God: A Human History

by Reza Aslan

As the Israeli historian Yuval Harari observes, the bodies of Homo sapiens were adapted to running after game, not to clearing land and plowing fields. Surveys of ancient human skeletons show just how brutal the transition to agriculture was. Farmers were more susceptible than hunters to anemia and vitamin deficiency. They caught more infectious diseases and died younger. They had worse teeth and more broken bones, and they suffered from a host of what were fairly novel ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis, and hernias. In fact, skeletons unearthed in and around the Ancient Near East indicate that in the first few thousand years of the Neolithic Revolution, humans lost an average of six inches in height, largely as a result of their inadequate diet. In light of all this, the transition from hunting to farming seems not only to have been a bad bet on humanity’s part; it was, in Harari’s words, “history’s biggest fraud.”