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Why is this guy smiling? Because if he lived before agriculture, he had a bigger brain and a better life than you do.
Every passing day, it seems, more evidence comes to light that agriculture is the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. Not only industrial agriculture, but agriculture itself. The story we tell ourselves is that we were savages stumbling around the jungle being eaten by tigers when we learned how to plow, and civilization ensued, with all its benefits. Because of agriculture, we tell ourselves, we ate better, lived longer, flourished, and humankind ascended to the pinnacle of evolution. The story makes us smile and feel good about ourselves, and like most such stories, it’s a lie.
We have learned much in recent years about who we were before we were farmers. For 300,000 years we were nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers living in small bands of a few dozen each. We “remember” our long-ago lives as “nasty, brutish and short,” and “red in fang and claw.” We tell each other that such people lived only to about 25 years of age, but that’s a corruption of the concept of “average”: if they survived infancy, they could count on living well into their 60s. We envision lives of endless, backbreaking labor just to stay alive, when in fact recent studies estimate that hunter-gatherers needed only 24 hours a week or so of modest effort to do everything required to supply their basic needs of food, water, shelter and clothing. (Offer that deal to a present-day warehouse worker or lawyer and see if they would take it.) We were healthy — our bodies and our brains increased steadily in size over the generations.
Then, 12.000 years ago, we started to farm. Coincidentally, the global climate warmed and stabilized, making much more of the world hospitable to us, and to growing grain. Farming metastasized, and took over much of the world — all of the “civilized” world, by definition — in a few thousand years. Of course we gave climate change no credit for the achievement, it was our brilliance entirely that made it happen.
And here’s what happened next, according to a recent paper on the subject by John Gowdy, Professor of Economics Emeritus at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY:
The adoption of agriculture made the average person worse off for millennia. Physical health declined dramatically and most of the world’s people were born into rigid caste systems and lived as virtual or actual slaves. According to Larsen (2006 p. 12): “Although agriculture provided the economic basis for the rise of states and development of civilizations, the change in diet and acquisition of food resulted in a decline in quality of life for most human populations in the last 10,000 years.” After agriculture, humans became shorter and less robust and they suffered from more debilitating diseases, from leprosy to arthritis to tooth decay, than their hunter-gatherer counterparts (Cohen & Crane-Kramer, 2007). It is only in the last 150 years or so that the longevity, health, and well-being of the average person once again reached that of the Upper Pleistocene. The average human life span in 1900 was about 30 years, and for Upper Pleistocene hunter-gatherers it was about 33 years.
Although this information runs counter to conventional wisdom (oxymoron alert) it is not surprising to anyone who has delved even a little bit into the subject. But toward the end of his paper, Professor Gowdy included some data that not only surprised me, it shocked me.
Since the advent of agriculture 12,000 years ago, the human brain has been shrinking. Without regard to race, gender or geographical location, the average volume of the human brain is 150cc less than it was, a decrease of about 10%. If our bodies had shrunk at the same rate, our average height and weight would be 4’6” and 64 pounds. For 12 millennia the decrease has been “smooth, statistically significant and inversely exponential.”
Having thus raised the question of whether we will have the brain capacity to do it, Professor Gowdy proposes that the only response possible to the coming collapse of industrial civilization is a return to hunting and gathering. Obviously this implies an enormous contraction, both in the number of humans alive and in their range (there will be no hunting and gathering on the toxic and blasted corn fields of Kansas).
Nevertheless, for some, and for our species, it’s a possible way forward, or back, to the future. It’s like we’ve been offered a do-over. Happy New Year.
“Crânio de Homo sapiens” by Bruno Chaves Animais is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
The prophets and sages of civilization’s cradles looked on the emerging agriculturally-based order with considerable skepticism. The Jewish Bible (OT) as well as The Epic of Gilgamesh both revile the evil ways of those dwelling in the city-states. From Enoch to Urek to Sodom to Nineveh to Babylon, El was not pleased. Cain’s sacrifice of vegetable produce was rejected because it was farmed – not gathered. God saw the looming crisis and tried to re-nomadize Cain, but to no long-term avail. (God’s efforts with Abram along these same lines proved more successful.)
The physical statures and especially brain functioning of civilized peoples shrank due to a diminished intake of meat protein and an increased diet of cultivated variates of grain – bred to be easy to grow and high of yield-per-acre, but lacking in the robustness and nutritive value of their wild forbearers.
The better health and larger, stronger bodies of the ‘wild men’ were evident to early civilized scribes; after all, for at least a few thousand years they shared the same territories. They were fondly remembered. The wild ones spoke to the animals and ate from an endless and beneficent garden. Adam, Eve and Enkidu they were. It is written, “There were giants in the land in those days – old men, men of renown”.
Tom you’re going to love this.
The OpenAg™ Personal Food Computer is a tabletop-sized, controlled environment agriculture technology platform that uses robotic systems to control and monitor climate, energy, and plant growth inside of a specialized growing chamber. Climate variables such as carbon dioxide, air temperature, humidity, dissolved oxygen, potential hydrogen, electrical conductivity, and root-zone temperature are among the many conditions that can be controlled and monitored within the growing chamber to yield various phenotypic expressions in the plants.
https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/personal-food-computer/overview/
Yup. Gotta have one.
Agriculture gave rise to patriarchy, environmental destruction, armies, monotheism, priests, kings, hierarchies, tyranny, slavery, empire, industrialism, use of fossil fuel and perennial warfare. For the vast majority of human history, people have lived as hunter-gatherers. If there is a habitable earth in another century, we will return to that more natural way of life.
Personally, I’m looking forward to it.
OK, time to throw a damp towel on this dewey-eyed nostalgia fest. In fact, the Golden Age of the Noble Savage living in harmony with Mother Nature never was. Even the writers of Genesis, while decrying the drawbacks of city life, understood that the Garden was a temporary state – an ideal rather than a hard reality; that human nature – sin – would invariably cause people to strive for more dominance over just about everything. Aggression, invention and competition are primary drivers of evolution in a number of species. Add to these inner demons, tool use and language, and you have a dominant super-creature, ever expanding its range…until the is no more virgin range to exploit via hunting and gathering techniques. That’s when farming took hold.
Studies of contemporary and recent tribal cultures (New Guinea, Samoa, the Americas, Africa, etc…) as well as fossil evidence of pre-civilized Cro-Magnons demonstrate that tribal peoples were as prone to violence, environmental degradation, over-hunting, and even cannibalism as modern humans.
All things considered, Civilization was inevitable. As I have said on a few occasions, it is as natural for a human to build a skyscraper as it is for a beaver to build a dam.
I have never used the words “the Golden Age of the Noble Savage living in harmony with Mother Nature” and if I ever do I hope someone will take me out back and shoot me. Another thing I try not to do is, when I’m going to disagree with someone, first restate what they have said in so oversimplified a way as to make it seem idiotic. You have a dark view of human nature, which I do not share. God bless us, every one.
I do apologize. I know that I have a bombastic style and that I often engage in overstatement. I am highly opinionated – one of my many faults. But I do enjoy your blog and I meant no offence. In the future I will try to curb my bull-in-the-china-shop ways.
Still, I would say that I don’t have a dark view of human nature. It is as it is for reasons necessary to survival. I try to avoid value judgements about such matters.
No apology necessary. Opinionated is good.
A lot of trenchant Hobbesian gas to decompress here, but I’ll just point out the glaring errors.
Firstly, comparisons between contemporary and archaic h/g societies are not appropriate in most instances because the former are often influenced by factors which the latter weren’t.
In any case, most modern research indicates a complex history of interaction between h/g and ag lifestyles since as far back as the Lower Paleolithic. Many modern communities – whether labelled h/g or otherwise – often switch between the two or adopt a seasonally distributed hybrid, and archaic h/g’s likely did so as well. Furthermore, the structures of both archaic and modern h/g societies are themselves highly variable.
Secondly, there is no evidence whatsoever to my knowledge that archaic h/g societies conducted violence, exploitation/slavery and environmental destruction on the same scale as archaic ag-based city-states, let alone modern industrial civilisation.
Thirdly, the sense in which you employ “natural” is incoherent. Everything is “natural” by definition, hence the quality of “natural” tells us nothing about whether something is inevitable or inherent (or anything else).
Non-human animal behaviours are almost exclusively a hybrid of parent imitation and genomic instinct as far as we know. Many human behaviours are not. Equivocating their causes on the basis of “nature” or “evolution” is as ridiculous as equivocating all blue things on the basis of the colour blue.
So no, civilisation as we know it is not the “inevitable” consequence of “human nature” or “evolution”. Like everything else in nature it is the consequence of many factors interacting with each other over for X duration, most of which we have not and will probably never identify due to lack of sufficient evidence.
Of course, genomic human behaviour (like competition over food or mates) does have a role to play, but not in a vacuum.
In conclusion, attempts to compare two lifestyles as diverse, fluid and ancient as hunting gathering and agriculture are little more than expressions of personal biases or superstitions.
The one thing we can all agree on, though, is that any system that depends upon complex infrastructure fuelled by full spectrum wastage of finite resources is deeply unsustainable. We live in such a system, and I don’t know what will come after. I do, however, know that humanity, not “human nature”, will build the future of humanity.
Actually, fossil evidence of prehistoric h/g warfare is rife: sculls bashed in, ribs crushed, limbs dented by crude implements. Scientists are able to determine which of these incidents happened while the subject was still alive. Also, intra-tribal warfare in New Guinea and Africa has occurred even in my lifetime. Further, the incursion of Asians into North America some 13,000 years ago resulted in the extinction of a number of mega-fauna species through over-hunting, long before the Europeans arrived. I’m sure this was not the first such occurrence.
The reason that European-based societies have wreaked so much more havoc has more to do with technology than any moral or ethical superiority of the hunter-gatherers. It’s mostly about dominance, and acquisition and control of resources.
It’s not at all clear that the megafauna were over-hunted. The opposing hypothesis, which I like better, is that the arrival of humans jostled the ecosystem — altered hunting or grazing territories slightly, setting in motion a cascading crash of the system, with the megafauna the principal victims because they ate so damn much. Makes more sense to me than spindly little dudes with sticks wiping out the hairy mastodons. You ever kill a hairy mastodon with a stick?
Two points: (1) “spindly little dudes with sticks”? Try walking from Siberia to Alaska in the permanent winter of the last ice age, then conquering an entire continent within a thousand years. These were a tough-ass lot!
(2) The fauna in North America evolved in a environment that not only lacked humans, but also lacked any creature resembling humans. They were instinctually unafraid of us and were therefore brought down easily. Contrast this with African fauna that has co-existed with human types since the Pliocene, and has survived nicely – not despite human contact but because of it. They are born with a fear of humans. Those born without same were slain long ago.
This article from Dec.2019 is a summary of the most
thorough investigation of the question in relation to the Australian megafaunal extinction. While both hunting and climate change were factors,it seems clear that climate was the main factor. The extinction of the megafauna occurred in regions where
there was no coexistence with humans,as well as in areas where there was coexistence.
https://theconversation.com/did-people-or-climate-kill-off-the-megafauna-actually-it-was-both-127803
Fortunately, my understanding of empirical evidence exceeds that of the Discovery channel. Evidence of violence and warfare isn’t evidence of them happening on a widespread or systematic scale, or under normal conditions. In fact the constraints of the h/g lifestyle itself and the conditions under which it existed indicate the opposite.
And that’s quite apart from the problematic (to say the least) yet hilarious notion that the African “tribes” involved in regime change conflict in recent decades are hunter-gatherers.
Human incursion into North America coincided with the end of the last glacial age, by which point megafauna adapted to colder climates were dying or extinct. There is no evidence that prehistoric hunting activities were extensive enough to wipe out thriving species and biomes.
The European colonisation of America involved a deliberate genocide of indigenous peoples for specific ends. It’s not remotely comparable to archaic h/g warfare. In fact, not even to erstwhile or precedent warfare amongst Native Americans, many of whom weren’t hunter-gatherers.
Good point. But the last ice age came to an end, somewhat abruptly, about ten thousand years ago. The Asian incursion is dated to thirteen thousand years ago at least – it may have started before that. Plenty of time to engage in mayhem. Still, climate change may well have played a part. A convergence of circumstances seems likely.
The shrinking human brain is indeed an interesting detail. Things I’ve read indicate that some human brain structures remain undeveloped or atrophy when their functions are outsourced to memory or processing devices. For instance, memory has taken a big hit since we began using books, smartphones, and the Internet to access information we used to keep in our heads. Turns out that rote memorization may have performed a bigger function than we knew prior to the rise of writing systems. Similarly, building mental maps and wayfinding are far more difficult in the era of GPS, which many have embraced enthusiastically with no thought of cognitive tradeoffs. The notion that displacing low-level mental tasks leaves us better able to concentrate our efforts on high-level tasks is spurious.
Returning to our HG past has a certain rhetorical flair and balance, but that world is long gone, having been thoroughly transformed and despoiled by humans over just a few thousand years. According to estimates by Vaclav Smil, wild mammals (a primary HG food source) have been reduced in number (or biomass) by roughly half in just the last 100 years. Fisheries have also collapsed and fresh water has been toxified by industrial activity. So just the food and water aspects are unable to support a large human population absent continued industrial activity. Considering we’re in the midst (or at the beginning) of the sixth mass extinction, I for one doubt that humans can survive.
And a Happy New Year to you Mr. Lewis.
I suspect that compounding all you have described is that the fossil fuelled population explosion of the last 300 years has driven an ever less vigorous natural selection of our species, probably worse the richer a country has been. While the DNA may be around to raise the average if depopulation is takes enough generations to concentrate it again, a fast and catastrophic case could leave humans diminished in more than just population.
I would suggest there is a sustainable alternative to hunting and gathering; permaculture, the careful management of our environment to mimic nature in a way that serves humans. Eden was after all a garden, not a wilderness, so some human management is implied. For instance there is good evidence that much of the Amazon Basin was so managed pre-contact, such that until recently Europeans observers thought it was a primeval forest, but it was more like an orchard, abandoned when its population was decimated by disease that spread sooner that settlers. Early European observers did notice that an uncommon amount of the vegetation fed or otherwise benefitted humans.
Our use of the word civilized is interesting. From simply meaning living in cities it has come also to mean behaving properly. So we have the arrogance of city dwellers telling all others to act like them, it’s the only proper behaviour. A civilized person would know which fork to use, and which village (full of villains after all!) to bomb.
The shrinking of brain size may or may not be a
good indicator of diminished intellectual abilities.
The jury is still out on that question. I think
if you follow the link below you will find several
possible causes of changes to brain size and what
those changes might mean for intelligence.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/if-modern-humans-are-so-smart-why-are-our-brains-shrinking
Yes jury still out on our survival as a species but for sure we face a very significant bottleneck event. There will be no easy return to hg lifestyle for us. It may yet prove to be that our intelligence is a lethal adaptation. My best guess is that the peramaculture this could lead to us developing into some form of ecosystem engineer or more likely our technological dependence will lead to our extinction I like your work its nice to see Sapien still means something