The Greatest Mistake in History
A Talk Given Before the Groton-Ledyard (CT) Rotary Club
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We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in human history. We are mostly safe from starvation and predators.
But for most of human existence, people hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants of a great many kinds. Philosophers have always told us that kind of life was short, nasty and brutish. Since hunter-gatherers had no way to store and preserve food, there was never a respite from the struggle that started every day at dawn’s first light. Every day, there was a forced march to find food and stave off starvation. On the other hand, keep in mind that in those times, everyone lived in warm climates.
And 10,000 years ago, people invented agriculture and they began to escape from privation and the terror of death. They domesticated both plants and animals. And most people stopped moving around. They stayed in one place, or at most they commuted back and forth twice a year between upland and lowland pastures. But somehow a few tribes of hunter-gatherers still survive today.
Why did almost all of our ancestors adopt agriculture and animal husbandry? Seems like a silly question. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. Planted crops yield tons more per acre than wild roots and berries. Imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts that animals hadn’t eaten, and from chasing wild animals with poor weapons – and they suddenly see a cultivated orchard down in a valley, and a pasture full of meaty, wooly sheep. Wouldn’t they convert to sedentary life in a New York minute?