From: gts (gts_2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 12:45:17 MDT
"The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race"
http://www.agron.iastate.edu/courses/agron342/diamondmistake.html
This is an excellent article by Jared Diamond that appeared in Discovery
Magazine in 5/87. According to Diamond, agriculture is the worst mistake in
the history of the human race.
Someone here (Damien S., I think) wrote in a related thread that Diamond
disagrees with my view that it was for nutritional reasons that agriculture
led to poor health; that Diamond believes instead that the poor health of
early farmers was a result of increased infectious disease caused by
over-crowding and by living with animals. However from this article it would
appear that such is not Diamond's view.
Diamond acknowledges that the pre-agricultural diet was a healthier diet,
and lists variations on this theme as the first and second of three reasons
for the poor health of early farmers. The third of his three reasons is
indeed increased disease from over-crowding, but he adds parenthetically
that arguments of archeologists who claim this as the only reason are really
just chicken-and-egg arguments, because "crowding encourages agriculture and
vice versa."
Excerpt from the article:
"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 farmers 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 appearance
of large cities."
-gts
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