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?”

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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-and-egg 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.

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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.

The other night I had a discussion with a guy about technology. He was repeating the old tired lines that technological advancement is a net benefit. I told him that most technological advancement (or more accurately, increased societal complexity) are mainly a set of attempts to solve the problems brought about by the last set of increased complexity. My thesis was that eventually the society would fail when the cost of solving a problem became greater than the benefit it experienced.

Much of this thought came from “Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond. It’s an amazing book. The above article shows how agriculture gave rise to disease and eventually inequality (it’s hard to have a despot when everyone’s gathering food all the time).Complexity resulted in the concentration of power because of the allocation of scarcer and scarcer resources. When everyone gathered food from the land there was no need to have a concept of ownership. It was only when people began to farm that ownership was developed, an idea that is inherently exclusive and also often requires force to prevent the have-nots from making the haves into have-nots.

He also states that our civilization can never go back because we’ve forgotten all the survival skills necessary to live without agriculture and because there’s too many people for the land to naturally support.

But hey, at least we have the comforting knowledge that one day we WILL become a space-faring race which will make our lives better by … and we also have iPods too.