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October 22, 2024
the latest archeological research reveals sporadic but very definite evidence that foragers behaved in all sorts of ways that are normally associated with agricultural societies.[7] In the wetlands of Mesopotamia, where food was plentiful, the population settled down in semi-permanent hamlets prior to taking up agriculture.[8]
Before the widespread adoption of settled agriculture, the planet probably had about 5 million inhabitants—less than one-thousandth of today’s total.[9]
A study based on observations of foraging communities over the last fifty years or so estimated the average lifespan of hunter-gatherers to be around seventy-two years.[10] Remarkably, this figure is only one year less than the global life expectancy today according to World Bank data.
the First Agricultural Revolution—began 12,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent. It coincided almost exactly with the end of the last Ice Age and the beginning of the Holocene—the period of relatively warm, stable climate that made agriculture possible. But this doesn’t mark a point in time when everyone in the Middle East suddenly gave up hunting and gathering to instead cultivate crops and rear animals.
Rather, farming likely began as a series of playful experiments or as a way to spend longer each year in a semi-permanent settlement rather than on the move.[11]
Over the next few thousand years, and independent of developments in the Near East, similar transformations happened elsewhere: in China the population domesticated rice, soybeans and different types of pigs; and in India millet, mung beans, another variety of rice and humped zebu cattle.[12] Settled agriculture spread slowly but surely across Eurasia, and by 2000 BCE farming supported large cities from the Mediterranean all the way to the Far East.[13]
The earliest examples of complex states don’t appear until six millennia after the Neolithic Revolution first began in the Middle East, and they didn’t develop at all in some places where farming emerged. “To say that cereal-farming was responsible for the rise of such states is a little like saying that the development of calculus in medieval Persia is responsible for the invention of the atom bomb.”
By growing calorie-rich cereals, farming societies were able to feed many more mouths on the same amount of land: Diamond suggests 100 times more.[17] A recent study demonstrated that our planet is capable of supporting no more than 10 million hunter-gatherers.[18] By 1800 CE, the world’s population had grown to about 900 million with only very basic technology,
Population growth was five times faster after the adoption of agriculture.[20]
Whereas hunter-gatherers had a child roughly every four years, women in early agricultural societies gave birth on average every two years.[22]
Between 500 and 1,000 years after a community adopted settled agriculture we tend to see a marked increase in deaths, causing population growth to level off and, in some cases, go into reverse.[24] What caused this sharp rise in mortality? Part of the answer related to diet. Hunter-gatherers would have eaten a wide array of seasonal seeds, nuts, fruits and vegetables.
Even when the harvest didn’t fail or the grain stores survived the winter months, the Neolithic diet was lacking in protein and vitamins. As a result, almost everywhere that humans adopted settled agriculture, early farmers were less healthy than hunter-gatherers. Their skeletons were shorter and more likely to show signs of anemia due to iron deficiency and enamel defects as a result of lack of vitamins A, C and D, calcium and phosphorus.[26]
Even where there is no genomic evidence, the archeological record supports the argument that an epidemiological revolution followed hot on the heels of the Neolithic Revolution.
This research challenged the widely held assumption that the British Isles have always been inhabited by white people. Before the advent of ancient DNA analysis, it made sense to assume that Homo sapiens had quickly evolved lighter skin as they spread northward out of Africa into Europe about 40,000 years ago. Paleolithic Europeans had no need for dark skin to protect them from the harsh African sun, whereas a lighter complexion would have allowed their bodies to absorb more sunlight and produce larger quantities of vitamin D.
If Neolithic European Farmers had swept across the continent in a blaze of violence, then we would expect that the invaders would have been mostly men. But analyses of DNA from people alive around this time demonstrate that roughly equal numbers of males and females migrated westward.[50] The fact that the couples and probably whole families moved en masse to set up farms suggests that there was little or no resistance from Western Hunter-gatherers. It is inconceivable that the indigenous foragers would have allowed their land to be stolen and their way of life destroyed. So if farming wasn’t
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In contrast, the hunter-gatherers that the Neolithic European Farmers encountered as they migrated westward through Europe would have been almost defenseless against these viruses and bacteria.
