Should We Go Back To Be Hunter-Gatherers Essay

In "The Worst Mistake In Human History?" written by Jared Diamond, there are many valid points to prove that agriculture was the wrong step to grow into. One example that Diamond provided was that agriculture divided people into specific classes, the higher class such as the kings, and the lower classes such as peasants. The kings in these agricultural societies received better care and better food than others, but in a hunter-gatherers group, there would be no king or because they live off of what they gather and hunt each day. The text states, "They live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others," This is a good thing because

In Jared Diamond’s “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” he kicks off by telling readers the negative effects agriculture has placed on our world that still follows us today. He believes that “with agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism that curse our existence” and that this will continue on until a change occurs (Diamond1). He explains the progressivist perspective as well but uses their reasoning as a way to back up his. Diamond is correct that human’s worst mistake is beginning agriculture because more problems occurred than it actually solved and humans are not better off this way.

He explains how farmers are highly susceptible to malnutrition, anemia, infectious diseases due to being crowded together, degenerative conditions due to hard physical labor, starvation, and sexual inequality due to women being released of their hunting duties and pressured to produce offspring to tend to the fields. Moreover, he supports his idea by explaining how hunter-gatherers have sufficient leisure time for painting and sculpting, sleep a good deal, work less hard than farmers, and have healthier diets due to the abundance of wild plants and animals available. The diet of hunter-gatherers contains high protein and well balance of proteins compared to farmers who can only consume one or a few foods from their

In the 1930's, V. Gordon Childe proposed that the shift to food production was one of the two major events in human history that improved the condition of human societies. Childe described the origins of agriculture as a 哲eolithic Revolution.But the shift from hunting and gathering to food production was not as advantageous to humanity as Childe believed. Although there were benefits, there were also serious drawbacks, and humans paid a price for the advantages of agriculture.

Farming has been a source of work ever since man has been introduced to the earth, but the past 100 years have been promising in continuing to provide for the needs of the growing population. The people have become more educated, and technology has become much more advanced. The two have come together to boon the land and animals so that they produce to their fullest potential. The people of the world have been influenced to the extent that they work smarter not harder to provide for the growing population. Farming, a crucial necessity to the survival of mankind, has evolved in the area of education of the people which has assisted in the advances of technology, land, and animal production which will lead to the provision of food for the growing

Jared Diamond, in his article, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human race”, explains that the worst mistake that humans made was the decision to change from a hunter gatherer society into an agriculture society. Jared Diamond gives evidence of how switching from an agricultural society was a bad mistake. Many believe that adopting an agricultural society and leaving the hunter gatherer society was the way to a more qualitative and sustainable lifestyle. As Diamond says, it is true that because this society was adopted and evolved because we have longer lifespans and live better now than how people lived back in the old days. But Diamond`s claim that the hunter gatherer society gave humans more benefits individually than what the agricultural society had to offer is agreeable.

As more people shifted towards an agriculture based society, many began to produce a surplus of food. This surplus allowed people a new privilege, to allocate to a single area for an extended period of time. More and more people began to settle down in this fashion, eventually once small hunter-gatherer tribes grew into chiefdoms, and chiefdoms expanded into city-states. Populations as a result began to increase in size and expand its territory to meet the new demands of the increasing population. This expansion would not come free however, mother nature itself had to pay the price. Strayer conveys with this quote the extent to which agriculture had on the world’s population and it 's affect on the environment. “On a global level, scholars estimate

In the article The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race Jared Diamond argues that switching to agriculture was a mistake, and that hunting and gathering came with less consequences. Hunting and gathering may be better to not spread as much disease and not as such of a risk of malnutrition, but the population now is too big to switch back. To keep a constantly growing population agriculture should not change.

Based on the output of production, agriculture is perceived as an advance because farmers can produce more food within a smaller area than they could possibly obtain as hunter-gatherers. Harris says that this situation happened since farmers control “the rate of plant reproduction” (Harris 219), which means that immediate adverse consequences could be prevented with the intensification of production. On the other hand, hunter-gatherers, which depend on the availability of natural plants and animals; consequently, can raise their output very little. However, although farmers can produce more food than hunter-gatherers do, the numbers of crops are limited; therefore, when the crops failed, there is risk of starvation.

“The discovery of agriculture was the first big step toward a civilized life.” (Arthur Keith)

As most know, humans have existed in a hunting-gathering system for the majority of our time on earth. During the Paleolithic, population sizes were low and settlements were sparse. At the dawn of the Neolithic, large settlements begin to appear and something strange occurred. Agricultural systems began to develop and civilization emerged as our ancestors evolved from a foraging society to an agricultural society. Following the transition from hunting and gathering, the Neolithic resulted in a dramatic change in population density and size that affected the public health drastically and one of the first epidemiological transition leading to an increase in infectious and nutritional diseases occurred.

Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times.

Health problems did not only stop at diseases, but continued on to physical health as well. Both hunter-gatherers and farmers have to work to obtain food, however farming requires a lot of hard physical labor. Farmers have to work hard to maintain their crops because that is their only food source, and taking care of crops is not easy and it took a toll on their health. It is shown in evidence that farmers had “an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor” (Diamond, 118). Between diseases and physical defects farming was making a huge impact on humans’ ability to survive, so much that even life expectancy went down from twenty six years in hunter-gatherers to nineteen years in farming communities (Diamond, 118).

The emergence of agriculture was a major stepping stone in human history. During this birth of agriculture, also known as the Neolithic revolution, humans began inhabiting permanent settlements, grow their own crops, and domesticate both plants and animals for food (Weisdorf, 2005). Considering humans have been hunter-gatherers for the majority of their approximately 7 million years of existence, the emergence of agriculture in the Old World only occurring 10,000-5,000 years ago, marks a significant transformation in food sustenance techniques (Weisdorf, 2005). However, this turning point in history is associated with both positive and negative implications. There is much controversy over whether or not the introduction of

The revolutionizing transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture was a central shift in the way homo sapiens lived that occurred twelve thousand years ago. Consequently, several factors contributed to this astonishing modification of life including increasing population size, favorable environments such as the Nile River in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent in the Mediterranean. Furthermore, the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture allowed for mass production of food in order for the sustainability of the increasing population size, but with agriculture also came specialization and the division of labor ultimately leading to moral inequality.