The conventional view is that the discovery of agriculture about 7000 years ago in N.Europe (as the last ice age came to an end) by concentrating the production of food in one place released man for other activities. It catalyzed the development of trading which led to the development of written records and mathematics.
On the other hand Bryan Sykes, in "Adam's Curse" (A book which charts the decline of the Y chromosome and forecasts its eventual demise [recent studies have refuted this] and has had mixed, and sometimes contradictory, reviews in Amazon) presents some interesting (I think) arguments that agriculture has had some more malign influences.
1) Nutritional status declined as the diet was then dominated by carbohydrates
2) More sedentary lifestyles led to decline in physical condition
3) Whereas the hunter gatherer lifestyle was compatible only with monogamy, a man could plant enough grain to support two or more families. Land therefore acquired value and strong, ruthless individuals could buy, extort or simply take land from weaker individuals. Ownership of land therefore became linked to wealth, power and fecundity. Women married to such men would have more children and women who were attracted by power increased as a proportion of the female population. Sexual selection therefore led to men who were increasingly aggressive and power seeking and women who tended to be attracted to such men (I realize that this is an over-simplification and exaggeration but it contains an idea which, if valid, accounts for the nature of the alpha-male and why they are nearly always promiscuous. Of course all men are not like this; some remain with a hunter-gatherer personality and others have elements of both. Women likewise, mutatis mutandis. It also accounts for the absence of drive for success in many women but not, interestingly, for male attitudes towards women).
From this we can break down the big question into smaller subsets:
a) Was this form of agriculture always inevitable or were there alternatives (at least theoretically)?
b) If there were alternatives what were/are they and what are their benefits and disadvantages?
c) Is Sykes right in his analysis and conclusions?
d) If not, why not?
e) Are there any reasons to believe that any of the alternative societies that might have evolved would have been an improvement on the one in which we now find ourselves?
On what evidence is the claim based that nutritional status declined with the advent of agriculture? Hunter gatherers lived a generally short life and they were generally short judging by remains found. Agriculture has allowed civilizations to flourish and we are now on average better fed than at any time in history. Secondly agriculture is not a sedentary lifestyle but one that is most arduous. Not sure about the third point:)
Brian - I can't check for the moment but I think Sykes's comment on nutritional status may have been based on inference but you are right that life would have been less hazardous in an agricultural society and the hunters would have had difficulty in maintaining sufficient calorie intake to balance a high energy consumption. Of course agriculture is a physically demanding occupation but, even in the early years, farmers could make enough food to supply many more than their own family. But it can be argued that agriculture has become too productive and too protected, leading to populations larger than the planet can sustain in the long term. I agree that it is probably unfair to blame agriculture but agriculture is an enabling technology for obesity, diabetes type II and over-population. My question really is whether it could have been different?
Some blame the food industry. Some boredom and alienation. Re overpopulation some see too many mouths, some see two more hands.
I am not seeking something or someone to blame for obesity and overpopulation but only for insights into the influence (if any) of different factors. I suspect it's mostly down to genetics and the speed with which civilisation evolved, overtaking our capacity to adapt to a change in diet at the same time as our life expectancy has doubled.
Stephen -
Interesting to consider that rather than freeing humans from completely nomadic existence, to evolve a life where food is more consistently available, and more opportunity has presented itself for pursuit of the arts, that the advent of agriculture could have been a less than completely positive development. But it does seem plausible, now that you mention it, that without agriculture, and the accompanying growth of "civilization," humans would have had less opportunity to exercise greed, war, and efforts in general to subjugate their neighbors. That actually sounds like an opportunity gained for more aggression. I guess the future depends on humans making better use of their free time. :-)
This question, Was agriculture a benign or malign invention? does allow for interesting speculation. Considering a statistical analysis point-of-view. Like many social and medical studies, I suppose, you could consider this as possibly an opportunity for application of multiple regression. The problem with multiple regression is that some regressors interact with others in very complex ways. Even if you find some associations, you need some theory to consider whether or not there may actually be a causal relationship, as statistics cannot tell you that.
So we cannot really say that x definitely led to y, as such relationships are probably more complicated than that. But to speculate that not all aspects of the development of agriculture may have been 'healthy,' sounds like a healthy exercise.
As for the book you mentioned, that sounded a bit extreme to me. Not having heard of it, I searched the Internet, and found this review on an NIH website:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC518678/
My personal 'theory' is that real differences between men and women have never been so great as our cultures have generally assigned to them. It's mostly just steroids.
The comparison of hunter (men/steroids)-gatherer(women/child-bearers) to agrarian lifestyles/changing roles could perhaps use more scrutiny for us to learn more about ourselves.
The nutritional considerations that you and Brian discussed were quite interesting. I drifted into vegetarianism, just because I love animals - not that they don't eat each other - but I think humans are natural omnivores who need a balanced diet, and I find the idea of making a child a vegetarian - or worse, a vegan - to be an alarming idea. We human animals likely do best with a balanced diet. So protein-heavy vs carbohydrate-heavy diets sound like lose-lose propositions to me.
But I'm not an expert on any of this, just a speculating amateur. It is , however, an interesting question to contemplate, and seems to challenge an old and perhaps too easily accepted paradigm: that agriculture has just been a good thing.
You asked what other ways agriculture could have developed, and I feel completely stumped there, with an embarrassing lack of imagination on such a topic. It would be very interesting to hear someone else's speculation on that, however.
Cheers - Jim
Brian- overall, agriculture is a much more sedentary life style than hunting-gathering. Development of agriculture freed men from frequent, if not daily, expeditionary searching and hunting trips for food, since they were able to get a year's supply of food by few weeks' or months' effort . This gave them a lot of free time to develop art, other intelectual potentials, and civilizations.
Friends - thank you for your replies.
James - thanks for the ref. to the review of Sykes's book. I agree with all of it – in fact I skipped a lot of the last sections. Nevertheless the argument that agriculture was indirectly responsible for aggression in men and for the attraction of females to powerful men was new to me, interesting and convincing. I have nothing to do with agriculture but I was (once) a biochemist and acquired an interest in nutrition working in the food industry. I ended up as a consultant in water management. In this capacity was I asked in 2000 by WWF to carry out a number of Cost Benefit Analyses of large scale transfers of water between river basins (to provide material to support their opposition to the Yangtse-Yellow River transfer then planned by China). One of the case studies that I selected (having read Marc Reisner’s “Cadillac Desert”) was California. Farmers growing watermelons in a desert rely on irrigation water costing around 1$/cubic meter to provide, for which they pay a few cents. The balance, representing the cost of dams and engineering works, was provided by the Federel Govt and is still being paid for by taxpayers who also buy the $25 billion worth of food that California produces.
Another irony has recently come to light.
America produces roughly twice as much food as the country needs, 40% of which is thrown away after purchase but before use. I presume most of the remaining 10% is consumed and appears in the consumers as obesity, fuelling a type II diabetes epidemic. (Farmers are actually now protesting because the water is running out.)
I am now revising my reports for publication on RG to include not just a CBA but a full accounting of the cost of water subsidies in California.
The EU has plenty of water but, in nations suffering from obesity crises, food subsidies sound absurd.
But still, I cannot imagine an alternative to agriculture that would have allowed the development of humanity on the scale and at the rate that it has achieved. Even if there were an alternative it is unreasonable to expect our ancestors to have had the foresight and the power to change things.
Patrick
We are speculating in any case but 7000 - 8000 years is a short time in evolution (about 300 – 400 generations) and the greatest rate of human development has taken place during this period. I don’t know whether our DNA shows any signs of concurrent rapid genetic change but I doubt it because a small genetic change can produce a large change in phenotype (eg dogs). I wonder if the pace of recent development does not owe something to the male drive for “success”. I would expect the evolution of this drive to require a number of successive genetic changes. The usual cause of rapid change is sexual selection – in this case “successful” males would offer females better reproductive opportunities and would be sought-after spouses. This ensures a rapid spread of the associated genes and, worse, the intensification of the characteristics of the phenotype.
I don’t think ‘knowing how to kill’ is sufficient nor that agrarian culture and the law have tamed our acquisitive characteristics. The problem is that we did not evolve to meet an objective like ‘ a house, wife, 3 kids and $100 000 in the bank’; many of us never feel we have “enough” which account for wealth inequality. Fortunately not every male in every generation is like this ......but ...... enough are to create inequality and tension. Some educators believe that competitiveness is a Good Thing and I agree, but we also need to be taught the rules and customs of our society in order to temper and moderate our acquisitive instincts.
Mrs Thatcher in the UK thought that the purpose of education is to prepare us for Work. If someone said “Surely it is to prepare us for Life!” she would have said “Yes, of course, but what’s the difference?”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reprieve-for-men-y-chromosome-is-not-vanishing/
argues that the existential decline of the Y chromosome has been overstated and that it has several functions that are too important to disappear. If the authors are right this removes the central plank, but not the subsidiary ones, from Sykes's book. Nevertheless there are counter-arguments to these too.
At best I believe Sykes has over-simplified an issue that is much more complex than he thinks.
Agriculture is considered as most humanised art of all cultures, besides feeding the world , therefore i reckon , it is undoubtedly benign than malign, however , latter is manageable
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