While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the B-minor Mass. ![]() Since crops can be stored, and since it takes 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. The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken place over the past few thousand years. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the advantages of agriculture? Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. The agricultural revolution spread until today it's nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive.įrom the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask "Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is silly. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. ![]() Since 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. It's a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?įor most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. We're better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence. ![]() In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image.
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