Humans Paid a High Price For the Transition to Farming
Today, humans on average enjoy more abundance, affluence, and security, than during any previous period in the history of our species. Because our prosperity is built upon foundations created during the Agricultural Revolution, particularly the transition to settled farming, it is easy to assume that the transition had been beneficial at the time. It was not.
Take our first major staple crop, wheat. It did not offer a better diet. We are an omnivorous species that evolved to thrive on the wide variety of food offered by the hunter gatherer lifestyle. Grains made up only a tiny fraction of our diet before we took up farming, but they soon came to form almost the whole of most humans’ caloric consumption. Also, during most of the period after we took up farming, the grains-based diet was poor in minerals and vitamins, was hard to digest, and because flour was not as finely ground and refined as today, it ground our ancestors’ teeth to nubs.
Indeed, the transition from a hunter gatherer diet to the grain based diet of farmers reduced both the average life expectancy and the physical heights of farmers compared to their hunter gatherer ancestors. Average height for men went from 5’10” during the hunter gathering period to 5’5″ after our ancestors took up farming, while women’s height decreased from 5’5″ to 5’1″. It took about 10,000 years – until late in the 20th century – for the average human height to return to what it had been before the Agricultural Revolution.
Farming was also risky. Hunter gatherers relied on dozens of species to survive, and if times got hard and one or more species grew scarce, they could eat more of other species that were still around. By contrast, farmers got most of their calories from a few staple crops, and sometimes from just a single crop, such as wheat, rice, or potatoes. If that crop failed, famine frequently followed, killing off thousands, or even millions, of farmers.
Farming also led to more violence. Because farmers relied for their survival on the crops planted in their fields, they had far more of an incentive to defend their territory than did hunter gatherers, who often could avoid violence from interlopers by moving on. Moving on and abandoning their fields often meant death from starvation for farmers, so conflicts involving settled farmers and interlopers led to greater violence than humans had ever experienced before.
To gauge the likely levels of violence in early farming communities, anthropologists studied primitive agricultural communities in New Guinea, and discovered than in some agricultural tribes, violence accounts for 35 percent of male deaths. It is even worse in some primitive agricultural tribes in South America, where 50 percent of all adults, of both sexes, meet a violent death at the hands of other humans.
In addition, farming eventually led to the subjugation of most farmers by emerging elites. Chiefs, priests, and warriors who formed an aristocratic caste, seized the surpluses produced from farming, and reduced the farmers to a caste of downtrodden peasants and serfs. That inequality and injustice was the foundation upon which civilization was built. While civilization was and is generally a good thing, it should not be forgotten that it was built upon the often unwilling, aching, and sometimes flogged, backs of the soil’s tillers. Those downtrodden farmers were the vast majority of mankind throughout most of human history.