Did Agriculture improve human quality of life?

[Original Poster]

In this thread I'll be addressing several myths about hunter-gatherers and the agricultural "revolution." The first myth is that farming means more calories and more calories mean each individual is fed better. This is related to the myth that early humans evolved into farmers to stave off starvation. In reality more calories means a greater carrying capacity. The population increases to the maximum this new limit can sustain, and the average number of calories each person takes in reaches the same equilibrium as the hunter-gatherers, simply on a larger scale. Furthermore, to assume hunter-gatherers began farming to stave off starvation is like saying someone will build themselves a life-boat while they're drowning. Farming requires more labor and time invested before an outcome can be reached and could not evolve out of necessity. The second myth is that farming societies have a lot more free time and hunter-gatherers spent nearly all their time looking for food. This led to art and more advanced cultures, the Parthenon, etc. The reality is that the segregation of labor leads to more work. In fact in some cases the average work week for a hunter-gatherer is less than 14 hours. The reason hunter-gatherer populations remained low was not because they were starving to death but because they simply didn't take more from their environment than it could replenish, and didn't breed more mouths than the environment could sustainably feed. While an elite class emerged and fared better than the common man, the average amount of leisure time dramatically decreased. Things like the Parthenon came to be because this new elite class could demand it and because the increased production of calories led to the division of labor, enabling a new class of laborer to engage in these endeavors, supported by the overworked, under-nourished farming class. Art existed long before farming, as scarification and face-painting reveals. A third myth is that disease and illness were more prevalent in hunter-gatherer societies and in general agricultural societies succumbed to illness and starvation less often. This has been assumed by paleontologists for years without any evidence, but paleopathologists (one who studies ancient diseases) have discovered that directly after the advent of agriculturalism enamel defects indicative of malnutrition increased 50% and degenerative spinal conditions increased, probably a result of hard physical labor. The transformation to agriculture had the immediate effect of dropping human life-expectancy from 26 to 19. Furthermore while hunter-gatherers had a varied diet, agriculturalists most prevalently depended on three starch-based crops and had a greater chance of suffering from nutritional deficiencies as well as greater risk of mass starvation due to crop failure. Finally, because of population density, diseases such as tuberculosis did not exist until farming. Hunter-gatherers lived too far spread. Another myth is that Hunter Gatherers had greater infant mortality rates. In fact infant mortality increased with the advent of farming, as did the number of pregnancies. This was because women were no longer nomadic and didn't have to wait until their child could walk before having another, also because diseases were more prevalent due to population density, and population fluctuations were more severe due to crop failure. The final myth I'll mention in the OP is that agriculture was an inevitable way of life. The reality is that agriculture leads to three advantages: increased calorie production, increased child birth because women no longer have to wait until their child can walk before bearing another and division of labor leading to a soldier class living off the food supply produced by the farming class. These combined to enable farming societies to support large war-machines, conquering and forcibly conforming all societies that had not developed the same system. Source: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

[Marvo]

Without it we wouldn't have technological advancements, so that you could look back and criticize it this day.

[Xaqaria]

I think a lot of your myths focus on the effects of agriculture on individuals instead of human society as a whole. The development of classes due to the distribution of labor is itself what allowed human society to develop higher technologies and create more lasting physical achievements. Even if the 'average' labor increased, farming allowed for some individuals to not be directly involved in food production which freed that portion of society to pursue other goals. Perhaps on an individual basis it may seem unfair for there to be a higher class that 'steals' the labor of the lower class for their own survival but that doesn't take in to account the engineering advancements that that higher class was able to achieve for society as a whole due to those conditions.

[Original Poster]

It's true that human civilization has led to many advancements but the main claim I am trying to rebuke is Hobbes claim that before civilization, life was "solitary, nasty, brutish and short." When it clearly wasn't. Compared to the agriculturalists that followed, hunter-gatherers had less illness and death, were better fed with better nutrition, there was more gender equality, and many other difference that made the original life style more advantageous. Farming won because it had a competitive advantage due to increased calorie production, but it did not actually improve human quality of life. You can argue it set the framework for later improvements such as modern medicine if you like, and I won't disagree. We have made some improvements but in modern society, even with our technologically advanced farming methods and with all these machines to do our chores, we still have way less leisure time than hunter-gatherers. And that's another important myth to dispel, people seem to think hunter-gatherers spent their whole lives starving, barely making it hand-to-mouth, which simply isn't true. Their food fluctuations were less severe than farmers because they didn't have to deal with crop failure, and they didn't suffer from the nutritional deficiencies of the farmers. Furthermore, they spent hours, even days, working on paintings, telling stories, dancing and celebrating, decorating their bodies and crafting new tools to perfection.

[Marvo]

The point of this thread is very dull.

[IndieAnthias]

Hobbes made ethnographic claims with absolutely no ethnographic evidence. This idea (that you're describing) has been fairly uncontroversial among anthropologists since Sahlins coined the term 'original affluent society" to describe h/g's, back in the 60s. It has certainly not taken hold in the general public, though. Life expectancy is almost always used as the main proxy for quality of life, and often times the only proxy. I disagree with this, and I think that other things like the mental health profiles of populations would paint a very different picture of our quality of life compared to h/g's (obviously modern h/g's lives have been greatly infringed upon, but the safe assumption is that they only did better in the past before they started being contacted). Modern life is a psychological minefield. Our social structure is too inconsistent to serve it's evolutionary function. One example of this is self-esteem: We compare ourselves to the best people we see anywhere, which for us is the best out of millions instead of the best out of dozens. This causes an endemic drop in self-esteem. Adaptive lag is a rather controversial subject but I'm convinced it exists and is pervasive based on above-mentioned mental health profiles.

[mcwillis]

Well, I can say that I will thoroughly enjoy my vegetable curry and rice tonight. Certainly far better than the local foliage I could personally gather and boil up to eat.

[nina]

What would become of us had we never developed agriculture?

[Marvo]

What would become of us had we never developed agriculture? Development of agriculture is indication of our intellect, really. With the evolutionary path we were taking at the time, reaching a point of intellect where we would develop agriculture was inevitable.

[Original Poster]

What would become of us had we never developed agriculture? We'd be living more sustainably, for one.

[Photolysis]

Did Agriculture improve human quality of life? Obviously yes. But if you disagree I guess you could always go back and live in a cave and enjoy a far more unstable and uncomfortable lifestyle. What would become of us had we never developed agriculture? There would be a far smaller global population and people would live in much smaller groups. Technology would be extremely limited. In short, society as we know it would not exist.

[Original Poster]

If you're going to toss around words like unstable and uncomfortable you'll have to back them up. Personally, I'm far happier in the woods with a few friends and a lake than anywhere else. Granted I like to bring modern equipment in like sleeping bags and lighters. I certainly love technology but that doesn't mean H/G lifestyles were nearly as bad as you're implying.

[Photolysis]

If you're going to toss around words like unstable and uncomfortable you'll have to back them up. Personally, I'm far happier in the woods with a few friends and a lake than anywhere else. Granted I like to bring modern equipment in like sleeping bags and lighters. I certainly love technology but that doesn't mean H/G lifestyles were nearly as bad as you're implying. Try ditching all the modern technology then and living off the land. You don't know when your next meal is, and any injury could mean death because you're unable to hunt. Not to mention that hunting several animals is extremely dangerous and carries the risk of death. Population is inherently tied to the availability of food, so limited growth and limited population sizes indicate an unreliable and limited food supply, hence the use of the term unstable. Take a look at the few isolated tribes out there. Several bushmen do actually make use of some modern technology (even if it's only as simple as a decent pair of shoes) which simply wouldn't exist without having being invented by human societies that have developed via agriculture. The ones that are isolated and not turned to agriculture haven't progressed beyond the stone age. Every single modern convenience is owed ultimately to agriculture. Now unless you want to seriously argue that they have a far better quality of life than anyone in modern civilization, it's self-evident that agriculture dramatically increased the quality of life by providing relatively stable food supplies, allowing for increased population growth and density, leading to increased specialization of knowledge since less time was spent per person gathering sufficient food and surviving. Better technology lead to more efficient agriculture and the feedback loop took things from there.

[Original Poster]

Limited population size does not indicate that food supplies are unstable. Maybe try reading the source material I provided in the OP. Famines were far less severe for H/Gs because they didn't have to deal with problems like crop failure. They kept a limited population because their lifestyle could not support vast numbers, but that doesn't mean they had to constantly wonder where their next meal was coming from. That's total bullshit and goes against basically every drop of research that has been done on the subject. The remains of H/Gs shows substantially healthier bodies than early farmers, who had bone lesions and other problems indicative of malnutrition. The only reason agriculture overwhelmed H/Gs is because even the healthiest, well fed hunter can't stand up against hundreds of malnourished farmers.

[khh]

Well, living as hunter/gatherers certainly meant we were more "in tone" with the rest of nature. It meant we adapted to nature, rather than seeking to adapt nature to us as we are currently doing. But without agriculture and the surplus food that allowed us to generate, we wouldn't have had the resources for technological advancement. Creativity requires the base needs to be met while one still has enough time left to ponder, and that simply wasn't possible with the hunter/gatherers. Another important distinction was that agriculture allowed us to form small villages, then towns and eventually cities, while hunter/gatherers lived in small tribes by necessity. If the game moved, so must they. Now whether this has made a better world is of course hard to say, and depends on your point of view. From an environmental standpoint the answer is no. It was better before. But I do believe people nowadays, in general, is happier than people were then. But this is of course hard - if not impossible - to really prove. edit: Just read the (entire) OP, and it seems I must modify one of my points to accommodate what you said there. While the average working day for a labourer increased with agriculture, it did make an "elite" class that had nothing better to do than sit around and wonder. And it was this class that provided technological advancements.

[dutchraptor]

Well to begin with hunting and gathering is completely unsustainable in comparison to how quickly humans breed. Also the only reason people ever formed groups and farms was because resources dont move. Hunter and gatherers were limited to basic tools so they had to ditch their nomadic ways and settle around places which had mines, trees and farmland. Farming wasn't a result of illnesses or quality of life but because tribes wanted to progress scientifically in terms of tools, weapons etc.

[Original Poster]

Well to begin with hunting and gathering is completely unsustainable in comparison to how quickly humans breed. Also the only reason people ever formed groups and farms was because resources dont move. Hunter and gatherers were limited to basic tools so they had to ditch their nomadic ways and settle around places which had mines, trees and farmland. Farming wasn't a result of illnesses or quality of life but because tribes wanted to progress scientifically in terms of tools, weapons etc. I find it funny that you say H/G is not a sustainable lifestyle when we did it just fine for two hundred thousand years. Then, 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia we adopted Totalitarian Agriculture. This is a specific type of agriculture which maximizes production, giving it a slight edge against any other type of agricultural system which did not. This quickly spread both East and West and pushed all other types of lifestyles into the places no one else really wanted to go anyways. Now in the last 10,000 years we've seen dead zones in the oceans, hive collapse from honey bees, oil spills destroy miles of environment, global warming threaten entire categories of ecosystems, bombs destroy entire cities and our soil sucked dry of its nutrients. And you say Hunter/Gathering is unsustainable? We're on the brink of collapse. Whether from soil depletion, global warming, peak oil or nuclear winter, we cannot sustain this lifestyle any longer.

[Marvo]

We're on the brink of collapse. Whether from soil depletion, global warming, peak oil or nuclear winter, we cannot sustain this lifestyle any longer. Why not? The only thing we're running out of is energy, which we can easily solve with advances in nuclear power.

[Original Poster]

Did you ignore everything else? Our conflicts alone have become globally threatening. Our farming practices are destroying entire ecosystems. Our soil is becoming worthless and requiring synthetic additives which are also threatening entire ecosystems. We're pushing hundreds of species to brink of extinction. We not only need a better energy source, we need an agricultural system that doesn't ruin the soil, poison the food chain and cause dead zones oceans. We need an economic system that doesn't require a dangerous positive feedback loop to function. The problem with modern society can hardly be summed up by an energy shortage. Frankly I could only hope we run out of oil and are forcibly cut down so we can't take any more of this planet with us.

[dutchraptor]

I find it funny that you say H/G is not a sustainable lifestyle when we did it just fine for two hundred thousand years. Then, 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia we adopted Totalitarian Agriculture. This is a specific type of agriculture which maximizes production, giving it a slight edge against any other type of agricultural system which did not. This quickly spread both East and West and pushed all other types of lifestyles into the places no one else really wanted to go anyways. Now in the last 10,000 years we've seen dead zones in the oceans, hive collapse from honey bees, oil spills destroy miles of environment, global warming threaten entire categories of ecosystems, bombs destroy entire cities and our soil sucked dry of its nutrients. And you say Hunter/Gathering is unsustainable? We're on the brink of collapse. Whether from soil depletion, global warming, peak oil or nuclear winter, we cannot sustain this lifestyle any longer. I totally agree with the fact that our lifestyle nowadays is ruining the earth but you're not getting the bigger picture. We have a rapidly increasing population since the begining of man. Therefore civilisations were formed because H/G require's a nomadic lifestyle which doesn'y suit a large groups of people, so no its not sustainable at all. There is absolutely no way to prevent this growth and like with all civilisations there will be high and low periods of quality of life. Maybe now everything is messed up but in a few hundred years things will level out.

[Alric]

There is really no way but forward Omnis. It is to late. If technology stalled out today and no longer went forward, billions of people would die. We are already at the point where if we cut off all global emissions of green house gasses the planet would continue warming by itself. Also with the oil shortages we would all starve as well. The only real hope for humans is to develop advance technologies that solve all our problems before they kill us off. I am generally positive though, I think we will get the technology.

[Marvo]

Did you ignore everything else? Our conflicts alone have become globally threatening. Our farming practices are destroying entire ecosystems. Our soil is becoming worthless and requiring synthetic additives which are also threatening entire ecosystems. We're pushing hundreds of species to brink of extinction. We not only need a better energy source, we need an agricultural system that doesn't ruin the soil, poison the food chain and cause dead zones oceans. We need an economic system that doesn't require a dangerous positive feedback loop to function. The problem with modern society can hardly be summed up by an energy shortage. Frankly I could only hope we run out of oil and are forcibly cut down so we can't take any more of this planet with us. Come to Denmark, we have solved all of these problems.

[Original Poster]

I totally agree with the fact that our lifestyle nowadays is ruining the earth but you're not getting the bigger picture. We have a rapidly increasing population since the begining of man. Therefore civilisations were formed because H/G require's a nomadic lifestyle which doesn'y suit a large groups of people, so no its not sustainable at all. There is absolutely no way to prevent this growth and like with all civilisations there will be high and low periods of quality of life. Maybe now everything is messed up but in a few hundred years things will level out. Let me explain how biology works. Everything is made of food, without food the population does not increase because there's no food to make it increase. When the food supply increases, the feeder populations increases. When the food supply decreases, the feeder supply decreases. Feeder populations do not exceed what can be supported by the food populations. They can't, there's not enough food. This is known as a negative feedback loop. Negative feedback loops are like when your thermostat turns on in the cold and turns off in the heat, and vice versa with the air-conditioning. Negative feedback loops regulate things to keep them sustainable. We can assume the population of humanity increased from its beginning, 200,000 years ago until agriculture, 10,000 years ago but this increase was miniscule compared to the population increase that occurred since agriculture. This is because once we had agriculture we could control our food supply. We had more people, so we produced more food, which resulted in even more people, which meant we needed to produce more food, and then we got even more people. This is a positive feedback loop, and this is the sort of thing hurricanes, monstrous corporations and nuclear bombs are made of. Not only has H/G lifestyle sustained us since we were humans, but before we were humans. I'm not saying it's the only sustainable lifestyle but there's a reason it's worked for human-like creatures for 200 million years. It's self regulating. There is really no way but forward Omnis. It is to late. If technology stalled out today and no longer went forward, billions of people would die. We are already at the point where if we cut off all global emissions of green house gasses the planet would continue warming by itself. Also with the oil shortages we would all starve as well. The only real hope for humans is to develop advance technologies that solve all our problems before they kill us off. I am generally positive though, I think we will get the technology. Two things. One, I am already working on setting up a network in my community which would free it from dependence on the monetary, oil-based market. It might sound selfish, but everyelse who wanted to could make the same preparations The second reason could be described by this example. If you feed mice 2 pounds of food a day, their population is going to increase to the limit those 2 pounds can support. If you remove all but 3 grams of food, yes you'll have starvation. However, if you limit it by removing 3 grams of food every day so the food supply slowly dwindles, you don't get famine. They simply stop breeding as many mice, and sure they breed a few but old mice die and the population continues leveling off because all biological species other than bacteria are designed to do that. No famine, no mass starvation. Human beings also still follow these carrying capacity rules and don't have to continue trying to make more food to support a massive population. The only difference is because we control our food supply, we can continue making more and more food.

[Alric]

Even as we produce more and more food though, populations are starting to drop in all modern countries. Except for countries with heavy immigration, in which the birthrates are still dropping but people moving in from other places is still balancing it out. So we are actually breaking out of the population growth cycle at the moment, though poor countries(some of which have huge populations) are still lagging behind the rest of us. Which is why global population is still increasing. However, once those countries catch up with us, their populations should start to drop as well. Right now if we wanted, and everyone worked together we could probably have a global sustainable system where our population remains high and we continue to rapidly advanced technologies. The problem is the unequal distribution of resources, and politics. Trying to solve those problems are going to be extremely difficult, and likely would be a lot harder than just going back to a primitive hunter gathering culture, but if those problems are solved we would have a far superior system. So it is most definitely worth the effort.

[Photolysis]

Not only has H/G lifestyle sustained us since we were humans, but before we were humans. I'm not saying it's the only sustainable lifestyle but there's a reason it's worked for human-like creatures for 200 million years. It's self regulating. Unfortunately what you don't understand - despite it only requiring minimal knowledge of ecology - is that the mechanism that regulates population growth is called starvation. It's sustainable in the same way that having 10 children used to be sustainable: because most of them dropped dead due to disease. But nevermind that, it's sustainable so it must have been a much better quality of life!