By Lee Vincent, March, 2006

I love those grand farms in Maine and New Hampshire – and in Northwestern France -- where the barn is joined to the side of the house. So convenient in a hard winter. Farmer and spouse can tend to the beasts without being fully outdoors. And every kind of pest can easily come into the house, because they don’t have to crawl forty yards across hard frozen ground or snow. So convenient for them, too. There are almost no germs and few other vermin that crawl more than a few inches across ice and snow.

Of course, settled, agricultural societies did gain obvious advantages. Those surpluses and wealth that they built up could be used to create armed forces and drive the others out of all the good territories. People in larger towns and cities were attacked by more diseases, but they also built up immunities. The real reason why settled peoples were able to conquer others was often not by force of arms. It was because the invaders had gained immunities, but they brought with them diseases that their opponents could not resist, and so the losers got themselves conquered more by diarrhea and dehydration and such than by swords and arrows.

Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and long-lasting life-style in history. The change over to agriculture probably happened as much by accident as anything else. Tribes somehow got a little to large to move around, and so they figured out how to make more food happen in the place they were at. The result was starvation, warfare and tyranny in most of the world, most of the time – and even for us, we got the multitude of chronic diseases that I would guess account for 80-95% of the time and money we spend on medical matters.

Not much we can do, now, about all this. But it accounts for how we got to where we are.

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