For about 2.5 million years Homo sapiens were pretty content feeding themselves by hunting and gathering. During this time the plants and animals on which the humans dined lived without human intervention. Even though humans spread around the globe they continued their basic traditional means of finding food. They did that because their means of living were pretty darn good. As Yuval Harari asked, “Why do anything else when your lifestyle feeds you amply and supports a rich world of social structures, religious beliefs and political dynamics?”If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

This changed about 10,000 years ago when Homo sapienslearned to manipulate the lives of a few animals and plant species to their “advantage”. At least they believed it was to their advantage. But was it?

Harari described the life of humans after the invention of agriculture this way,  “From sunrise to sunset humans sowed seeds, watered plants, plucked weeds from the ground and led sheep to prime pastures. This work, they thought, would provide them with more fruit, grain, and meat. It was a revolution in the way humans lived—the Agricultural Revolution.”

This shift began in about 9,500-8,500 B.C. in the Middle East  of Turkey, Iran, and the Levant. It probably started with the domestication of wheat and goats. As Harari explained, “By 3,500 B.C. the main wave of domestication was over. Even today, with all of our advanced technologies, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between about 9,500 and 3,500 B.C.—wheat, rice, maize (called ‘corn’ in the US), potatoes, millet, and barley. No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years. If our minds are those of hunter-gatherers, our cuisine is that of ancient farmers.”

At one time scholars believed that agriculture spread from this single source in the Middle East around the world, including the New World. Now most scholars agree that agriculture started up in other parts of the world without benefit of the Middle Eastern ancestors. For example, people in Central America domesticated maize and beans even though they knew nothing about wheat and pea cultivation in the Middle East. China domesticated rice, millet, and pigs. North American indigenous people cultivated pumpkin. In New Guinea the people domesticated sugar cane and bananas. In Africa they domesticated millet, sorghum, wheat, and rice. From these places agriculture spread around the globe.

The fact is that it is very difficult to domesticate plants and animals because few are good candidates. Where those species lived is where agricultural domestication began by very smart humans.

I have always thought, along with most other people, that agriculture was a tremendous advancement for human society. But was it?  Wendell Berry called agriculture one of the world’s worst disasters ever.  Yuval Harari came pretty close to saying this too. This is how he described agriculture:

“Scholars once proclaimed that the agricultural revolution was a great leap forward for humanity.  They told a tale of progress fuelled 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 grueling, 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 difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease.  The Agricultural Revolution enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure.  Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.

Who was responsible?  Neither kings, nor priests, or merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice, and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens rather than vice versa.”

As wild as these statements seem they do make sense. Look at the results. 10,000 years ago wheat was just a wild grass found only in a small area of the Middle East. Within a few thousand years it had spread around the world. Wheat became one of the most successful plants ever!  As Harari said, “We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.” Wheat sure was smart. Maybe humans not so much.

Now you could reverse this argument of Harari.  After all, since the domestication of wheat humans have prospered around the world so they now number nearly 8 billion. But the point Harari made it is that wheat and these other domesticated products did not really benefit individualhumans. They are no better of he claims. It did benefit the species because there are so many of us, but how does that benefit me?

As Harari said, It

“enabledHomo sapiensto multiply exponentially…This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

Yet why should individuals care about this evolutionary calculus? Why would any sane person lower his or her standard of living just to multiply the number of copies of Homo sapiens? Nobody agreed to this deal: the Agricultural Revolution is a Trap.”

Most people assume that hunter-gatherers had a much more difficult way of life than farmers. Indigenous people in North America were bothfarmers and hunter-gatherers in different places and different times. However, the lifestyle of the hunter-gatherers was quite different from what many have assumed.

As Yuval Noah Harari explained in his book Sapiens,

“The hunter-gather way of life differed significantly from region to region and from season to season, but on the whole foragers seem to have enjoyed a more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle than most of the peasants, shepherds, labourers, an office clerks who followed in their footsteps.”

As we know people in modern societies work an average of forty to forty-five hours a week. In fact surprisingly perhaps, in the last couple of decades the average weekly workweek has been increasing. It seems the more “advanced” we get the more we work. What kind of advancement is that? Yet today, as Harari said,  “hunter-gatherers living in the most inhospitable of habitats—such as the Kalahari Desert—work on average for just thirty-five to forty-five hours a week. They hunt only one day out of three, and gathering takes up to just three to six hours daily. In normal times this is enough to feed the band. It may well be ancient hunter-gatherers living in zones more fertile than the Kalahari spent even less time obtaining food and raw materials. On top of that, foragers enjoyed a lighter load of household chores. They had no dishes to wash, no carpets to vacuum, no floors to polish, no nappies to change and no bills to pay.”

Harari  also pointed out that according to his research, “The forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives than agriculture or industry do.”

European people ate much less nutritious food than the Indigenous people they encountered in North America. At first contact, Europeans were surprised at how fit and healthy the indigenous people were. As Harari said,

“In most places and at most times, foraging provided ideal nutrition. That is hardly surprising—this has been the human diet for hundreds of thousands of years, and the human body was well adapted to it. Evidence from fossilised skeletons indicates that ancient foragers were less likely to suffer from starvation or malnutrition, and were generally taller and healthier than their peasant descendants.  Average life expectancy was apparently just thirty-four years, but this was due largely to the high incidence of child mortality…The foragers’ secret of success, which protected them from starvation and malnutrition, was their varied diet. Farmers tend to eat a very limited and unbalanced diet.”

The reason for this is that foragers were not as dependent on one food as so many Europeans were. As a result they were much less likely to be ravaged by famine. If they suffered a loss of one of their staple foods the hunter-gatherers were easily able to switch to other species or move to a better area.

As Harari explained,

“Ancient foragers also suffered less from infectious diseases. Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domestic animals and were transferred to humans after the Agricultural Revolution. Ancient foragers, who had domesticated only dogs, were free of these scourges. Moreover, most people in agricultural and industrial societies lived in dense, unhygienic permanent settlements.”

Of course this became a serious problem when indigenous people in the New World were contacted by Europeans who had built up immunities to many of such infectious diseases. the Europeans  were able to spread their diseases quickly and with deadly efficiency to their indigenous hosts. Usually this was not done deliberately.

For all of these reasons Indigenous hunter-gathering societies were pretty good places to live. They were not perfect and we should never idealize them, but they were a lot better than many non-Indigenous people believed. Their prejudices against the Indigenous people were without foundation.

As Harari said, “The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working hours have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies.”

We must as careful not to idealize them as we should be careful not to be biased against them. For example, in Paraguay there was a tribe of indigenous people that were called Achépeople. They were also hunter-gatherers and when an important member of their band died their custom was to kill a little girl and then bury the two together. If an old Aché woman became a burden to the rest of society a young man would sneak up behind her and kill her with an axe-blow to the head. This does not sound ideal.

Yet Aché people had societies relatively free of violence. They smiled and laughed a lot. The things they valued the most were good social interactions and good friendships.  Interestingly this is exactly what modern research has demonstrated that this is precisely what leads to the happiest lives. If only we in the west could learn the truth of this.  It is also interesting that “the Aché were hunted and killed without mercy by Paraguayan farmers.” If only we could learn to be as smart as the hunter-gatherers.

We should always look at such societies without prejudice or bias. We should keep our blinkers off. As Harari said, “The truth is that Aché society, like every human society, was very complex. We should beware of demonizing or idealizing it on the basis of a superficial acquaintance. The Aché were neither angels nor fiends–they were humans. So, too, were the ancient hunter-gatherers.”

In any event, any presumption that Europeans were vastly superior to Indigenous people like so many people now seem to believe is entirely unjustified.

I read a fascinating book called Sapiens that was written by Yuval Harari an historian from Israel. It was one of those books where I learned something new on every page. Harari doesn’t just think outside the box he doesn’t recognized boxes. He is an original thinker like few others.

Harari pointed out that usually in most habitats Sapiens did not feed themselves by hunting. Usually they gathered.  They were hunter-gatherers. Harari described it this way:

“In most habitats, Sapien bands fed themselves in an elastic and opportunistic fashion. They scrounged for termites, picked berries, dug for roots, stalked rabbits and hunted bison and mammoth. Notwithstanding the popular image of ‘man the hunter,’ gathering was Sapiens main activity, and it provided most of their calories, as well as raw materials such as flint, wood, and bamboo.”

This not the romantic or idealized picture I had of our ancestors.  I thought they were tough courageous hunters. They were that. But more than that, they were scroungers.    But sometimes the idealized version of events we hold dear has to give ground to other truths. And sometimes we learn our ancestors were amazing. They were just as amazing, but  in ways we have never thought of before. Harari added to his description of them this way:

“Sapiens did not forage only for food and materials. They foraged for knowledge as well. To survive they needed a detailed mental map of their territory. To maximize the efficiency of their daily search for food, they required information about he growth patterns of each plant and the habits of each animal. They needed to know to know which foods were nourishing, which made you sick, and how to use others as cures. They needed to know the progress of the seasons and what warning signs preceded thunderstorms or a dry spell. They studied every stream, every walnut tree, every bear cave, and every flint-stone deposit in their vicinity. Each individual had to understand how to make a stone knife, now to mend a torn cloak, how to lay a rabbit trap, and now to face avalanches, snakebites or hungry lions. Masters of these many skills required years of apprenticeship and practice. The average ancient forager could turn a flint stone into a spear point within minutes. When we try to imitate this feat, we usually fail miserably. Most of us lack expert knowledge of the flaking properties of flint and basalt and the fine motor skills needed to work them precisely.

In other words, the average forager had wider deeper, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants. Today, most people in industrial societies don’t need to know much about the natural world in order to survive. What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker? You need to know a lot about your tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited  to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skillful people in history.”

To support this startling conclusion Harari said, “There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain actually decreasedsince the age of foraging.”

I admit I never thought of our  ancestors quite that way. I think the use of the feminine “she” in this quote is not just a nod to avoiding masculine pronouns . This process of foraging, or gathering, was led by women.  Women  were vital in this process. Most of those important jobs were performed by women, while the men went hunting. It reminded me of what I learned in Africa.  The women did the hard work of fetching water I (among many other tasks). The men sat under trees discussing important matters! Women were incredibly smart in hunter-gatherer societies.

In other words ancient Sapiens were smart. Perhaps the smartest in human history as Harari suggests. They had to be in order to survive in a very dangerous world in which they were far from the largest, fastest, or keenest observers. They had to be smart—very smart. And this is what indigenous people were like when Europeans first contacted them! Makes you wonder why anyone would presume they were smarter. Only a deeply entrenched bias could do that.