before we tackle all this pessimism is one of definition. Agriculture can be informally defined as growing one’s crops and domesticating or at least keeping animals, rather than simply picking up what nature provides. 10 But anthropologists distinguish three kinds of such food production: horticulture, pastoralism, and intensive agriculture. People probably started out with horticulture, in which relatively unmodified crops are grown and cultivated with simple tools such as digging sticks. Modern-day horticultural societies include the Yanomami of South America, who combine growing manioc, taro, and some medicinal plants with foraging and hunting in the forest for the remainder of their food. Some horticulturalists today (and probably many in the past) spend part of their time as nomads, rather than living in permanent settlements. When they do form relatively sedentary groups, those groups are small, not likely to cluster in towns or cities.
Pastoralists, who rely on domesticated herds of animals that feed on natural pasture rather than on food provided by their keepers, have probably always been less common than crop-cultivating people, though even today a few groups, such as the Saami (known also as Lapps) of Scandinavia, who herd reindeer, persist. The animals are sometimes kept in one place for a few months at a time, as when the Saami keep female reindeer in corrals for milking during the summer. Although the reindeer, like other animals kept by pastoralists, provide the bulk of the Saami people’s livelihood, the Saami and other pastoralists also trade with agricultural groups for other products, like plant foods.
Intensive agriculture is more like the form of growing food most often practiced today, though it is still seen in societies we would probably classify as “traditional,” such as the rice-farming cultures of Southeast Asia. Fields are more permanent than those used by the horticulturalists, who may “slash and burn” the areas they cultivate, leaving them in between growing periods, sometimes for years, to regain nutrients in the soil. In contrast, intensive agricultural societies actively
The curse or blessing—or both—of agriculture
Once the human species had spread out of Africa, people probably lived as hunter-gatherers in small groups until the rise of agriculture, which anthropologists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending call the Big Change. 5 No one denies that it was a major milestone, but several scientists go further and claim that it was the beginning of a downward spiral. In 1987, Jared Diamond, who later wrote such best-selling and influential books about the history of humans on Earth as Guns, Germs, and Steel , titled an article on the establishment of agriculture “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.” In it he says, “With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.” 6 An article in the British newspaper the Telegraph about Diamond’s and others’ work is similarly gloomily headlined “Is Farming the Root of All Evil?” 7
Spencer Wells of the National Geographic Society goes even further: “Ultimately, nearly every single major disease affecting modern human populations—whether bacterial, viral, parasitic or noncommunicable—has its roots in the mismatch between our biology and the world we have created since the advent of agriculture.” 8 And environmental writer and activist John Feeney pulls out all the stops with, “As hunter-gatherers, we blended gracefully into Earth’s ecosystems. Then everything changed. Civilization is made possible by agriculture. Agriculture is unsustainable. If it weren’t obvious already, you can see where this is going.” 9
The first point to clear up before we tackle all this pessimism is one of definition. Agriculture can be informally defined as growing one’s crops and domesticating or at least keeping animals, rather than simply picking up what nature provides. 10 But anthropologists distinguish three kinds of such food production: horticulture, pastoralism, and intensive agriculture. People probably started out with horticulture, in which relatively unmodified crops are grown and cultivated with simple tools such as digging sticks. Modern-day horticultural societies include the Yanomami of South America, who combine growing manioc, taro, and some medicinal plants with foraging and hunting in the forest for the remainder of their food. Some horticulturalists today (and probably many in the past) spend part of their time as nomads, rather than living in permanent settlements. When they do form relatively sedentary groups, those groups are small, not likely to cluster in towns or cities.
Pastoralists, who rely on domesticated herds of animals that feed on natural pasture rather than on food provided by their keepers, have probably always been less common than crop-cultivating people, though even today a few groups, such as the Saami (known also as Lapps) of Scandinavia, who herd reindeer, persist. The animals are sometimes kept in one place for a few months at a time, as when the Saami keep female reindeer in corrals for milking during the summer. Although the reindeer, like other animals kept by pastoralists, provide the bulk of the Saami people’s livelihood, the Saami and other pastoralists also trade with agricultural groups for other products, like plant foods.
Intensive agriculture is more like the form of growing food most often practiced today, though it is still seen in societies we would probably classify as “traditional,” such as the rice-farming cultures of Southeast Asia. Fields are more permanent than those used by the horticulturalists, who may “slash and burn” the areas they cultivate, leaving them in between growing periods, sometimes for years, to regain nutrients in the soil. In contrast, intensive agricultural societies actively
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