The Evil And Suffering that Come With The Transition To Agriculture
WRITER: Pang, Yiu Kai (彭耀階) HONG KONG
June, 2017.
Farming’s harm does not rest in damaging the earth’s life support system alone,
there’s nothing exaggerating if we say farming
works in pushing humans into a purgatory like situation. Paleopathological
studies reveals that right at the onset of agriculture the earliest farmers all
suffered from mulnutrition and it’s deficiency related diseases and physique.
This phenomenon is prevalent among the earliest farmers in different places in
the world, while the same studies on pre-neolithic hunter gatherers show no sign
of similar problems.
Health deterioration is prevalent among the earliest farmers but not among the
latest hunter gatherers right before the agricultural transition. Modern city
dwellers find this difficult to digest as they have been soaked in the
overwhelming information of three eras of human “progress”:
The development from hunting-gathering to agriculture and to
industrialization. However, on the other hand, health deterioration conclusion
can easily be found to be reasonable upon pondering as farm yield contains far
less complete protein and B complex than a meat-fruit
mixture, and neolithic men’s knowledge about nutrition has to be very limited,
they had no idea that depending on grain as their main food could lead to
complete protein and B complex deficiency.
N
Health deterioration is only small matter comparing to the end of the lifestyle
without long hours of annoying labouring. Farming has to involve a lot of daily
hardwork: soil tilling, weed clearing, …, all are kinds of time consuming
repetitive labour, completely not comparable to the fun of game chasing and
fruit collecting of the hunter gatherers. Even worse, the matter was not easily
reversible. The earliest farmers who found the farming life not worthwhile quite
often could not revert back to hunting gathering. Once the natural growth forest
had been cleared to create farmland, gaming animals and wild fruit dissappeared,
even
the earliest farmers
later
had
abandoned using the
farmland , game and fruit could
not come back within a
few
decade’s time, you had to migrate to other places if you
wanted to. Not only so, the remaining hunter gatherers would
also
find livelihood
much more difficult when the neighbouring tribes had taken up farming. Since the
surrounding wild forests were cut down, the remaining barren land could no
longer support the game animals and wild fruits they need. The same thing
happened again in the post WW2 Tanzania Haksa hunter gatherer tribes.
Crumbling Invaluable Social Values
Daily repetitive hard labour is still small matter comparing to the crumbling of
hunter gatherer social values. Decades of recent in depth anthropological
studies reveals that nearly all existing mobile hunter gatherer tribes exercise
equality measures strickly, from the distribution of food and necessities to
political power over the tribe, i.e., they exercise a kind of direct democracy.
Only stationary or farming tribes are different. At first sight such phenomenon
seems incomprehensible, some may have practiced direct democracy by chance, but
how can they all realize the social values that people in the mainstream
agricultural and industrial societies have fought for centuries and still cannot
realize? But if we can employ a little systems thinking and have some
understanding of how the tribespeople live in the wilderness, we should be able
to find out why.
Basically an individual hunter gatherer can live by himself or his family in the
wild, they voluntarily join the tribe for more secured food supply, more play
mates(hunter gatherer tribespeople mostly like playing collective games), and
more secured old age etc., should they find the tribe treat them not fair, they
can simply go away, turn to live by himself or his family in the wilderness. So
a particular tribe cannot maintain it’s member if they don’t treat everyone
equally, this explains why nearly all mobile hunter gatherer tribes stick to
equality principle so strictly. Non-mobile ones not necessarily follow the
equality principle may be because stationary ones have turned the surrounding
Nature far less food supportive due to a change in their food getting and
population practice. The pre-requisite they can become stationary must be
because they can produce food themselves, such as cattle or poultry rearing, or
planting food crops, etc., so that they don’t have to move away when the game
animals in the region has been dwindled. This ability also enables them to
settle down , enjoy living in bigger and more complex houses and owning more
matter, tools and wealth. Their ability to produce food also allows them to grow
in population, not having to abide by the food constraint of the surrounding
regional ecosystem, which also ends up in a tribal population much larger than
the surrounding Nature’s game, fruit can support and thus leads to over
hunting-gathering. This’s the very reason why stationary tribes do not
necessarily exercise full equality among all members. When a power and privilege
seeking leader suddenly emerges in a tribe, the deprived ones may want to leave,
but are detered by the fear that they may not be able to make a living in the
wilderness, in the end they choose to stay, swallow up the inequality or even
exploitation.
The transition from mobile hunting gathering to stationary type is also
irreversible for reasons mentioned above. This may also be the very cause humans
switch to argriculture economy from hunting gathering, at least anthropologists
can find no good reason that our ancestors should make such a transition, but
there should have been arbitrary changes, if the change by chance is
irreversible, then an all out transition to agriculture is possible.
What Price To Pay For?
What is the lure of agriculture? Or better we first ask what is the price to pay
for switching to agriculture instead. The price are of two kinds, manifest and
hidden ones. The manifest ones are daily mechanical repetition of manual labour,
humans usually find this kind of work annoying and hard to bear if they have to
do that for whole day every day. The second manifest one is longer working hour
and so less time for friends, family, and group activities. The third manifest
one is less tasty food. In mobile hunting gathering tribes, tribesmen all know
that the amount of food they can get has to be what the surrounding Nature can
give them, so they usually maintain a stable population. But in agricultural
villages, villagers usually think more people also mean more hands and so more
food yield, so they usually have a much larger population than what the natural
surrounding food yield can support, which unavoidably has lead to insufficient
game animals and wild fruit for the village to consume, wild tasty food has
become uncommon in their daily meals.
The Hidden Price: Social Hierarchy, Brutality, War, Empire, Slavery, Banishment From Eden
However, hidden prices cost the earliest farmer even much dearer. The first
hidden one is their worsened health. Agriculturists’ diet has to be mainly
vegetables and grains, without
sufficient complete proteins and B complex,
overpopulation also tightens their food supply, these two effects together make
the earliest farmers malnutritious and illness prone. The second hidden one is
ecosystem deterioration. The earliest farmers have to clear forests for farming,
overhunt and overgather the surrounding regional ecosystem, causing ecosystem
deterioration and habitat loss over long periods of time. As farming depends on
healthy regional ecosystem for good harvest, this also means the place will be
poverty strickened. The third hidden one is farming begets barter markets,
barter market begets money, money begets wealth amassing, wealth amassing begets
greediness, exploitation of natural resources and other people, emerging of
social hierarchy, power differentiation, fraternal society, army for conquering
other
peoples,
kingdoms, enslaving peoples in other defeated places, humans have fallen into a
purgetary state, and global environmental condition has dropped to an
unprecedented low.
The last hunter gatherers and the first farmers’ health have been examined by
physical anthropologists, while the last hunter gatherers’ regional environment
and the first farming villages’ surrounding environment have been examined by
archeologists, the effects of transition upon human health/nutrition and global
environmental conditions can thus be found out.
In the abstract of the thesis jointly prepared by the Isreal Antiquities
Authority, the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University, the Department
of Anatomy of Tel Aviv University, and the Department of Archaeology of
University College Cork of Ireland: “Paleopathology And The Origin Of
Agriculture In The Levant”, the authors summerize that “”The comparison of the
health profiles of pre-Neolithic (Natufian hunter gatherer, 10,500 – 8,300 BC)
and Neolithic (agricultural, 8,300 - 5500BC) population based on the study of
200 Natufian skeletons and 205 Neolithic skeletons reveals a higher prevalence
of lesions indicative of infective diseases among Neolithic population, and an
overall reduction in the prevalence of degenerative joint disease. These results
indicate that in the southern Levant the leolithic transition did not simply
lead to an overall deterioration in health but
rather resulted in a complex profile which was shaped by 1) an increase
exposure to disease agents, 2) changes in diet, 3) population aggregation in
larger and denser settlements, 4) changes in activity patterns and the division
of labour, and 5) a higher resistent immunological system and response capacity
to environmental aggressions (mainly infections). “”
The awful consequences of transition to farming does not end here, yet it’s
worthwhile to examine the emergence of empires and slavery in more detail as
it’s also a common mis-conception that war, empire and slaves are elements of
history since earliest human ancesters roam the grasslands and forests of
Africa, Asia and Europe. Empires and slavery are the necessary outcomes of war,
to suppose slavery was common since the onset of
human pre-history, we have to first conclude that war was rampant since
the earliest ancesters emerged. Yet the recent scientific studies of the hunter
gatherer tribes before and after the transition to agricultural ones reveal us
that war was not common before the transition, but turned rampant only after
that. One such representative studies was held by Douglas Fry and Patrik
Soderberg of Ado Akademi University in Finland. Their study in the US journal
“Science” suggests that the origins of war were not –as some has argued—rooted
in roving hunter gatherer groups, but rather, in cultures that held land and
livestock and knew how to farm for food.
In facing the various global environmental crisis, we are bewildered at the
unshakable human greediness, firmer than rock indifference to impending total
collapse, desperate grasp of money, power and social status……Modern people all
tend to believe this is human nature, but upon close examination of neo-lithic
hunter gatherer culture as against the agricultural ones, we quickly find that
this’s not the case, greediness, money, power, matter, status prone is only the
byproduct of agricultural and industrial civilizations, not
inherent
nature
of humans.