Jared Diamond, ‘The Third Chimpanzee for Young People: On
the Evolution and Future of the Human Animal’, 2014:
“The progressive view tells us that agriculture brought us
health, longer lives, security, leisure, and great art. This seems convincing,
but it is hard to prove. How do you actually show that the lives of people ten
thousand years ago got better when they abandoned hunting for farming?
One way is to study the spread of agriculture. if it were
such a great idea, you’d expect it to have spread quickly. But archaeology
shows that agriculture spread across Europe at a snail’s pace— barely a
thousand yards per year! From its origins in the Middle east around 8000 BC,
agriculture crept northwestward to reach Greece around 6000 BC, and Britain and
Scandinavia 2,500 years later. That’s hardly what you’d call a wave of
enthusiasm.
Another approach is to see whether modern hunter-gatherers
are really worse off than farmers. Scattered throughout the world, mainly in
areas not good for agriculture, groups such as the Bushmen of southern Africa’s
Kalahari Desert have continued to live as hunter-gatherers into modern times.
Astonishingly, it turns out that these hunter-gatherers generally have leisure
time, sleep a lot, and work no harder than their farming neighbors. The average
time spent finding food each week, for example, has been reported to be just
twelve to nineteen hours for Bushmen. When asked why he had not adopted
agriculture, as neighboring tribes had, one Bushman replied, “Why should we
plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?”...”
Artist: P C Vey, The New Yorker, June 2018