5. History’s Biggest Fraud
FOR 2.5 MILLION YEARS HUMANS FED themselves by gathering plants
and hunting animals that lived and bred without their intervention. Homo
erectus, Homo ergaster and the Neanderthals plucked wild figs and hunted wild
sheep without deciding where fig trees would take root, in which meadow a herd
of sheep should graze, or which billy goat would inseminate which nanny goat.
Homo sapiens spread from East Africa to the Middle East, to Europe and Asia,
and finally to Australia and America – but everywhere they went, Sapiens too
continued to live by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals. Why do
anything else when your lifestyle feeds you amply and supports a rich world of
social structures, religious beliefs and political dynamics?
All this changed about 10,000 years ago, when Sapiens began to devote
almost all their time and effort to manipulating the lives of a few animal and
plant species. From sunrise to sunset humans sowed seeds, watered plants,
plucked weeds from the ground and led sheep to prime pastures. This work, they
thought, would provide them with more fruit, grain and meat. It was a revolution
in the way humans lived – the Agricultural Revolution.
The transition to agriculture began around 9500–8500 BC in the hill country
of south-eastern Turkey, western Iran, and the Levant. It began slowly and in a
restricted geographical area. Wheat and goats were domesticated by
approximately 9000 BC; peas and lentils around 8000 BC; olive trees by 5000
BC; horses by 4000 BC; and grapevines in 3500 BC. Some animals and plants,
such as camels and cashew nuts, were domesticated even later, but by 3500 BC
the main wave of domestication was over. Even today, with all our advanced
technologies, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come
from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and
3500 BC – wheat, rice, maize (called ‘corn’ in the US), potatoes, millet and
barley. No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000
years. If our minds are those of hunter-gatherers, our cuisine is that of ancient
farmers.
Scholars once believed that agriculture spread from a single Middle Eastern
point of origin to the four corners of the world. Today, scholars agree that
agriculture sprang up in other parts of the world not by the action of Middle
Eastern farmers exporting their revolution but entirely independently. People in
Central America domesticated maize and beans without knowing anything about
wheat and pea cultivation in the Middle East. South Americans learned how to
raise potatoes and llamas, unaware of what was going on in either Mexico or the
Levant. Chinas first revolutionaries domesticated rice, millet and pigs. North
America’s first gardeners were those who got tired of combing the undergrowth
for edible gourds and decided to cultivate pumpkins. New Guineans tamed sugar
cane and bananas, while the first West African farmers made African millet,
African rice, sorghum and wheat conform to their needs.
From these initial focal
points, agriculture spread far and wide. By the first century AD the vast majority
of people throughout most of the world were agriculturists.
Why did agricultural revolutions erupt in the Middle East, China and Central
America but not in Australia, Alaska or South Africa? The reason is simple:
most species of plants and animals can’t be domesticated. Sapiens could dig up
delicious truffles and hunt down woolly mammoths, but domesticating either
species was out of the question. The fungi were far too elusive, the giant beasts
too ferocious. Of the thousands of species that our ancestors hunted and
gathered, only a few were suitable candidates for farming and herding. Those
few species lived in particular places, and those are the places where agricultural
revolutions occurred.
Scholars once proclaimed that the agricultural revolution was a great leap
forward for humanity. They told a tale of progress fuelled by human brain
power. Evolution gradually produced ever more intelligent people. Eventually,
people were so smart that they were able to decipher nature’s secrets, enabling
them to tame sheep and cultivate wheat. As soon as this happened, they
cheerfully abandoned the gruelling, dangerous, and often spartan life of huntergatherers,
settling down to enjoy the pleasant, satiated life of farmers.
Map 2. Locations and dates of agricultural revolutions. The data is
contentious, and the map is constantly being redrawn to incorporate the
latest archaeological discoveries.1
That tale is a fantasy. There is no evidence that people became more
intelligent with time. Foragers knew the secrets of nature long before the
Agricultural Revolution, since their survival depended on an intimate knowledge
of the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered. Rather than heralding a
new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives
generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Huntergatherers
spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in
danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged
the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not
translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population
explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the
average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was
history’s biggest fraud.2
Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits
were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants
domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.
Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of
wheat.
Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many,
confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short
millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary
criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most
successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of
North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can
today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any
other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of
the globes surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn
from insignificant to ubiquitous?
Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had
been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000
years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat.
Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing
little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy.
Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens
broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water and
nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding
under the scorching sun. Wheat got sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for
worms and blight. Wheat was defenceless against other organisms that liked to
eat it, from rabbits to locust swarms, so the farmers had to guard and protect it.
Wheat was thirsty, so humans lugged water from springs and streams to water it.
Its hunger even impelled Sapiens to collect animal faeces to nourish the ground
in which wheat grew.
The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to
climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and
carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price.
Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought
about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias.
Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were
forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed
their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word
‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin domus, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one
living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.
How did wheat convince Homo sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a
more miserable existence? What did it offer in return? It did not offer a better
diet. Remember, humans are omnivorous apes who thrive on a wide variety of
foods.
Grains made up only a small fraction of the human diet before the
Agricultural Revolution. A diet based on cereals is poor in minerals and
vitamins, hard to digest, and really bad for your teeth and gums.
Wheat did not give people economic security. The life of a peasant is less
secure than that of a hunter-gatherer. Foragers relied on dozens of species to
survive, and could therefore weather difficult years even without stocks of
preserved food. If the availability of one species was reduced, they could gather
and hunt more of other species. Farming societies have, until very recently,
relied for the great bulk of their calorie intake on a small variety of domesticated
plants. In many areas, they relied on just a single staple, such as wheat, potatoes
or rice. If the rains failed or clouds of locusts arrived or if a fungus learned how
to infect that staple species, peasants died by the thousands and millions.
Nor could wheat offer security against human violence. The early farmers
were at least as violent as their forager ancestors, if not more so. Farmers had
more possessions and needed land for planting. The loss of pasture land to
raiding neighbours could mean the difference between subsistence and
starvation, so there was much less room for compromise. When a foraging band
was hard-pressed by a stronger rival, it could usually move on. It was difficult
and dangerous, but it was feasible. When a strong enemy threatened an
agricultural village, retreat meant giving up fields, houses and granaries. In many
cases, this doomed the refugees to starvation. Farmers, therefore, tended to stay
put and fight to the bitter end.
12. Tribal warfare in New Guinea between two farming communities
(1960). Such scenes were probably widespread in the thousands of years
following the Agricultural Revolution.
Many anthropological and archaeological studies indicate that in simple
agricultural societies with no political frameworks beyond village and tribe,
human violence was responsible for about 15 per cent of deaths, including 25 per
cent of male deaths. In contemporary New Guinea, violence accounts for 30 per
cent of male deaths in one agricultural tribal society, the Dani, and 35 per cent in
another, the Enga. In Ecuador, perhaps 50 per cent of adult Waoranis meet a
violent death at the hands of another human!3 In time, human violence was
brought under control through the development of larger social frameworks –
cities, kingdoms and states. But it took thousands of years to build such huge and
effective political structures.
Village life certainly brought the first farmers some immediate benefits, such
as better protection against wild animals, rain and cold. Yet for the average
person, the disadvantages probably outweighed the advantages. This is hard for
people in today’s prosperous societies to appreciate. Since we enjoy affluence
and security, and since our affluence and security are built on foundations laid
by the Agricultural Revolution, we assume that the Agricultural Revolution was
a wonderful improvement. Yet it is wrong to judge thousands of years of history
from the perspective of today. A much more representative viewpoint is that of a
three-year-old girl dying from malnutrition in first-century China because her
father’s crops have failed. Would she say ‘I am dying from malnutrition, but in
2,000 years, people will have plenty to eat and live in big air-conditioned houses,
so my suffering is a worthwhile sacrifice’?
What then did wheat offer agriculturists, including that malnourished
Chinese girl? It offered nothing for people as individuals. Yet it did bestow
something on Homo sapiens as a species. Cultivating wheat provided much more
food per unit of territory, and thereby enabled Homo sapiens to multiply
exponentially. Around 13,000 BC, when people fed themselves by gathering
wild plants and hunting wild animals, the area around the oasis of Jericho, in
Palestine, could support at most one roaming band of about a hundred relatively
healthy and well-nourished people. Around 8500 BC, when wild plants gave
way to wheat fields, the oasis supported a large but cramped village of 1,000
people, who suffered far more from disease and malnourishment.
The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of
DNA helixes.
Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by
the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees,
so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of
its DNA. If no more DNA copies remain, the species is extinct, just as a
company without money is bankrupt. If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is
a success, and the species flourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are
always better than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural
Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.
Yet why should individuals care about this evolutionary calculus? Why
would any sane person lower his or her standard of living just to multiply the
number of copies of the Homo sapiens genome? Nobody agreed to this deal: the
Agricultural Revolution was a trap.
The Luxury Trap
The rise of farming was a very gradual affair spread over centuries and
millennia. A band of Homo sapiens gathering mushrooms and nuts and hunting
deer and rabbit did not all of a sudden settle in a permanent village, ploughing
fields, sowing wheat and carrying water from the river. The change proceeded
by stages, each of which involved just a small alteration in daily life.
Homo sapiens reached the Middle East around 70,000 years ago. For the
next 50,000 years our ancestors flourished there without agriculture. The natural
resources of the area were enough to support its human population. In times of
plenty people had a few more children, and in times of need a few less. Humans,
like many mammals, have hormonal and genetic mechanisms that help control
procreation. In good times females reach puberty earlier, and their chances of
getting pregnant are a bit higher. In bad times puberty is late and fertility
decreases.
To these natural population controls were added cultural mechanisms. Babies
and small children, who move slowly and demand much attention, were a burden
on nomadic foragers. People tried to space their children three to four years
apart. Women did so by nursing their children around the clock and until a late
age (around-the-clock suckling significantly decreases the chances of getting
pregnant).
Other methods included full or partial sexual abstinence (backed
perhaps by cultural taboos), abortions and occasionally infanticide.4
During these long millennia people occasionally ate wheat grain, but this was
a marginal part of their diet. About 18,000 years ago, the last ice age gave way
to a period of global warming. As temperatures rose, so did rainfall. The new
climate was ideal for Middle Eastern wheat and other cereals, which multiplied
and spread. People began eating more wheat, and in exchange they inadvertently
spread its growth. Since it was impossible to eat wild grains without first
winnowing, grinding and cooking them, people who gathered these grains
carried them back to their temporary campsites for processing. Wheat grains are
small and numerous, so some of them inevitably fell on the way to the campsite
and were lost. Over time, more and more wheat grew along favourite human
trails and near campsites.
When humans burned down forests and thickets, this also helped wheat. Fire
cleared away trees and shrubs, allowing wheat and other grasses to monopolise
the sunlight, water and nutrients. Where wheat became particularly abundant,
and game and other food sources were also plentiful, human bands could
gradually give up their nomadic lifestyle and settle down in seasonal and even
permanent camps.
At first they might have camped for four weeks during the harvest. A
generation later, as wheat plants multiplied and spread, the harvest camp might
have lasted for five weeks, then six, and finally it became a permanent village.
Evidence of such settlements has been discovered throughout the Middle East,
particularly in the Levant, where the Natufian culture flourished from 12,500 BC
to 9500 BC. The Natufians were hunter-gatherers who subsisted on dozens of
wild species, but they lived in permanent villages and devoted much of their
time to the intensive gathering and processing of wild cereals. They built stone
houses and granaries.
They stored grain for times of need. They invented new
tools such as stone scythes for harvesting wild wheat, and stone pestles and
mortars to grind it.
In the years following 9500 BC, the descendants of the Natufians continued
to gather and process cereals, but they also began to cultivate them in more and
more elaborate ways. When gathering wild grains, they took care to lay aside
part of the harvest to sow the fields next season. They discovered that they could
achieve much better results by sowing the grains deep in the ground rather than
haphazardly scattering them on the surface. So they began to hoe and plough.
Gradually they also started to weed the fields, to guard them against parasites,
and to water and fertilise them. As more effort was directed towards cereal
cultivation, there was less time to gather and hunt wild species. The foragers
became farmers.
No single step separated the woman gathering wild wheat from the woman
farming domesticated wheat, so it’s hard to say exactly when the decisive
transition to agriculture took place. But, by 8500 BC, the Middle East was
peppered with permanent villages such as Jericho, whose inhabitants spent most
of their time cultivating a few domesticated species.
With the move to permanent villages and the increase in food supply, the
population began to grow. Giving up the nomadic lifestyle enabled women to
have a child every year. Babies were weaned at an earlier age – they could be
fed on porridge and gruel. The extra hands were sorely needed in the fields. But
the extra mouths quickly wiped out the food surpluses, so even more fields had
to be planted. As people began living in disease-ridden settlements, as children
fed more on cereals and less on mother’s milk, and as each child competed for
his or her porridge with more and more siblings, child mortality soared. In most
agricultural societies at least one out of every three children died before reaching
twenty.5 Yet the increase in births still outpaced the increase in deaths; humans
kept having larger numbers of children.
With time, the ‘wheat bargain’ became more and more burdensome.
Children died in droves, and adults ate bread by the sweat of their brows. The
average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person
in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC. But nobody realised what was happening.
Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only
small improvements here and there in the way things were done. Paradoxically, a
series of ‘improvements’, each of which was meant to make life easier, added up
to a millstone around the necks of these farmers.
Why did people make such a fateful miscalculation? For the same reason that
people throughout history have miscalculated. People were unable to fathom the
full consequences of their decisions. Whenever they decided to do a bit of extra
work – say, to hoe the fields instead of scattering seeds on the surface – people
thought, ‘Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful!
We won’t have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go
to sleep hungry.’
It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better
life. That was the plan.
The first part of the plan went smoothly. People indeed worked harder. But
people did not foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that
the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children. Neither did the
early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less
breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements
would be hotbeds for infectious diseases. They did not foresee that by increasing
their dependence on a single source of food, they were actually exposing
themselves even more to the depredations of drought. Nor did the farmers
foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and
enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty.
Then why didn’t humans abandon farming when the plan backfired? Partly
because it took generations for the small changes to accumulate and transform
society and, by then, nobody remembered that they had ever lived differently.
And partly because population growth burned humanity’s boats. If the adoption
of ploughing increased a village’s population from a hundred to no, which ten
people would have volunteered to starve so that the others could go back to the
good old times? There was no going back. The trap snapped shut.
The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last
time. It happens to us today. How many young college graduates have taken
demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn
money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they
are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages,
children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per
family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and
expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up
roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.
One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and
to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it
for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they
can’t live without it. Let’s take another familiar example from our own time.
Over the last few decades, we have invented countless time-saving devices that
are supposed to make life more relaxed – washing machines, vacuum cleaners,
dishwashers, telephones, mobile phones, computers, email. Previously it took a
lot of work to write a letter, address and stamp an envelope, and take it to the
mailbox. It took days or weeks, maybe even months, to get a reply. Nowadays I
can dash off an email, send it halfway around the globe, and (if my addressee is
online) receive a reply a minute later. I’ve saved all that trouble and time, but do
I live a more relaxed life?
Sadly not. Back in the snail-mail era, people usually only wrote letters when
they had something important to relate. Rather than writing the first thing that
came into their heads, they considered carefully what they wanted to say and
how to phrase it. They expected to receive a similarly considered answer. Most
people wrote and received no more than a handful of letters a month and seldom
felt compelled to reply immediately. Today I receive dozens of emails each day,
all from people who expect a prompt reply. We thought we were saving time;
instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made
our days more anxious and agitated.
Here and there a Luddite holdout refuses to open an email account, just as
thousands of years ago some human bands refused to take up farming and so
escaped the luxury trap. But the Agricultural Revolution didn’t need every band
in a given region to join up. It only took one. Once one band settled down and
started tilling, whether in the Middle East or Central America, agriculture was
irresistible. Since farming created the conditions for swift demographic growth,
farmers could usually overcome foragers by sheer weight of numbers. The
foragers could either run away, abandoning their hunting grounds to field and
pasture, or take up the ploughshare themselves. Either way, the old life was
doomed.
The story of the luxury trap carries with it an important lesson. Humanity’s
search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the
world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted. Nobody plotted the Agricultural
Revolution or sought human dependence on cereal cultivation. A series of trivial
decisions aimed mostly at filling a few stomachs and gaining a little security had
the cumulative effect of forcing ancient foragers to spend their days carrying
water buckets under a scorching sun.
