AGRICULTURE

The worst mistake in the history of the human race.



(1) What are the reasons that Diamond called agriculture the “worst mistake?”

The argument that Jared Diamond brings forward by stating that agriculture was the worst mistake in the history of the human race include many facts that he has presented. From biology, we learned that we did not create the Lord God, but we came in the development process along with millions of other species. Now, archeology has deprived us of another sacred belief - a fact that the history of mankind during the last million years has been a long history of progress. In particular, recent discoveries tell us that the emergence of agriculture, which is supposed to be a decisive step forward towards a better life, in many respects was a disaster from which we could not recover. Along with agriculture came social and sexual inequality, disease and despotism, poison our existence (Watts & Jonathan, 2007).

At the outset the evidence against this revisionist interpretation of the XX century Americans seems indisputable. We are almost in every respect a lot better than people who lived in the Middle Ages, which in turn is better than cavemen, who respectively were better than a monkey. If we think about our benefits, we have an abundance of different foods, the best tools and material things, we live much longer, and our life is much healthier than it has ever been in human history. Most of us are at risk of starvation and attacks by predators. We use energy oil and cars, and do not work ourselves hard. Do any neo-Luddites would have traded his life for the medieval peasant, a caveman or a monkey?

Perhaps, agriculture also contributed to gender inequality. Freed from the need to move children during a nomadic hikes and being forced to bear more children to work in the fields, women in agricultural societies became pregnant more frequently than in the communities of hunter-gatherers, with the result that they undermined their health (Watts & Jonathan, 2007).

In this sense, useful to recall the common complaint that archeology - is redundant, that it was in the distant past and teaches nothing contemporaries. Archaeologists studying the problem of agriculture reconstructed a crucial moment in history when they made the most important mistake in the history of mankind. Forced to choose between reducing the population and increase food production, they chose the latter and ultimately doomed themselves to famine, war and tyranny. Thus, with the beginning of agriculture only the elite had appeared to prosper, and the position of the majority of the population only worsened. Instead of swallowing the adherents of the thesis of progress that we chose agriculture because it has brought us good, we must ponder the question: How did we get in her trap, despite all its shortcomings?

(2) Why was agriculture found almost everywhere around the globe by 1000 years ago.

Most of our history we lived through hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and looking for wild ...