www.agron.iastate.edu/courses/agron342/diamondmistake.html
Discover Magazine, May 1987 Pages 64-66 Illustrations by Elliott Danfield To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy tau ght us that our earth isnt the center of the universe but merely one o f billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we werent specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other speci es. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human hi story over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture , supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many w ays a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence. At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will stri ke twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. Were better off in almo st every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it eas ier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tool s and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in hist ory. We get our ener gy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?
For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. Its a life that p hilosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. S ince no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10 ,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to do mesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread until today its nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive. From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask "Wh y did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries. Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing for t he first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the adv antages of agriculture? The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agr iculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken place over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and since it t akes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the B-minor Mass. While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, its hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until re cently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results ( surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Heres one exam ple of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen g roups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continu e to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have p lenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hou rs or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked wh y he hadnt emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replie d, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?" While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potat oes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunte r-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrie nts. In one study, the Bushmens average daily food intake (during a mo nth 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. Its 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 18 40s. So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers arent nasty and brutish, even though farmes have pushed them into some of the worlds worst real estate. But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbe d shoulders with farming societies for thousands of years dont tell us about conditions before the agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives o f primitive people improved when they switched from gathering to farmin g Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wil d plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric gar bage dumps. How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and the reby directly test the progressivist view? That question has become ans werable only in recent years, in part through the newly emerging techni ques of paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples. In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much materi al to study as a pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts found well preserved mummies whose medical conditions a t time of death could be determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry caves in Nevada remain suf ficiently well preserved to be examined for hookworm and other parasite s Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but th ey permit a surprising number of deductions. To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owners sex, weight, and approximate age. In the few cases where there are many skeletons, one can construct mortality tables like the ones life insurance companies use to calculate expected life span and risk of death at any given age. Paleopathologists can also calculat e growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recogni ze scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other dise ases. One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5 9" for men, 5 5" for women. Wit h the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B C had re ached a low of only 5 3" for men, 5 for women. By classical times hei ghts were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks ha ve still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors. Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeleto ns from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickso n Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A D 1150. Studies by George Ar melagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compa red to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a f ourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced bya bone conditio n called porotic...
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