Description
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover Magazine, May 1987, pp. 64-66.
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
By Jared Diamond
University of California at Los Angeles Medical School
To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the
universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God
but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human
history 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 ways 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 strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. 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. Just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and
material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We
get our energy 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. It’s a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. 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.
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. The agricultural revolution spread until today it’s nearly universal and few tribes of
hunter-gatherers survive.
From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask “Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors
adopt agriculture?” is silly. 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 the 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 advantages of agriculture?
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. 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. 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, it’s 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 recently, archaeologists
had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here’s one example of
an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world,
several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It
turns out that these people have plenty 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
hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes
by adopting agriculture, replied, “Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?”
While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets
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of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the
Bushmen’s average daily food intake (during a month 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. It’s 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 1840s.
So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren’t nasty and brutish, even though farmes have pushed them into
some of the world’s worst real estate. But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with farming
societies for thousands of years don’t tell us about conditions before the agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is
really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from gathering
to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those
of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps.
How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view?
That question has become answerable only in recent years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of
paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.
In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to study as a pathologist today. For
example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts found well preserved mummies whose medical conditions at time of death
could be determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry caves in Nevada
remain sufficiently well preserved to be examined for hookworm and other parasites.
Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit a surprising number of deductions. To
begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner’s 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 calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different
ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by
anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.
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. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had
reached a low of only 5′ 3” for men, 5′ for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but
modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.
Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio
river valleys. At Dickson 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 Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University
of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers
who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a
fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in
bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably
reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. “Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six
years,” says Armelagos, “but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional
stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive.”
The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by
choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. “I don’t think most hunger-gatherers farmed
until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity,” says Mark Cohen of the State
University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology
at the Origins of Agriculture. “When I first started making that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me.
Now it’s become a respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate.”
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There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers
enjoyed a varied diet, while early fanners obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers
gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition, (today just three high-carbohydrate plants — wheat, rice, and corn -provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino
acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if
one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many
of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease.
(Some archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-andegg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn’t take hold when populations
were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of
farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearnce of large cities.
Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep
class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd
of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of
social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite
set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae c. 1500 B. C. suggest that royals enjoyed
a better diet than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average,
one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A. D. 1000, the elite were distinguished
not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.
Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people in rich countries like the U. S., it
sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an elite, dependent on oil and minerals
that must often be imported from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a
peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?
Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their babies during
a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more
frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts — with consequent drains on their health. Among the
Chilean mummies for example, more women than men had bone lesions from infectious disease.
Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New Guinea farming communities today I often
see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field
trip there studying birds, I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp. The
heaviest item was a 110-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned to a team of four men to shoulder
together. When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, while one small woman
weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.
As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern huntergatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to
me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to. While postagricultural technological advances did make new art forms possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings
and sculptures were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and were still being produced as recently
as the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some Eskimos and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.
Thus with the advent of agriculture and elite became better off, but most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing
the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it
despite its pitfalls.
One answer boils down to the adage “Might makes right.” Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with
a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over on person per ten square miles, while
farmers average 100 times that.) Partly, this is because a field planted entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more
mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it’s because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their
children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it’s old
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enough to keep up with the adults. Because farm women don’t have that burden, they can and often do bear a child every
two years.
As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding
more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the
former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until
population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands
that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It’s
not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all
areas except the ones farmers didn’t want.
At this point it’s instructive to recall the common complaint that archaeology is a luxury, concerned with the remote past,
and offering no lessons for the present. Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at
which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase
food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.
Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we’re still
struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that
an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He
might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If
the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as
hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m.
we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread
to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture’s glittering
facade, and that have so far eluded us?
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Oldest Known Bread Crumbs Discovered – SAPIENS
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Following a New Trail of Crumbs to
Agriculture?s Origins
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ANTH 100
Exam 2: Biological & Archaeology
This exam is worth 25% of your course grade. Due before or on: Tuesday February 15
Late uploads will lose 1 point for each day late. If your exam is late, email me an explanation immediately.
How to Write Your Exam Answers:
Your two goals are to prove that you: 1) Read all the required readings & watched the lectures, and?
2) Understand the ideas & concepts covered in this course.
Goal 1: prove you watched & read
To prove to me that you watched the lecture videos and read the textbook & articles you will need to put information
from those sources into your exam answers. If you don?t use and cite those sources, then I will assume you didn?t watch
or read them. The more details and information you have from your sources, the more thoroughly it shows you read and
watched them. All of your answers should have multiple citations from the sources you used, not just one per source.
Citation Instructions:
A citation shows me where you got the information. When you mention any specific facts and ideas that you learned
during this class, you need to cite where that information came from:
Textbook citation: (author?s last name, page #) ebook page # start points are listed on the right side
Article citation: (author?s last name, page #)
Lecture citation: (Wild, week #, specific lecture title)
other videos I post for the class: (video: name of the video, week module #)
If there are ideas you want to use from our class discussions: (class discussion: name, week module #)
Put the citation at the end of the first sentence that has information from that source. Then put a new citation when you
switch to another page or a new source; and when you start a new paragraph. Do not wait until the end of the paragraph to
put the citations, you need to cite the source when you start using it.
Examples of where to put citations:
Anthropology studies how humans adapt biologically and culturally to change (Kottak, p.5). It proposes hypothesis that
can be tested, and explanations that are supported by evidence (Wild, w1, Anthropology). It provides explanations that
are both humanistic and scientific (Kottak, p.14). Anthropology research can help promote important social policies to
protect people or promote social change based on their cross-cultural perspective (Davis, p.3; and Kottak p.13). Some
examples of this can be seen in the social changes that have taken place in the United States recently.
Sources: use only assigned class materials, no outside or online sources are allowed. You do not need a works
cited/references/bibliography section at the end of your exam, you just need correct citations.
Goal 2: prove you understand
There is not a specific length requirement for these exams, but most good thorough answers are organized into a few
paragraphs and are at about a page long; and include multiple citations from each relevant source. To prove that you
understand the class material well, all of your answers must be in your own words. Copying and pasting the authors?
words doesn?t show you understand; so that is why you are not allowed to use any quotes.
Review this website about the difference between quotes and paraphrasing: https://plagiarism.iu.edu/index.html
Plagiarism: Copying someone else?s words and presenting them as your own can cause you to fail the assignment.
Copying ideas and writing from the exams of other students, or any online sources (e.g. Wikipedia) is cheating and
plagiarism will cause you to fail. The exam is about our class content not your Googling skills.
Review this website to understand what plagiarism is: https://www.plagiarism.org/audience/students
I check for plagiarism, and Canvas uses a software program to check your exam for evidence of plagiarism.
You can discuss your ideas with other students, but never share your written essay answers with other students (in this
class, or with students next quarter) because that can get you caught up in plagiarism cases.
Read the Green River information about Academic Honesty: https://libguides.greenriver.edu/academic-honesty
Formatting and uploading your exam:
Put your name, Exam 1, and date at the top of the first page; single space, 1 inch margins, 12 point font. Save your
exams in Word compatible .doc or .docx format (do not upload as pdf or ?.pages? file). When you save the file, use your
name for the filename, last name first, with ?E2? for ?Exam 2?. For example, my file would be named: WildKylebE2.doc
Upload your exam as one complete doc file to Canvas using the Exam 1 link. Only submit the final version, no changes
are allowed after you submit. Email me immediately if any problems occur with your upload.
EXAM 2 QUESTIONS
Read the instructions on the previous page thoroughly; if you don?t follow the instructions then you may fail.
Make sure each of your answers meets both of the two exam goals from the previous page.
To answer each question fully and meet the first exam goal, each answer will need to combine information from
my lecture, the textbook, and 1 or 2 articles; that is a minimum of 3 to 4 sources for each answer.
==============================================================================================
You are required to answer this first question, but your answer is not graded.
0) How this exam is better than the first one.
Based on my comments on your first graded exam, tell me how you improved this exam. Explain how you have
fixed specific problems or issues that I mentioned on your first exam. If you do not answer this question first
and thoroughly, then I will assume that you are not interested in improving your grade.
————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
QUESTIONS: Turn in only 4 answers from these 6 questions. I won?t grade extra answers.
It is your responsibility to work on your exam every week this quarter as we cover the topics in class.
Do not procrastinate on starting this exam. You need to answer at least one or two exam questions each week.
You should be able to answer all of these questions, but you will only turn in your 4 best answers.
Do not copy the questions on your exam; but you do need to clearly number and title each answer.
1) chimpanzees
First, describe what you learned about chimpanzees: their habitat, diet, and social lives. Then explain the idea
that some of their behaviors might qualify as culture. You?ll need to define ?culture? for non-human primates,
and choose at least 2 different examples of chimpanzee behaviors that might qualify as culture; be sure to
explain why both of the examples you chose might meet the criteria to be called cultural behaviors.
2) hominin bipedalism
Use the 9 steps of evolution to explain how early hominins evolved to become bipedal. Explain what the
relevant selection pressures were, the benefits of bipedalism in this setting, and the major skeletal changes
needed to make a quadrupedal ape into a bipedal hominin.
Then explain what evidence proves that Australopithecus afarensis was bipedal, and what we know about their
lives: things like habitat, diet, social lives, and intelligence.
3) the genus Homo
Using the four main species of the genus Homo that we focused on in lecture, describe what you think are the
most important cultural behaviors of each of these species. Be sure you explain what is new about the behaviors
of each species that makes it different from the species that came before it. For each species you will want to
describe the dates and locations they existed, then clearly explain their behaviors, explain what the evidence we
have of these behaviors, and why those behaviors are evidence of new cultural traditions.
* remember to write and format scientific names correctly in this answer
4) foraging
Explain what you have learned about foragers and their hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Keeping in mind the old
assumption that the forager lifestyle must have always been extremely difficult and harsh, explain what the
anthropological evidence shows us about the reality of forager life. Discuss things like diet, workload, and
social life for foragers using examples from the lecture and readings. Relative to the agricultural lifestyle that
came later, explain what you think were the main benefits or costs the foraging lifestyle?
5) farming
Explain what you have learned about early farmers ~10,000 years ago and their new agricultural lifestyle.
Keeping in mind the old assumption that the farming life must have always been much better than the foraging
life, explain what the anthropological evidence shows us about the reality of the transition to early agriculture.
Discuss things like diet, workload, and social life for farmers using examples from the lecture and readings.
Offer an explanation for why some people decided to become farmers during this time period, considering the
potential costs and benefits.
6) state civilizations
Choose two examples of large nation-state civilizations from the readings that you found interesting. For both
societies, explain some ways that we can use archaeological evidence to discover what life was like in these
state societies. Explain how they differed from earlier foraging and simple agricultural societies. You can
describe some of the things that we know about each of the two state civilizations in terms of things like: food
production, buildings, population size, religion, internal class divisions, and trade or conflicts with other outside
groups (though you don?t have to know about all of these things for each specific civilization you choose).
Lectures:
1.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3broq2DoMc4
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7O87yET24E
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr1B6F6i2mo
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrTXhIXUySc
the book
https://myebooks.mheducation.com/bookshelf/ebooks
chapters 3 and 8
username: [email protected]
Passward: @Yousuf2022
The articles
Two articles sent as PDF
Purchase answer to see full
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