Agriculture: Civilization's 'Great Mistake'

By Kirkpatrick Sale

From about 12,000 to about 8,000 years ago, agriculture became the established way of life for the great majority of the world's people--and when I say “way of life” I mean that in the fullest sense. Agriculture was not simply a way of getting food, satisfying one basic human need. Agriculture cemented in the human mind the psychology by which people understood their world: it was we who chose what seeds to plant and where, what forests to cut down, what weeds to pull, what fields to fire, what waters to divert, in short what species were to live and die, and when and how. Agriculture was a superb demonstration that humans could control nature (or believe they could); that humans could literally domesticate nature and place it under regular and systematic human will and design.

Hunting had certainly had its impact on local ecosystems, especially hunting to extinction as had happened all over the world in the preceding few millennia, but for the most part and the longest time it was no more harmful to nature as a whole than any other species' predation. Now, with deforestation, dams and irrigation, soil exhaustion, extensive settlements, and all that goes with agriculture, almost all natural systems were disrupted and degraded. We were declaring war not just on a species but a world.

That portentous attitude was surely behind the thinking that led to the next round of domestication: of fellow creatures. Like the planting and harvesting of grains, this seems to have begun in the Fertile Crescent, which had four of the easiest mammalian species to domesticate—goat, pig, sheep, and cow—out of the only 14 species that have ever allowed themselves to fall under human control. Whatever possessed humans to think of and carry through such a process is lost in the pre-historical mists, but we can assume that once they had fenced in wheat fields for convenient food (and protection from being eaten by other species) it was not that much of a leap to try to fence in animals (or at least to control herds) for convenient food. Thus the domestication of animals--"enslavement" might be a more appropriate word--joined that of plants.

Agriculture had numerous consequences, mostly deleterious, which is why a sober academic like Jared Diamond, a physiologist at the U.C.L.A. School of Medicine who has studied it extensively, could call agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”

Perhaps the first important consequence was an increase in population numbers and densities. Farming and herding allow a significantly higher yield per acre of land than hunting and foraging, and wheat and barley in particular are highly productive, so larger populations could be supported—100 times greater than hunting societies—and larger populations are what farmers always want anyway, given the laboriousness of their job. This was apparently achieved in most places by women giving birth to more children during their reproductive years, birth intervals being much shorter for farm families that can wean infants on to milk and gruel and not have to extend female lactation (and hence infertility) for years as hunting families must. In a very short period of time clan sites became villages, villages proliferated, and some of them grew into small, densely packed cities, of 1,000 (Jericho) and even 5,000 people (Catal Huyuk).

But think of what this means. Sedentary communities of more than 50 people are living as no one had ever lived before: they would need to create all sorts of new political, economic, cultural, and social institutions and policies to handle complexities at those scales. Gone the ancient rules of reciprocity, for no goat shepherd is going to give his hungry neighbors one of his animals for dinner, as was regularly done in hunting bands when the men came in with a catch, or he would soon be impoverished. Gone too the life of limited possessions imposed on mobile hunting societies, for now with a sedentary population, one could have all the possessions one could accumulate, from goats to grindstones and animals to acres, and the more the better.

Population accumulations and densities had other consequences. Diseases, many from the domesticated animal populations now living in close proximity to humans for the first time, had fertile territory in which to spread, and communicable “crowd diseases” flourished (measles, smallpox, and tuberculosis from cattle, for example, flu and pertussis from pigs, plus plague and cholera) that would have died out in the small populations of hunter-gatherers. It is little wonder that human life spans quite rapidly grew shorter—hunter-gatherer women on average reached the age of 40, men 50 or even 60, but agriculturalist longevity was in general 10 years shorter.

Another apparent effect of crowding was a decrease in body size, because when populations expanded to the limit of their food-growing, as farming settlements inevitably do, then, as the British Museum's Christopher Stringer explains, “humans therefore had to drop in either number or size, and evolved the latter course.” Average body height of the Sapiens hunters was about 6 feet, of the women maybe 5 feet 5 inches, but as early as 5,000 years ago the average height of agriculturalists was 5 feet 3 inches for men and 5 feet for women. Even more alarming was a decrease in brain size, of 8 to 10 percent, after the beginning of agriculture, perhaps as a result of the tediousness and repetitiveness of farming and herding as well as a response to the social overload of larger settlements, and possibly also because the continual concentration and information-processing of the hunter in the wild was no longer necessary.

Food surpluses proved another feature of agricultural societies because of the productivity of their concentrated fields, and this, coupled with better techniques for storage of grain and its protection from rot and rodents, allowed farmers in good harvest years to contribute their surplus grains to a communal grain supply. This in turn fed the development of two characteristics that were carried over from late-on hunting societies—division of labor and hierarchy—but now in just a few millennia came to have an increasingly decisive economic and social role in the life of agriculturalists.

Because of surpluses there could be full-time artisans and potters who would be supported from the communal granary, full-time shamans, full-time laborers for dams and irrigation ditches, full-time guards to protect the village from predators human and otherwise, full-time accountants to regulate the collection, storage, and distribution of grain—and full-time rulers, the high-status chieftains who would have had to try to bring order to such a complicated society and see that all these tasks were efficiently done. The hierarchy that had been resorted to in the hunter-gatherer world at times of stress now evolved into a full-blown stratified “class society.”

And here's the kicker: in the end, agriculture always failed. It was an environmental assault on the earth that was almost never sustainable for much more than a few centuries without disruption and devastation: in the long history of empires dependent on agriculture and irrigation (Babylonia, Sumeria, Assyria, Carthage, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Inca, Aztec) we may read the story over and over again, of the exhaustion and salinization of the land, the destruction of forests, the overgrazing of fields, the compaction of soils, the extinction of wild animals, the silting and salting of rivers, the alteration of climate, erosion, desertification—and, as agriculture and its attendant systems began to fail, the revolt of the underclasses, or the collapse of the imperial systems, or the invasion of outsiders, or often all three. Nature always ended up having her revenge: of all the places where agriculture started, only one, central China, remains a productive agricultural area today; the rest are deserts or jungles.

As the story of agriculture makes clear, the domination of the earth can come only at a price, and as we can tell today, the price may well be the despoliation of the earth and the destruction of human systems, perhaps the decimation of the species itself.