WAS THE INVENTION OF AGRICULTURE A BAD THING?

WAS THE INVENTION OF AGRICULTURE A BAD THING? Annalisa commented here about a book she was assigned in high school. ISHMAEL, by Daniel Quinn, deplores the transformation of hunter-gatherer societies by the invention of agriculture. Quinn deplores what he calls Totalitarian Agriculture, and calls for a drastic decrease in world population, as discussed here. The Economist article on hunter-gatherers that I posted on yesterday quotes Jared Diamond, the author of GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL, as calling agriculture, “‘the worst mistake in the history of the human race.'” The Economist article is a wonderful discussion of the consequences of the invention of agriculture about 12,000 years ago. Human height is thought to have decreased by about six inches at first, but agriculture permits a population density of about 100 times the population density for hunter-gathering. (It is this increase in population that the New Tribalists object to). The article concludes with a discussion of whether hunter-gatherers were noble savages. Some recent anthropologists don’t think they were.