The Fraud of Agriculture
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 hunter-gatherers, settling down to enjoy the pleasant, satiated life of farmers.
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 di
Notes:
Folksonomies: human evolution agriculture tool use
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Poverty (0.959032): dbpedia_resource
Human (0.944178): dbpedia_resource
Food security (0.818556): dbpedia_resource
Sustainable agriculture (0.784778): dbpedia_resource
Agriculture in China (0.737980): dbpedia_resource
World population (0.626117): dbpedia_resource
Mao Zedong (0.612133): dbpedia_resource
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind