(SCRIPT) Agriculture: Humanity's Best, Worst Invention
Episode Working Title: Agriculture: Our Best, Worst Invention
Themes: Human Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology
Writer/researcher: Trenton McNulty
Pitch:
Exploring how the invention of agriculture—the choice to settle down in exchange for stability and consistency—has actually made our day-to-day lives appreciably worse than our hunter-gatherer ancestors. For the past ten thousand years, we’ve worked longer and harder, our diets have become more limited, we’ve grown more isolated from one another, and the pressures of navigating a world entirely alien to our biology has caused an explosion of stress and mental illness. How do we fix this? Might our future lie in understanding who we used to be?
Script:
Imagine this.
You wake up in a beautiful meadow after a long, restful sleep. You watch the sunrise sparkle through the morning dew as you pick a hardy breakfast of nuts, berries and mushrooms.
Seeing storm clouds on the horizon, you head back to camp and find your family already packing. Together you slide your hand-carved canoes into the river and make your way downstream past mountains and valleys teeming with life. The water here is so thick with pink salmon that for dinner you simply snatch one from the water.
At night, you set a fire. You’ve been rowing all day, but you’re not exhausted, so you dance and kiss and hug and tell each other stories. You hold your partner close as the Milky Way shines above you.
[BEAT]
This was once the average day in the life of a human being.
For nearly 300,000 years, we went where we pleased, whenever we pleased. We stayed fit. We explored a world mostly untouched by human hands. We ate a wide variety of rich, healthy, fresh-picked food. And without work to tie us down, we spent almost all our time with the people we loved most.
But then things changed. In the Middle East, around 10,000 BCE, a few bands of hunter-gatherers started planting seeds rather than eating them. Barley and emmer and other grains. Other bands in China, Africa and Central America would soon do the same, independently of each other.
We can only guess why.
Maybe they grew tired of living in uncertainty. Food was abundant, but not infinite, and if they ran out, they went hungry. They could travel, of course, but venturing into new territory is always a gamble.
Without networks of communication or trade, it’s impossible to know what lies on the other side of a mountain. There might be new, dangerous predators. There might be rival tribes, ready to protect their land by force. You wouldn’t know. You couldn’t.
The simple act of putting a seed in the ground freed humanity from that fate. It promised us stability and control. If you can make your own food supply, you can make sure you’ll never go hungry. You can set down roots, rather than stray into the unknown. You can control the world, rather than be controlled.
This was the beginning of human civilization. The simple act that set the modern world in motion.
But when it comes to human happiness and well-being, some argue it was our greatest mistake.
Imagine this.
You wake up before dawn and eat two whole bowls of wheat. On your walk outside, you pick stray oats from your rotting teeth. You spend the entire day beneath the harsh sun, as the fields of grain offer no shade to shelter you. By midday your back already aches from bending over again and again to water the plants, pull weeds from the ground and shoo away pests.
When you finally return to the comfort of your home for another bowl of wheat, you learn that your daughter is sick. She collapsed, fallen under the sway of some kind of curse. The village shaman feeds her a poppy flower to soothe her suffering, but he can’t stop the curse itself.
It’s an illness, passed to her through the goats she kept. Viral diseases were rare among hunter-gatherers, but forcing other animals to live alongside us changed that.
When you go next-door to ask for support and advice from your friend, you pass it to him, and he passes it to his family. As humans now live together in enclosed spaces, even those who don’t know you soon fall ill.
By the end of summer, half the village is dead. And when blight hits your fields just before harvest time, killing off the one genetically identical crop you chose to grow, those few who remain soon starve.
[BEAT]
This is, admittedly, a worst-case scenario. While we could imagine a similar horrible year in the life of a hunter-gatherer, one where your brother gets eaten by a lion and your grandmother dies of exposure, the day-to-day lives of agriculturalists were unambiguously worse.
Farmers worked much longer, had fewer exciting experiences and were more vulnerable to illness and famine. While they ate plenty, that food often consisted of a few simple crops.
Archaeological evidence shows that after transitioning to cereal-based agriculture, humans began to live far shorter lives than our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Due to malnutrition, children grew slower, died easily, and by adulthood were literally 5 inches shorter. It took until the 20th Century for the average human height to return to Paleolithic levels.
So why did we do it? Why did we continue to follow the path of agriculture, even though it made our lives worse? There are two answers.
One is that the changes happened over many thousands of years.
The person who planted that first seed could never imagine a garden. The gardener couldn’t imagine a field. And once people came to rely entirely on farming, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the distant past. And you can’t return to something you’ve never known.
If you asked an ancient farmer how they’d solve the problem of starvation, they’d probably just say, “Plant another field.”
The second solution to explain why we stuck with agriculture has to do with population growth.
Nearly 8 billion people live on Earth today. But for most of history, we could barely reach 10 million. That’s all our environment could support, and all our lifestyle would allow. When you’re always on the move, you can’t afford to keep more than a few children around.
Farming changed that. For the first time, we could stay in one place. We could change our environment to make as much food as we wanted.
Extra food and a place to call home meant we could support more kids. And more kids meant more help in the fields, which meant more food.
Eventually there was so much food that not everyone needed to be a farmer. They could dedicate all their time to other pursuits, like building better houses, better pots and better ways of processing grain, which paved the way for even more people.
In a blip of time, they outpaced and outnumbered the hunter-gatherers. And a single healthy hunter-gatherer doesn’t stand a chance against 50 farmers, however miserable and malnourished they are.
Even if, at that moment, every one of those farmers put down their pitchforks and returned to the woods, the odds are good that someone somewhere would plant another seed. They’d have a family. And while it might take another millennia or two, they’d win out over the hunter-gathers in the end. The math is in their favor.
Was this truly our greatest mistake? Can we even call it a mistake, when it’s one we made again and again, in different parts of the world, unknowingly and maybe even inevitably?
In the modern era, it’s easy to say it was all worth it. A necessary sacrifice. 10 thousand years of pain and malnutrition are unfortunate, but we’ve come out the other side.
Global trade ensures our diets are as varied as we want them to be. Modern medicine lets us live better and longer than our hunter-gatherer ancestors ever did. We can cure disease. We can even drive viruses into extinction.
In 1970s, widespread use of vaccines eliminated smallpox, one of the most devastating and disfiguring illnesses in the history of our species. It’s gone, forever. Humans did that. Agriculture allowed those illnesses to spread to us in the first place, but by doubling down, and continuing to specialize, we found a solution.
If the COVID-19 pandemic came along a thousand or even a hundred years ago, it’s very possible you wouldn’t be alive to hear me right now.
Instead, many of us were privileged enough to wait out the pandemic indoors. Our quarantines played out inside air-conditioned palaces that the kings and emperors of past centuries would envy.
At night, we can flip a switch and fill our homes with sunlight. We can summon fresh, clean water at a whim, as hot or as cold as we please.
Over time, some very smart people, freed from gathering berries and throwing spears, worked together to achieve miracles.
Whatever issues agriculture caused, we’re free from them now. Right?
The truth is more complicated.
The new field of evolutionary psychology argues that while the physical conditions of our lives have improved, those changes have actually caused our mental lives to suffer.
While the first human civilizations of the Fertile Crescent seem far in the remote past, on an evolutionary timescale, they’re actually incredibly recent.
If we were to represent the entire history of humanity in a single day, with the present moment as midnight, agriculture only came along about four minutes ago.
For the entire day, we were hunter-gatherers. That’s who we are, on a biological level. What evolution conditioned us to be.
We experience so much mental illness in the modern world, not just because we’re better at seeing it, but because our minds are unsuited to the world we live in.
Imagine this. I don’t think you’ll find it very hard.
You wake up groggy, to the sound of an alarm. You were in the middle of a dream, in deep sleep, but your boss doesn’t care about that. He scheduled you for an early shift, and expects you to clock in before the sun even rises.
To your body’s circadian rhythms, it’s still nighttime. You should be in bed. But you fight against it, turning your phone’s brightness up to maximum and shining it right in your face.
At work, you spend the entire day behind a cash register. You flash fake smiles at an unending chain of people you don’t know and probably won’t see ever again.
To the humans of long ago, strangers were almost always dangerous. But the world doesn’t work like that anymore.
You need to navigate public spaces to fulfil even your most basic needs. You learned to accept nameless grocery clerks and bus drivers as normal. But they’re still an unknown. You compare yourself to them, or wonder deep down if they’re a threat.
A low-level unease saturates your brain with cortisol, the fight-or-flight hormone.
All through your shift you’ve been eyeing the chocolate bars behind the register. Sugar was once rare in nature. If you found fruit, you ate it fast, before it rotted, or anyone else could get it. But now sugar is everywhere, in the cheapest things, and eating healthy is expensive.
You compromise by buying yogurt, bread, and a hazelnut spread. But food manufacturers have filled these with sugar, too.
At night, you return home and fall into the arms of your partner. Your brain floods with oxytocin, the feel-good hormone you’ve been deprived of all day.
Now, you can finally relax. You can finally take some time for yourself.
So you take out your phone and scroll through Twitter and Instagram. The 150-character tweets and bite-sized video reels trigger your reward systems, filling you with a instant sense of gratification. You keep scrolling and scrolling, following those feelings as far as they’ll take you.
You think about taking out your latest knitting project, a scarf for your partner, but it’s become harder and harder to keep your attention on it. It takes so long to get anywhere.
Instead you put the phone away and close your eyes. You should get a good night’s sleep, you think. But the blue light still burns in your eyes, and it’s hard to get any rest. You tricked your brain into thinking it’s still daytime, and deprived of the chemical melatonin, you toss and turn.
You dread your 5 AM alarm.
[BEAT]
The modern world is one of wonders. But our hunter-gatherer brains are unequipped to deal with them, and corporations take advantage of that.
The same systems that connect us to others also slave us to them.
The same global food trade that solved malnutrition exploits those nutritional needs so we happily buy more than we need.
We have not escaped the consequences of agriculture, because agriculture says that abundance is worth the cost of our health and well-being, and this same mentality governs our world today.
Corporations dam rivers and clear-cut forests and pollute the Earth in an effort to expand human power, just as the first agriculturalists did.
And like them, we will reap what we sow.
What’s the solution? Do we tear apart modern society, let our population drop and return to the state of nature?
Obviously, that’s not possible. Even if it was, we now know that given enough time things would return to how they used to be.
So a half-measure, then. Maybe we outlaw social media, sugar and artificial lights?
Groups like the Amish and Mennonites do exactly that, rejecting the modern world in favor of a simpler lifestyle. Utopian communes all across the United States do more or less the same. But they all rely on agriculture for food.
It’s hard to live as our ancestors did, though people do try.
Followers of the ‘paleo’ diet use evolutionary psychology to support their belief that we should swear off protein power and nutritional shakes, and only eat the unprocessed foods that would have been available to paleolithic hunter-gatherers. Think fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, or lean meats like fish.
But in a way, even those are processed, as we’ve spent thousands of years selectively breeding plants and animals to be fatter and juicer than they ever would’ve been in nature.
Ultimately, there’s a balance to be struck, and the answer isn’t clear. But understanding our ancestors may be a way into understanding ourselves. What we need, and what we should aspire toward.
If we’re going to keep changing the world, we should at least try to change it in the right way.
RESOURCES:
Harari, Yuval N. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York :Harper, 2015.
Life History Transitions at the Origins of Agriculture: A Model for Understanding How Niche Construction Impacts Human Growth, Demography and Health by Jonathan C. K. Wells and Jay T. Stock
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7253633/
The agricultural revolution as environmental catastrophe: Implications for health and lifestyle in the Holocene by Clarke Spenser Larsen
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040618206000334
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300240214/against-the-grain/
The Cradle of Agriculture by Simcha Lev-Yadun and Avi Gopher
DOI: 10.1126/science.288.5471.1602
Encyclopedia Britannica, “Evolutionary Psychology” by Douglas T. Kenrick
https://www.britannica.com/science/evolutionary-psychology
Associations of screen time, sedentary time and physical activity with sleep in under 5s: A systematic review and meta-analysis by Xanne Janssen et al.
DOI: 10.1016/j.smrv.2019.101226
Origins and evolution of the Western diet: health implications for the 21st century by Loren Cordain et al.
The Evolutionary Mismatch Hypothesis: Implications for Psychological Science by Norman P. Li et al.
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