Agriculture vs Hunting and Gathering
The history of humans has been one long story of progress. Clearly, today we live better than our medieval ancestors, they lived much better than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. It’s easy to count our advantages - from the abundance of food and efficiency of its production, gained control over diseases, ease of travel and communication, all while we practically eradicated wars. We live the longest lives ever and we get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. Who in their right mind would trade that for the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers whose physical struggle for every meal and some sense of safety was on the daily agenda?
Yet many historians argue that taking up farming was the worst mistake in human history. Let’s explore why.
The blessings of agriculture
Only around 10,000 years ago we freed ourselves from the shackles of daily hunting and gathering. Over were the days when no food was grown and little was stored, when there was no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving.
In different parts of the world, people began to domesticate plants and animals, and as agriculture evolved, we were not only able to feed the ever-growing society but were also finally able to have some spare time to think and create art. There is a strong argument that all the biggest art masterpieces and technological inventions evolved thanks to agriculture.
There was less effort and time needed to collect crops from the garden, and food production was more efficient and could be stored. Cultivating food in one spot is a natural progression for an intelligent species that try to make their life easier. Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly gazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. Do you think they would gladly go back to their lifestyle?
The downsides of agriculture
This new lifestyle enabled the evolution of settlements, people could exchange goods and specialise in services. However, crowding in one location also enabled the diseases to spread. Many went on to trade with other crowded settlements, spreading diseases even further. Epidemics weren’t able to take hold in populations that constantly shifted camp in small groups.
Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease arrived with the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague with the appearance of large cities.
Farmers were quick to aim for cheap, high carbohydrate crops like potatoes, rice and corn. With the increased use of grains in the diet, there is a direct correlation between cavities and health decline in cultures like ancient Egypt.
The study of Indian skeletons from the Illinois and Ohio area showed a 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition after the adoption of agriculture, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia, 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 labour.
Agriculture, as convenient as it seems, proved to be very susceptible to seasonal changes, floods, drought and pests. If one crop failed, farmers ran the risk of starvation.
Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. As hunter-gatherers have no or little stored food, there can’t be any kings or social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Skeletons from Greece c. 1500BC suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners since they were two to three inches taller and had fewer cavities and bone lesions caused by disease.
How to compare the two lifestyles
The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is hard to study and compare to the modern one because pretty much all the indigenous tribes that lived like that have died off. One of the very few ones that still endure are Kalahari bushmen and Hadza nomads of Tanzania. Sadly, farmers pushed them to the worst real estate of the world, the unwanted places they couldn’t cultivate for their own crops, so it’s really hard to get a clear picture of the quality of life of the ancient hunter-gatherers.
However, there are ways to compare whether the twentieth-century hunter-gatherers are really worse off than farmers. Despite the tough conditions due to the geographical limitations, one study showed that the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers are much more diverse, eating a variety of wild plants and animals, compared to the high-carbohydrate diet of modern farmers that relied on only a few starchy crops.
The diet of the tribe 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,” writes Jared Diamond of UCLA School of Medicine.
Wild foraging provides constant flexibility being fed by what nature provided on that day. Not to mention the benefits of short unplanned fasting and daily exercise.
Spare time is an illusion
When we romantically imagine how farmers finally freed their minds and their bodies from constant worries about where the next food is going to come from and had some downtime to enjoy the fruits of life, we couldn’t be further from the truth.
The study of today’s tribes showed that their members have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbours. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen and 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. Compared to the farmer that works from dawn til dusk, seven days a week.
Although post-agricultural technological advances did make new art forms possible and the preservation of art easier, there were many art pieces like paintings and sculptures dating as far as 15,000 years ago.
Paleopathology
Paleopathology is the study of disease in the remains of ancient peoples. They can determine the medical condition at the time of death by autopsy of well-preserved mummies. Feces can be analysed for worms and parasites of long-dead people. Bones, of course, are the most obvious remains and they give plenty of information like sex, height, weight and approximate age. Teeth can speak for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), while scars left on bones can be a witness to anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.
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. Compare that to the height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages which was 5’ 9" for men, and 5’ 5" for women.
Adopting agriculture wasn’t a choice of improvement
The analysis of groups of skeletons from the same location shows that the lifespan of pre-agriculture people was around 26 years, but in the post-agricultural community, it was only nineteen years. Looks like these episodes of infectious disease, crop yield unpredictability and malnutrition were seriously affecting the survival ability of farming communities.
Looks like many primitive peoples adopted agriculture only when they had to. Not because of convenience but of necessity to support the quickly growing population. Whenever they switched to farming, the quality of life decreased. They swapped quality for quantity.
Giving birth
Hunter-gatherer women had to carry their child until they were independent enough to follow the tribe. This is why they had to space out child labour (often with the help of infanticide) every four years or so. The rise of agriculture freed women of this burden and allowed them to give birth more often, even every two years. This drained them of their health, which is shown on Chilean mummies, for example, more women than men had bone lesions from infectious diseases.
Conclusion
It turns out farming can support more people albeit with poorer quality of life. Many groups were blinded by the transient abundance that agriculture provided and quickly adopted the new method, unable to anticipate its pitfalls.
As the farming population grew, the tribes that weren’t inclined to take up farming were either killed or pushed off to the fringes. A hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter.
It’s not that all hunter-gatherers abandoned their lifestyle, but those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn’t want.
In the hope to maintain the population growth and provide food and social security, ironically, we chose a system that ended up with starvation, disease, warfare, inequality and tyranny.
Hunter-gatherers practised the longest and most sustainable lifestyle in human history. If this timeline was a 24-hour clock, the last six minutes before the end of the day would be the adoption of agriculture. As the clock hands pass midnight, I think it’s time to ponder how we can reintroduce the elements of this lifestyle into our modern life.
Resources:
https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/diamond