# Was the Agricultural Revolution a mistake? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 21, 2021, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740 "2021-11-21T22:54:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Jay\_Z](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Jay\_Z](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jay_Z)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2021, 8:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740/41 "2021-11-22T20:12:04Z")
> [@GreenWyvern](#): > > I think you’re greatly underestimating how plentiful birds, fish, and game were in many places in earlier times, and how much of hunting was a cooperative enterprise. I think you’re greatly underestimating the periodic population crashes experienced by hunter gatherers due to outeating their food supply. Because that’s what every animal is capable of doing. If a species can’t expand their numbers when food supply is abundant, they aren’t going to be able to survive when it isn’t. So the hunter gatherers would have been boom and bust, just like wolf packs or any other predator. Expand until your prey numbers decline, then you decline. Then the prey numbers bounce back, and the wolf pack or the human hunter gatherers bounce back. I suppose that’s okay from a species standpoint. From an individual standpoint, probably not so much fun to know that you’re likely to die of starvation during a bust cycle. Which again, is why ag was developed, to make food more predictable and less subject to the boom and bust cycle. I see no reason to believe that hunter gatherers lived in some state of Edenic permanent abundance, with no ability to outeat their environment, since every animal ever has that ability. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2021, 8:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740/42 "2021-11-22T20:42:17Z")
> [@Just\_Asking\_Questions](#): > > Without agriculture, we’d still be living in caves, or yurts and wearing animal skins. This is exactly the sort of utter [bullshit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit) that _The Dawn of Everything_ handily dispatches. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2021, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740/43 "2021-11-22T21:00:51Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > > [@puzzlegal](#): > > > > Farming seems to have spread across Europe, he tells me, at about the rate of one farm-width per generation. > > Could you explain this? Even if you put farming as far back at 15,000 years ago and use 25 years as a generation, that’s only 600 generations. That would imply a “farm width” is about 5 miles, unlikely until very recent times. I’m sure he was simplifying a bit. But a generation is more like 20 years than 25, and it’s not really one new farm per generation. His point was that there doesn’t seem to be a rapid adoption of farming anywhere, instead, it seems to have spread with the population that was already farmers. Whereas things like new pottery techniques, better horse collars, and other obviously desirable technologies often spread hundreds or thousands of miles in a generation. ---
**Author:** ![Dr\_Paprika](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr_paprika/32/3042_2.png) [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2021, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740/44 "2021-11-22T22:47:12Z")
Ha ha! I thought of quoting that but really only remembered the last bit. Come off it, Mr. Dent. You can’t lie in front of that bulldozer forever. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2021, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740/45 "2021-11-23T13:20:57Z")
> [@Jay\_Z](#): > > I think you’re greatly underestimating the periodic population crashes experienced by hunter gatherers due to outeating their food supply. Cite? Because I can point to at least 3 “hunter-gatherer” cultures that had no problem surviving for millennia without those kinds of cycles being evident i.e. persistent occupation, cultural continuity etc. It’s a fallacy to compare non-agricultural societies to predators, because they were _not_ simple predators. Predators don’t have the reasoning and technological capabilities for long-term food storage, for instance. Nor were H/Gs as dependent on singular prey animals as you seem to think. The archaeological records of the Near East, West Coast NA and Japan bear this out. > [@Jay\_Z](#): > > Which again, is why ag was developed, to make food more predictable and less subject to the boom and bust cycle. This is a nice Just-So story, but is not borne out by the archaeological evidence. We spent _thousands_ of years playing around with agriculture. If it was so self-evidently advantageous, we really would have had an Agricultural Revolution, but we didn’t. It was a very gradual process conducted for various reasons, most largely cultural- not survival-centered. ---
**Author:** ![Ulfreida](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ulfreida/32/8014_2.png) [@Ulfreida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulfreida)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2021, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740/46 "2021-11-23T14:19:11Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > I do not think it is accurate that human HGs had to spend most of their non-hunting time asleep due to lack of energy. I agree with all this but just wanted to add that men in particular tend to valorize (I hate this word but it is most appropriate here), HUNTING. But in reality, most activity was usually gathering. Which is a lot like agriculture: when the crop is ready, you go harvest it and prepare it properly for use or storage. If you have to live on animals you have to trap or catch, as in the Arctic for example, yes, your existence will be quite precarious. Nanook died of starvation not long after Nanook of the North was filmed. ---
**Author:** ![Martin\_Hyde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/47e85d/32.png) [@Martin\_Hyde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martin_Hyde)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2021, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740/47 "2021-11-23T14:33:15Z")
Right, one of the things stressed a lot in more modern scholarship is there wasn’t one day when Ur-Hakk the Hunter-Gatherer noticed he could plant seeds and growing crops, so now his entire society were settled agriculturalists. There were long stretches of time in which these societies engaged in proto-agricultural behaviors but didn’t become fully settled farmers. I think the importance of how HGs could modify the plant environment in their region even before deliberate planting is sometimes underestimated, they could destroy plants they didn’t like and essentially “garden” the ones they did, to reshape their environment in ways more beneficial to them. I think it is often underestimated the degree to which pre-modern Hunter-Gatherers sometimes modify their environment to improve their situation, they were not passive participants in the process. Also interesting about agriculture–it didn’t actually eliminate the possibility of boom and bust. It did generally increase the “carrying capacity” of a region, so what you sometimes had in settled agricultural societies is a population spike, but then something bad happens. War, drought etc and a few years of bad harvests stack. Suddenly that big population is hungry, and the agricultural system can’t produce enough yield to keep people alive. Mass die offs occur. Such mass die offs have been regular parts of agricultural societies. The last major one in the West not directly related to large scale wars were in the early 19th century–“the year without summer”, likely linked to a large volcanic eruption that caused a brief year of global cooling. It’s also interesting to note that there are multiple points throughout history in which agriculturalism found itself at a distinct disadvantage to other cultural forms. In the early Bronze age, around 2400 to 2100 BC, the Neo-Sumerian Empire was essentially overrun by peoples we know as the “Amorites”, who as best we can tell were semi-nomadic pastoralists, who instead of planting appeared to mostly travel around to exploit good grazing lands for their herds. Considered barbarians by the Sumerians (some Sumerian records indicate walls were constructed to keep the Amorites out), it is believed a period of prolonged drought that weakened the Sumerians eventually gave the Amorites a tactical advantage and they swooped in. One advantage of nomadic pastoralism is if things get rough in a specific area, you can move or attempt to move to better land. Settled agriculturalists lack that option. Several of the new states that formed after the ensuing collapse of the Neo-Sumerians were led by Amorite dynasties–including Babylon’s Hammurabi. History of course contains many tales of settled agriculturalists falling to non-agriculturalist outsiders–the Sea Peoples of the Early Bronze Age collapse, various waves of nomadic Steppe peoples who ravaged and conquered Europe and Asia (Huns, Magyars, Khazars, Tatars, Mongols et al.) ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2021, 3:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740/48 "2021-11-23T15:11:47Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > War, drought etc and a few years of bad harvests Don’t forget infectious diseases. Farmers, who lived in high population densities, were in close contact with large numbers of animals, and often relied on water sources contaminated with their and their animals’ sewage, were at much higher risk of infectious disease than hunter-gatherers. We think of how Eurasian diseases devastated the less agricultural peoples of the Americas, but that’s only because Eurasians were selectively bred for resistance, after all those plagues swept through their populations generations ago. Ancient Rome suffered a series of devastating plagues. So did many other agricultural communities that left recorded histories. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2021, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740/49 "2021-11-23T15:31:48Z")
> [@Ulfreida](#): > > If you have to live on animals you have to trap or catch, as in the Arctic for example, yes, your existence will be quite precarious. Note that one of the most sedentary, persistent and quite culturally complex H-G societies, the PNW Natives, like the Haida and Tlingit, largely relied on caught fish and sea mammals for their subsistence, same as the Arctic indigenes, and didn’t have this precarious existence. Of course people living in the most marginal lands (Arctic, Desert) are going to have a more precarious existence. But most H-Gs lived in very nice locales. Consider also the pre-agricultural phase of the Jomon culture in Japan. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2021, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740/50 "2021-11-23T15:44:03Z")
My sense from “Sapiens” is that quite a lot of it is Harari’s opinions, and they are not always especially well supported. I found myself, over and over again, struck by his tendency to argue from just asserting things he thought were true. I now use the book to hold my monitor up higher. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2021, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740/51 "2021-11-23T15:51:01Z")
I recommend a monitor arm. Soooo much nicer than stands. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2021, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740/52 "2021-11-23T17:25:10Z")
I haven’t read the book, so let me understand - is the premise that we’d be better off if we were still hunting and gathering and living in mobile tribes and other small groups? Does he give an explanation for how we could possibly have a technological society under that scenario? Or are we supposed to be better off living as primitives? What is the carrying capacity of Earth without modern arpgriculture? I’m guessing well under a billion people. Maybe a few hundred million. So we should be just one more species living to survive and not much more? ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2021, 6:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740/53 "2021-11-23T18:30:21Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > Note that one of the most sedentary, persistent and quite culturally complex H-G societies, the PNW Natives, like the Haida and Tlingit, largely relied on caught fish and sea mammals for their subsistence, same as the Arctic indigenes, and didn’t have this precarious existence So the fact that they were so in tune with nature is the reason that the megafauna of the PNW survived until Europeans showed up? Hey, wait a minute… > [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > I haven’t read the book, so let me understand - is the premise that we’d be better off if we were still hunting and gathering and living in mobile tribes and other small groups? No, not at all, I read the book and am not sure how anyone read it that way. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2021, 6:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740/54 "2021-11-23T18:37:59Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > So the fact that they were so in tune with nature Did I say _anything_ about “in tune with nature”? ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2021, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740/55 "2021-11-23T18:39:23Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > is the premise that we’d be better off if we were still hunting and gathering and living in mobile tribes and other small groups? No, that’s not the premise. And in fact that kind of false dichotomy is one of the things the book handily refutes. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2021, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740/56 "2021-11-23T18:58:36Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > So the fact that they were so in tune with nature is the reason that the megafauna of the PNW survived until Europeans showed up? Hey, wait a minute… Humans who first show up in an area don’t know how to live there yet, and are very likely to do damage. Cultures that survive in a given area for hundreds or thousands of years are very likely to succeed in doing that by learning to prevent or at least limit further damage. Drastic cultural changes combined with major movements of people have put most of the population of the planet into the position of ‘not having learned how to live here/with this technology yet.’ The scale of the population and of the technology mean that we don’t have hundreds or thousands of years to figure it out. Maybe we’ll pull it off; but that’s far from certain. (I have also not read the book; waiting for it to show up in my library system – actually it just did, as a new book in one library out of forty and not one near me. I could order it, but I’ll probably wait till later in the winter; I suspect there’ll be more than one copy in the system by then.) ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2021, 7:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740/57 "2021-11-23T19:56:00Z")
So for someone who hasn’t read the book, can you summarize what the world of today is supposed to look like without agriculture? Or was he arguing that it just would have been better if it was delayed for a while, or what? ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2021, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740/58 "2021-11-23T20:00:34Z")
They wasn’t talking about hypotheticals like that at all. They were investigating why states form, and why there’s this mistaken idea that there’s some inevitable ladder of progress, and also what mistaken ideas people have about what pre-agricultural societies were like. Also how the Enlightenment was actually partially a reaction to deeply philosophical, sophisticated Native criticism of colonialism. Ideas of “better” don’t enter into it at all. I think there’s a slight misunderstanding about what the book is about. It’s not a polemic about a better pre-agricultural world, or an indictment of agriculture, or anything like that. It’s just an examination of what people get wrong about what early societies were _actually_ like, what people get wrong about the evolution of complex societies, and the problems around using simple models of state formation. With lots and lots of real-world examples of very diverse cultures, drawn from the most up-to-date archaeology. Cities without social stratification, cities based around charisma not military force, societies rejecting slavery because their neighbours are slavers, people who viewed farming as a kind of playful thing, stuff like that. It was also a convincing argument for why I shouldn’t give up on anarchism as a valid political philosophy, but that was likely just me. ---
**Author:** ![GreenWyvern](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/greenwyvern/32/2834_2.png) [@GreenWyvern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreenWyvern)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2021, 8:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740/59 "2021-11-23T20:12:15Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > So for someone who hasn’t read the book By ‘the book’, do you mean Harari’s book, referred to in the OP, or Graeber & Wengrow’s book that has been mentioned several times in the thread? ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2021, 8:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740/60 "2021-11-23T20:14:09Z")
Shit, I was assuming he was talking about _Dawn_, not _Sapiens_, since he was talking to me. @Sam_Stone , ignore my post if you meant _Sapiens_, I was talking about _Dawn of Everything_. As for Sapiens - he lost me when he started talking about _H. sapiens_ vs _H. neanderthalis_ as though we were uniquely imaginative and that’s what won out over Neanderthals. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-agricultural-revolution-a-mistake/954740.md?page=4)