Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

The Agricultural Revolution certainly 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.

Not then, maybe. But it allowed people to become specialists, and specialties became more and more advanced and specific, and eventually that led to us having a society where the vast majority of people live to be adults and grow old. It expanded the realm of leisure and entertainment. It gave people motivation to contribute to the growth of society in their own way.

The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.

Enough with the overdramatic moralizing.

We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.

Confusing. We were the ones doing all the work, but wheat domesticated us? The party doing the domesticating is the party working to make the other species work for them. The fact that we changed our lifestyle to allow us to grow more wheat is not a case of wheat “manipulating” us. Domestication is work. Plus, wheat is not conscious, so this feels like a ridiculous statement.

How did wheat convince Homo sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a more miserable existence?

“Rather good life” where half your children die before puberty.

Many anthropological and archaeological studies indicate that in simple agricultural societies with no political frameworks beyond village and tribe, human violence was responsible for about 15 per cent of deaths, including 25 per cent of male deaths.

So this is a good point. What problem did humans seek to solve with agriculture? Stability, perhaps. Knowing where their next meal was coming from. Controlling the output of their crops. But solutions sometimes create problems. Often these problems have to be solved before we can reap the full benefits. So political structure, institutions had to be created. And those things came with their own problems, seeking their own solutions. And so on and so forth. Progress isn’t made by giving up on when a solution causes more problems, but by continually creating new solutions for new problems. That has been the trajectory of history. Sapiens settling in one place wasn’t a bad thing for society’s growth, but we had to figure out how to do it and how to implement it in a way to maximize its benefits. We are still going through this process.

Yet it is wrong to judge thousands of years of history from the perspective of today.

Is it? It would be wrong to assume agriculture was a net benefit for people at the time, but how else could we judge to overall effect of agriculture on humans than with time?

A much more representative viewpoint is that of a three-year-old girl dying from malnutrition in first-century China because her father’s crops have failed.

Again, for hunter-gatherers before the development of agriculture, half of all children died before puberty. So saying “agriculture was bad because children died” doesn’t hold much weight.

This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

There is some truth here, but happiness is one of the key motivators behind evolution. People tend to do what makes them happy, so it is better for a species’ survival that the things that make us happy are also good for our survival. If humans were by and large happy with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, why change? The decision to change has to come before natural selection.

Nobody agreed to this deal: the Agricultural Revolution was a trap.

Except they did? Again, if they were perfectly fine and healthy as hunter-gatherers, they wouldn’t have been vulnerable to such a “trap”. They made a choice, it wasn’t forced on them.

For the next 50,000 years our ancestors flourished there without agriculture.

What does “flourish” mean? The half that didn’t die in childhood may have had a great chance to live to a relatively old age, but again: half died in childhood!

As people began living in disease-ridden settlements, as children fed more on cereals and less on mother’s milk, and as each child competed for his or her porridge with more and more siblings, child mortality soared.

It didn’t soar, though. It remained high, maybe even close to what is was for the hunter-gatherers that preceded them. And this is likely very accurate in why child mortality rates did not improve.

In most agricultural societies at least one out of every three children died before reaching twenty.

One out of three is less than one out of two.

Yet the increase in births still outpaced the increase in deaths; humans kept having larger numbers of children.

Well, yes. High child mortality rates mean people have more children. That leads to regional overpopulation. This isn’t a “despite this”, it’s a “because of this.”

One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.

Is this an “iron” law? It makes sense and I would be prone to agree. But maybe new technology and advancements are luxuries when they are first introduced, but then become necessities because people recognize how much the change is needed. Plenty of luxuries remain luxuries because their purpose is solely the enjoyment of the person who owns/uses them, not to solve a problem or to bring humanity forward as a whole.

Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived.

No. Maybe on factory farms in recent centuries, but through the majority of its history, the practice of animal husbandry has generally incorporated humane treatment. In subsistence and sustainable farming, domesticated animals generally were well cared for, had their needs attended to, and were only killed if it was necessary — generally, for food. For the most part, if resources could be gathered from the animal without harming or killing them, that would be how it would be done.

In contrast, the vast majority of domesticated chickens and cattle are slaughtered at the age of between a few weeks and a few months, because this has always been the optimal slaughtering age from an economic perspective.

Interesting use of the present tense “are” here. Previously the author said we can’t judge the merit of the agricultural revolution based on how we live today, but here he is doing just that.

Not all agricultural societies were this cruel to their farm animals. The lives of some domesticated animals could be quite good.

Going back to past tense when the past few paragraphs dealt with recent practices. “Not all were” except we haven’t established that ANY of these ancients *were*.

Yet from the viewpoint of the herd, rather than that of the shepherd, it’s hard to avoid the impression that for the vast majority of domesticated animals, the Agricultural Revolution was a terrible catastrophe.

Assumptions and moralizing.