Agriculture: Need we worry?

Primitive man has lived twice: once in and for himself, and the second time for us, in our reconstruction. (Gellner, 1988: 23).

To kill a man between panels is to condemn him to a thousand deaths. (McCloud, 1994: 69)

One of humanity’s most important inventions is agriculture. This decisive step freed people from the quest for food and released energy for other pursuits. No civilisation has existed without an agricultural base, whether in the past or today. Truly, agriculture was the first great leap forward by human beings. (MacNeish, 1992 cited in Kiple, K.F., 2007: 61)

Why was Jared Diamond (1987: 66) led to the assertion that ‘the’ so-called ‘Neolithic Revolution,’ which had its beginnings around eleven thousand years ago at the dawn of the Holocene, was the “worst mistake in human history?” It was a bold suggestion to make, and because the consequences of this ‘revolution’ permeate most societies and the world at large to this day it is an important one to confront. In this discussion, this view will take the form of a challenge, and because there are only really two weak links in his pithy claim, first that it was a ‘mistake’ and then – the more tenuous of the two – that it was the ‘worst’ of them, these will support the skeleton of the assault. Perhaps because – unlike today – these early ancestors of ours were not likely to have the option to eat less, Diamond says that the mistake resulted from their choosing to produce more food, rather than to limit their population. While he has good evidence to say that “starvation, warfare, and tyranny” resulted from this choice, it will be a challenge for even a more comprehensive balance sheet to settle whether this was the ‘worst’ of our species mistakes; the staunchest luddite must admit after all the benefits that agriculture has bestowed. Is it possible that agriculture has opened the possibility of solutions to some of the very problems it has also created? (Kiple, K.F., 2007: 3)

To meaningfully discuss agriculture, we should be clear about what exactly a community practicing it does, and more importantly what might be meant by any ‘revolution’ inherent to this kind of living. A suitable definition of an agricultural society could be based on that used by Price and Bar-Yosef (2011: S165): one that lives with a diet predominantly of domestic plants and/or animals. What about adopting this kind of diet was revolutionary? Looking back over thousands of years makes it possible to see any dramatic effects of a process, so is this merely an attribution resulting from anthropological hindsight? Did its pioneers consider it a massive step from prior procuring practices? There are at least two reasons to believe otherwise. One is latent in the earlier definition itself: early practitioners did not rely on it exclusively and still did some hunting and/or gathering; the other reason is that it does not seem a particularly rare development: Cochran and Harpending (2010: 31) point out that humanity has managed it on at least seven independent occasions, and Price and Bar-Yosef’s more recent survey (2011: S163) has inflated that figure to ten separate locations, adding that the origins of domestication – a prerequisite for agriculture, at least – continue with new evidence to be placed earlier in time.

While the times and places of agriculture’s emergence are not a great mystery, there have been several reasons proposed for the shift and consensus has not congealed about any of them, probably due to the variety of circumstances.  Diamond’s thesis does not depend on a particular cause, but he did propose it alongside an assumption that the choice was forced by population pressure. This is dubious in the light of it being fairly recently realised that early experimenting with agriculture occurred in fail-safe environments of relative plenty, and is also weakened by the fact that most evidence of significant population growth post-dates agriculture. This latter tendency does however bolster his central point, given a number of flow-on effects of this growth. The main incontrovertible negative of agriculture has been epidemiological: with growing populations tend to come denser populations, and denser populations foster the spread of infectious pathogens, and promote in particular the spread of zoonoses where this is accompanied by greater contact with animals (some notable examples being HIV and various strains of Influenza). While humans are able to respond to these threats to some extent, consciously (through improved hygiene, vaccinations, antibiotics, bacteriophages, etc.) or unconsciously (mutations affecting susceptibility), we are fundamentally – though not completely – limited in our ability to control their evolution for the better. (Diamond, 1987: 66; Price and Bar-Yosef, 2011: S168; Ewald, 2007)

Some authors make the shady assumption that the population growth of agriculturists is inexorable. While it is true that forager cultures have an innate restraint on their population, “since the plants and animals they depend on cannot be overharvested without immediate harm,” there can be cultural forces keeping the growth of agricultural communities in check. They need not be so draconian as those in China, either. Hans Rosling (2012) highlights the UN Population Division’s forecast that the world’s population will stop growing at ten billion, partly as a consequence of simple – and interrelated – things like increased educational level of women, greater numbers of women integrated in the workforce, and increased ages at first marrage. While it will without doubt be a demanding problem to feed a global population reaching this ceiling, it is misleading to label the issue intractable. (Hemenway, 2006: 3)

When cultural factors are more prominent than biological, it is plausible that future trends could be directed to a greater extent, so while inequalities – economic and gender-based - were greatly exacerbated by the growth in sedentism resulting from agriculture, that these are mutable can be witnessed by the fact of national differences in income inequalities – or the successes of the feminist and suffrage movements in various areas – across the modern world. Still, post-agriculture disparities appear early in the record, for example in the behaviour of the living – evinced through the building of monumental structures, or nutritional deficiencies via skeletal remains – and the treatment of the dead – from differences in grave artifacts alongside remains. (Price and Bar-Yosef, 2011: S167-S169; Diamond, 1987: Kiple, 2007: 62-63)

The core corollary to Diamond’s position – affirming some views that had been expressed through the 20^th century but had become especially salient in the 1960s – is that hunter-gatherer societies were indeed the ‘original affluent society.’ That he justifies this partly by extrapolating backwards from modern hunter-gatherers (who thus never made the switch) is cause for concern, as a hypothetical difference between their culture and an ancestor’s sibling-cultures could itself explain why they did not follow the majority. Kaplan expertly illustrates how evidence has in the past been selectively accommodated to suggest that such people are generally of a disposition “more concerned with games of chance than with chances of game,” and in doing so either quells or demolishes various conclusions. Estimates of foragers’ hours of leisure, for example, are somewhat diminished when one is careful demarcating what constitutes ‘work’ and ‘leisure,’ highlighting how the latter can often be more strenuous than the former. He also manages to tear up the “somewhat rosy picture” of their “well-balanced diet.” Just as other commentators have decried early agriculturists’ protein insufficiency, he points to – for example – the !Kung tribe’s lack of a reliable source of carbohydrates or animal fat. There were no doubt varying degrees of nutritional wealth between different hunter-gatherer groupings, but Kaplan shows us how careful one needs to be in linking approaches to subsistence. (Sahlins, 1972; Kaplan, 2000: 302, 305, 309-310, 312-313)

Cochran and Harpending (2010: ix, 14, 23, 65-66) are of the perspective that we cannot approach a macroscopic understanding of the changes in human society between (or beyond) hunting and gathering and agriculture without taking biological evolution seriously. Previous anthropologists, they propose, were led to the misconception that human evolution had halted because they only attended to easily observed characteristics. There were many forces, however, continuing to shape human living in ways unique to the disparate populations across the globe, and they assert that agriculture was the most important of all of these: that by stimulating population’s growth, we accelerated our own evolution by increasing the frequency of favourable mutations, and highlight the perhaps counter-intuitive importance of such mutations to later generations: that it takes “only twice as long [for an advantageous allele] to spread through a population of 100 million as it does to spread through a population of 100 thousand.” Together these conclusions lend compelling support to the suggestion from the outset of this discussion, that even though agriculture had negative social and biological consequences our species had no chance to foresee, the provenance of these changes would continue to yield us further tools to combat them.

Is it reasonable to talk of the Neolithic ‘Revolution’ as a ‘mistake’ only when considering it in the short term? Does an encompassing view – both temporally and spatially – lead to a conclusion that the transition to agriculture was just “an inevitable step in the evolution of human society?” Given that humans have not even practiced sedentary agriculture for “one-tenth of one per-cent of their time on earth,” it is easy to imagine that unforseen advances still to accrue – in both our knowledge and accomplishments – may provide future chapters for this ongoing debate. (Price and Bar-Yosef, 2011: S168; Kiple, 2007: 3)

List Of References

Cochran, G. and Harpending, H., 2010. The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. New York: Basic Books.

Diamond, J., 1987. The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, Discover 52(5): 64-66 [online] Available at: [Accessed 17 September 2012].

Ewald, P., 2007. Paul Ewald asks, Can we domesticate germs? [video online] Available at: [Accessed 24 September 2012]

Gellner, E., 1990. Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hemenway, T., 2006.  Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron?,  Permaculture Activist [online] Available at: [Accessed 17 September 2012].

Kaplan, D., 2000. “The Darker Side of the ‘Original Affluent Society.’” Journal of Anthropological Research 56(3): 301-324. Available through: JSTOR [Accessed 16 September 2012].

Kiple, K.F., 2007. A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization. New York: Cambridge University Press.

McCloud, S., 1994. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperPerennial.

Price, T.D. and Bar-Yosef, O., 2011. “The Origins of Agriculture: New Data, New Ideas.” Current Anthropology 52(S4): S163-S174. Available through: JSTOR [Accessed 16 September 2012].

Rosling, H., 2012. Religions and Babies | Video on TED.com. [video online] Available at: [Accessed 24 September 2012].

Sahlins, M.D., 1972. “The Original Affluent Society.” In Stone Age Economics. Available at: [Accessed 22 September 2012].