How Agriculture Ruined Everything

As an exception to this collection of articles, this one is not about applying Zen-ish principles to daily life. It is instead a bit of general information that provides a lot of context for why our lives today are so stressful.

The assumption expressed by Hobbes that the life of primitive humans "was poor, nasty, brutish and short" has great intuitive appeal, and has been restated in various ways by numerous authors. However, recent actual research on those few remaining primitive groups that have been observed, and on archeological remains from the time of the initial shift to agriculture, support the opposite conclusion. It is clear to me that agriculture ruined everything, and there are many scholars who agree with this assessment.

Those few hunter-gatherer societies that still exist today seem to fare well in the social-emotional sphere. Furthermore, years of accumulated anthropological research shows that those who live by hunting and gathering show a very strong tendency to live in egalitarian, consensus-based societies (including nearly equal status for men and women), and to enjoy generally good health.

It seems that there was much cooperation within pre-agricultural family groups and little contact between groups. Women's labor was highly esteemed and women had similar status to men. The absence of significant property (due to being nomadic) meant that theft and war were uncommon, there was little material competition or stratification. Health was better, and a great deal of time was spent in peaceful eating and socializing.

Of these conclusions, better health is the most surprising, so let's take a quick look. While illness and injury led to short lifetimes for most individuals, while alive, they were commonly healthier. The switch from a widely varied diet to relying only on relatively few agricultural crops and domesticated animals effected a huge decrease in the nutritional value of the human diet. The adulteration of pseudo-food over the recent past has made this many times worse.

The shift from intermittent labor with long periods of restfulness to long hours at hard labor provided a significant increase in physical and emotional stress. With most of the day spent in separate work instead of shared socializing, gender roles become a larger factor in how people understand themselves and each other.

Having become dependent on food production instead of seasonal migration and foraging meant that people had to survive several months per year without food production, as well as occasional catastrophic loss of the food supply due to local weather conditions or various forms of crop (or labor) compromise or failure. Illness and injury were common, and living in denser, less mobile, less sanitary communities was a major health setback. A by-product of settled communities was the development of trade, and this resulted in unintended transportation of disease vectors.

While foraging groups tend toward egalitarianism, settled communities tend toward social stratification, politics, material greed, theft, and war.

A single hunter might only have a small chance of making a successful kill, and of not being killed in the process. A group of hunters who agree to work together and share whatever they catch have a much safer and more reliable food supply, and are engaging in a powerful form of social bonding. Hunter-gatherers earn their living (hunt and gather) 2 to 3 hours per day. How many hours do you work per day?

If you combine a 40-hour work week with a half hour commute each way, that's 30% of your week, and you spend another 30% or so asleep. Hunter-gatherers spend 8 to 12 percent of their week hunting and gathering. And they don't have to exercise because their natural life exercises them. Hunter-gatherers have 100% more unstressed leisure time than you do, and their work time is less stressful (for the most part), better for their health, and socially deep. We have not won the contest of having better lives than hunter-gatherers.

A mother on her own is easily overwhelmed by an infant's demands, but when a mother is surrounded by others who help provide care, both mother and child have better physical and emotional outcomes. In a modern, nuclear (or "sub-nuclear") family, one person, typically the mother, provides all or nearly all of the care for infants and toddlers.

In a hunter-gatherer group, in the course of any given day, between 10 and 20 individuals will participate in the care of each individual infant or toddler, with the mother providing approximately only half of the care. Imagine the psychological development of two children in their first few and most dependent years of life, one raised primarily by a senselessly over-stressed mother who cannot possibly provide what 10 to 20 people can provide, and one whose needs are most often met by a non-exhausted caregiver.

Most of us get most of our protein from animal sources, which is fine from a basic biology perspective. However, this brings along a huge ecological cost, whatever hormones farmers use to optimize their profits, and our support of an industry that raises animals under horrifically cruel conditions.

Very many modern humans barely eat any vegetables, and much of what they do eat is nutritionally damaged by overcooking, or over-processing before it even reaches the person who will eat it. Most of it is carries literal poisons (pesticides), on purpose, because we think pretty is more important than non-poisonous, and money is more important than health. Let's say that you eat lots of veggies of all kinds, locally grown and organic, and on top of that you are vegan. How many different plant species do you actually eat, and how much protein do you actually consume? Count it up. Then come back. In most cases, it won't be good. And for people living in most modern locales, it isn't even possible.

Individual hunter-gatherers, even as they exist today in incredibly disadvantaged and geographically constrained circumstances, eat on the order of 150 different plant species and get over 90 grams of plant protein per day (which is more than the U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance). Something like a potato famine cannot wipe them out because they depend on such a wide variety of food sources. That same variety provides a broad spectrum of nutrients that keep them very healthy at a baseline.

Paleopathologists tell us that the shift from hunter-gatherer to agriculture was marked by a decrease in height, increased signs of malnutrition, a threefold increase in spinal problems, an increase in number and incidence of diseases, an increase in parasites, and a shortened lifespan.

Contemporary hunter-gatherers certainly have some health problems that modern medical care could address, but our many technical "advances" have produced such unnatural diets, so little physical activity, and so much stress that we have vastly more health problems than they do. Additionally, prior to agriculture, we never had enough people in the same place for things like the common cold, influenza, measles, or tuberculosis, polio, or the plague to be a large-scale issue, let alone devastating epidemics or pandemics.

Cooperation and mutual support in hunting, in gathering, in child rearing, and a healthier life closer to nature are vastly better for everyone than separation, competition, overeating of demonstrably terrible food, and the near-abolition of physical activity for most of the population. Note that the only reason we need to exercise is because we have eliminated most of the physical activity that occurs in a natural life.

Prior to agriculture, humans had no chance of destroying the global ecosystem. Prior to being tied to a given area of land by agriculture (which includes both livestock and crops), when a group became too large to function well or developed profound disagreement on some important issue, they would split into two groups and maintain however much distance suited the circumstances. That's hard to do when you are tied to the land, or to customer who are tied to the land. Natural communities split up once they reach a few hundred members. We have both companies and individual apartment buildings larger than that, embedded in towns, cities, counties, and countries that may be vastly larger. Judging by the news, we aren't handling that very well.

Personal property is a burden to a nomad, so prior to agriculture people did not accumulate it to a significant degree. With little ownership of personal property, no ownership of land, and everyone sharing resources and mutual aid more or less equally, prior to agriculture, wealth inequality, social stratification, and warring were all so minimal as to be almost entirely non-existent.

With the advent of livestock as food (not just as labor) the skills of the hunter transferred into guarding and otherwise taking charge of this valuable asset. This newly invented concentration of wealth played a significant role is the development of patriarchy and its partner, misogyny.

Then it got worse. When raising animals and crops with human and animal labor but no machinery or devices, men and women were still similarly productive. With the advent of the plow, the on-average greater muscularity of men made them more productive farmers than women.

With farming requiring an abundance of cheap labor that has no parallel in a nomadic existence, women were valued most for producing and raising laborers (er, I mean children), and men were valued most for field labor. Thus, agriculture cemented patriarchy, misogyny, strict gender roles, hoarding of private property in one's lifetime and across generations, dramatic wealth inequality, stratified societies, and poverty, for thousands of years to come. If you haven't noticed, we are still deep within the midst of it.

The primary benefit of agriculture is of course that one can produce more food than one needs. Storage of excess becomes insurance against lean times. It becomes a source of "currency" that can buy goods and services. But it also becomes a source of wealth that can both attract crime and fund wars. (How's that working out?) It can create greed, fear, and false beliefs about one's superiority and natural rights. It can feed armies, and motivate local and global wars.

If feeding an army gets difficult, or anything else presses you, or just for pure greed or self-aggrandizement, you can use your army to steal more land from someone else, acquiring agricultural output, the land itself, and the kill, rape, otherwise devastate or even simply absorb people directly or indirectly tied to that land.

With agriculture being tied to immovable land, and needing supplies and tools, some people left the farms and began to develop a vast array of new trades, along with towns and cities in which to practice them (being both non-farm-dwelling yet non-nomadic). Thus we acquired politics, increases in social inequality and wealth inequality, kingdoms, countries, empires, and massively large-scale wars.

In sum, a natural life is inescapably hard enough, and beginning with agriculture, we humans have gone to extraordinary lengths over the past 12,000 years to make it much harder!