Was the Agricultural Revolution a Terrible Mistake? Not If You Take Food Processing Into Account
Mongongo Nut Tree
The Thesis: Hunter-Gatherers Were Affluent Because They Had Ample Leisure
“Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. . . The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.”
So declared Yuval Noah Harari last year in his best seller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015).
Judging by the 1000 plus reviews on Amazon of which only about 10% are negative, lots of his readers are buying into the agriculture-was-a-disaster theory.
Just imagine. Work for a couple of days or a bit more, then lie back and chat with visitors, snooze away the afternoon, dance in the evening. The Garden of Eden hardly offered better. Perhaps the agricultural revolution was a mistake.
I’m not going to take on all aspects of the agriculture-as-disaster theory. What interests me is the idea that farmers worked harder than foragers. It’s based on a limited number of studies of hunter-gatherer work. One of the most important, dealing with the Kalahari bushmen, turns out to be bunk.
I’m not the first to have discovered this by any means (see below). But it’s shocking and important to me.
The agriculture-as disaster theory rests, at least in part, on ignoring the work involved in processing and cooking food. If you take cooking and processing into account, agriculture was not a disaster.
Since processing and cooking is my major theme and since it interests most readers of this blog, forgive me for going on a bit.
Background to the Agriculture-As-Disaster Theory
You’ve probably already heard the agriculture-was-a-disaster theory. It’s hardly new. It’s been around in its modern form since the 1960s.
In 1972, the prominent anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins in Stone Age Economics lauded forager-gatherers as having found a “zen road to affluence. ” Their few needs easily met, a sharp contrast to the endless wants of urban dwellers. They had so much leisure, he suggested, that much of the time they hardly knew what to do with themselves.
In 1989, Mark Nathan Cohen in Health and the Rise of Civilization added the important wrinkle that health appeared to have deteriorated with the transition to agriculture.
By then, Jared Diamond had taken the agriculture-as-disaster theory beyond anthropologists to the general public. His 1989 article in Discover Magazine was titled “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race“–the mistake being farming. When in 1997 he repeated the theory in the Pulitzer-prize-winning mega-best seller, Guns, Germs and Steel, it entered classrooms, living rooms and book clubs across the United States.
The Evidence: The Bushmen of the Kalahari Could Gather Enough Mongongo Nuts to Survive in 2-1/2 Days a Week
One very important line of evidence for the leisured hunter-gatherer thesis came from research carried out on the !Kung San, hunter gatherers in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa, by Richard B. Lee in the early 1960s. It was much discussed at an important conference, Man the Hunter, held shortly thereafter.
The Bushmen had a “work week . . . of 2.4 days per adult,” Lee claimed in The !Kung San. Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society, 1979, chapter 9 (link to relevant chapter), 250-280.
Oh wow.
He continued, the bushmen “appeared to enjoy more leisure time than the members of many agricultural and industrial societies.”
The Problem: Food Processing was Not Counted as Work
But read on
“To accept the proposition that housework is work . . . does not mean that housework should necessarily be brought into the sphere of capitalist wage labor. . . . I have considered housework [defined as including food processing, tending the fire, collecting firewood] as a separate category in order to make these data comparable with data on industrial and other societies.”
Jeepers creepers.
Perhaps it is a good idea to try to compare hunter-gatherers with modern industrial workers. But at the expense of not counting food processing when considering the work load of hunter gatherers? Really?
Consider Lee’s figures on the “different” category of housework.
Mongongo nuts. Wikipedia
8 hours a week spent cracking mongongo nuts (minimum, not clear if this includes preliminary cooking to soften the shell or subsequent time extracting the kernel), p. 270
4-7 hours a week spent making and repairing tools (35-64 mins daily), p.277.
15-22 hours a week spent on butchery, meat cooking, and fuel collection (2.2-3.2), p. 278 (no mention of carrying water in ostrich shells).
In short, each adult spent between 27 and 37 hours a week on food processing and ancillary activities: fuel, water and tools.
Assume an eight-hour work day. Therefore: 3.5-4.5 days a week spent on food processing, tools, fuel, and water.
That is, given any reasonable sense of work, bushmen spent more time dealing with the food they collected than collecting it.
As so often in history, food processing took longer (and took more energy) than collecting or producing food.
Thus the total work week for the bushmen on the lowest of estimates turns out to be between 6 and 7 eight-hour days (not counting child care).
Lee also claimed that a nut-collecting expedition yielded 1900 kcals per forager hour.
Later re-calculations by Kristen Hawkes and J.F. O’connell adding in the time to process the nuts suggested a much lower figure of 670 kcals per forager hour.
Turning Mongongo Nuts into Food
In case you’re curious, a little on mongongo nuts. They’re supposed to be pretty nutritious, though mention is also made of their indigestibility. They’re certainly not that easy to process.
“The difficulty of extracting the kernel is one reason why exploitation of mongongo has been so limited, ” says the New Agriculturalist. This reminds me of the problem faced by those who wanted to market macadamia nuts, which was delayed until a way was found to crack them without destroying the kernel.
Mongongo nuts come from a tree that grows widely across southern Africa. Sometimes its Latin name is given as Schinziophyton rautanenii and sometimes as Ricinodren rautanenii, so don’t let that throw you off.
“The nuts ripen between March and May. A thin egg-shaped layer of edible flesh surrounds a thick, hard, pitted nut shell, and if you can break into that there is a hazelnut-sized kernel inside.
The nut shell stores well for much of the year, a big plus for the hungry forager. Even the dried, crumbly flesh of old fruit is edible -there may be edible dried fruit on the ground for as long as eight months, overlapping the fall of the new crop. Some bushmen remove the flesh from the fresh fruit, dry it in the sun, and store it for use later in the year.
Both Bantu and Bushman peoples use the fruits, with the modern preference being to boil the whole fruit to remove the tough and indigestible outer skin, and make a sweet, maroon colored porridge – very similar to ‘applesauce'(USA)/stewed apples (British colonial) – from the flesh,” says the Natural Food Guide
So the flesh is nice, but it’s the kernel that packs the calories. Continuing from the same source.
“The big value is in the seed. The skin takes up 10% of the fruit by volume, the flesh 20%. The remaining 70% is the nut-like seed, including the wide hard shell around it. The ‘shell’ (endocarp) around the ‘kernel’ is very thick indeed, and although porous, it is very hard and tough. So hard that even elephants, which love the sweet fruit, can’t crack them.”
Edwin A. Menninger, in ‘Edible Nuts of the World’ says: “A forester in Rhodesia [Zimbabwe] sent this author some Manketti nuts and on the package under the scientific name Ricinodendron, he had written “recovered from elephant dung”. This startled me. The nuts are like oversized pecans which have had smallpox and were covered with pockmarks.
I wrote the forester to ask why the special inscription, and he replied that there are three reasons: (1) The elephants eat the fruits greedily and it is much easier to let the elephants do the job of picking; (2) The seed will not germinate until it has spent a week inside the elephant, and (3) The elephant enjoys the fruit but his digestive mechanism does not affect the extremely hard shell and the nut inside.
The natives of Rhodesia, therefore, follow the elephant, recover the hardshelled nuts where they have been dropped, clean and dry them, then crack the extremely hard shell, and find the contents perfectly delicious.”
So you get your nuts the best way you can.
The bushmen walk out of camp, collect them, pile them into sacking, judging by the photographs on Lee’s site at the University of Toronto. Then they lug 40 plus pounds back to camp on their backs. It must have been more laborious before sacking was available.
An adult bushman consumes about 300 nuts a day, according to Lee. A tree yields about 900 nuts a year. That means visiting about 122 trees a year for every bushman.
“Once collected, the hard shell can be broken between two rocks, and the single kernel (sometimes there are two) extracted. It is easier to crack if it is roasted in a fire first – or, as in some areas, covered in sand and a fire built on top.” Natural Food Guide
Reflections on the Agricultural Revolution as a Mistake
It’s good to question sacred cows, and the idea that the shift to farming was good had been a sacred cow since at least the Scottish Enlightenment (even if both the Bible and Romantics saw it as a disaster).
At the same time, however, the glee with which many of the “foraging is great” camp seized on the reported data about the short work week of the foragers has always given me pause. It seems more because it confirms their pre-existing suspicions about progress than a simple acceptance of scientific evidence.
Now I would be the last to claim that the life of farmers through most of history was a whole bundle of fun. It was usually grindingly hard work. On the other hand, most of history has been a pretty hard haul. And most changes in history have had uneven consequences.
The great thing about the research by Lee that set the recent re-thinking of the agricultural revolution rolling was that it was based on numbers, on observations of hours worked. I am all for trying to quantify claims. Even when it can’t be done exactly, it sharpens and clarifies the issues at stake.
Lee’s results, though, were horribly flawed by a concept of work that as what happened outside the household, thus eliminating all the tedious daily chores of collecting water and firewood, preparing carcasses and plants, and then cooking them.
A bit of personal history here. One of the things that impelled me to write Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History was Guns, Germs and Steel. The Fates of Human Societies.
I loved the grand scale but hated that part two “The Rise and Spread of Food Production,” a long 100 pages’ worth, was in fact about farming, not food. If you looked at the index, there were no entries under cooking and none under processing.
It is ridiculous to equate food and farming.
(1) Farms produce far more than the raw materials for food. They also supply us with raw materials for clothing, with fuel, and often with the raw materials for housing.
(2) Conversely farm products are not food, not until they have been processed and cooked.
Diamond’s lack of interest in cooking and processing was part of a consistent pattern going all the way back to the evidence Sahlins drew on for the leisured hunter-gatherer.
Eating is the whole point of acquiring the raw materials for food, whether by gathering or by farming. Until we pay attention to the time and energy required to turn these raw materials into food by processing and cooking, we’re not going to have an adequate history of the fates of human societies.
“Why should we plant when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?” said a bushman to Richard B. Lee in the mid-1960s (reported in Man the Hunter, 1968, 33).
Well, because although the life of a farmer is hard and the diet can be monotonous, I find it hard to imagine that “it’s less stimulating and varied” than slogging around collecting mongongo nuts, or that the diet is worse than a daily ration of 300 mongongo nuts and a bit of stewed bush meat.
________
For more criticisms of the agriculture-as-disaster theory, see
David Kaplan, The Darker Side of the “Original Affluent Society (2000).
Robert Kelly, Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers (2013).
Wonderful photographs by Richard Lee of life among the Kung. Unfortunately under copyright.
I think the question to ask is “If hunter-gathering was so great, why did people stop doing it?”
Matt Ridley, in his book The Rational Optimist, covers some of the points about why we as a species moved away from hunter-gathering to agriculture. As a species agriculture started before the Younger Dryas (which halted it) and then after the YD, agriculture took off and popped up in many places simultaneously rather than spread (I’m taking Matt’s word for it).
It seems that trade had a lot to do with agriculture. Eventually, people decided planting and tending was easier than going long distances to get the needed grain. Agriculture raised the density of the desired plants in an area and the people as well. Farmers stayed in one place for a while and had an affinity for places that had settlements since they could sell or trade their surplus grain there. In the settlements, people specialized at particular jobs and purchased or traded for goods and services they wanted.
Ridley says, “…human beings have been moving away from self-sufficiency and toward mutual interdependence for 100,000 years…..Trade is much older than farming: Australian aborigines used to trade stone axes for sting-ray barbs over long distances, showing that hunter-gatherers can benefit from exchange. The advent of agriculture accelerated the trend toward specialization—but not everywhere. In temperate zones, farming encouraged trade, but in the tropics subsistence farmers often ate and wore their own produce.”
He says that in the temperate zones grain could be traded because it was durable.
If hunter-gathering were such a great gig, we’d all still be doing it.
Agreed with all this, Norm. But I like to get down into the weeds perhaps a bit more than Matt Ridley (whom I admire immensely) does. And I also would put the emphasis differently from him and from all these anthropologists. The real question is not why did we farm but why did we choose roots and tubers. Once that choice was made farming more or less followed, I think.
Could be because of the perks there were. Hunter-gatherers didn’t have a stable food supply, while farmers did. They may have been unaware of the cons of farming.
Very interesting and enjoyable post. It is also claimed though, I thought, that life expectancy dropped a bit and diet deteriorated with transition from hunter-gathering to early farming, is that true?
Yes, that is also claimed and may be true. I’m simply taking on the work issue here. And given the horrible data (I didn’t mention that this was collected over only one month, that that month was one of the most abundant of the year, that the bushmen have iron pots and other tools), I tend to be a priori skeptical about the health data.
This is great! Part of my thesis is on how underrepresented women are in the archaeological record and archaeological literature because of the oft-unstated research focus on “men’s work” and “masculine spheres” – that is, hunting/trapping/fishing and the public domain. (Not that there haven’t been instances of women doing these activities.) I’m sure even the calculations of workers in industrial contexts looked at paid work, not childcare, homemaking, or cooking, all of which went (and still go) unpaid – I found the movie Suffragette to be really illustrative of this. The protagonist, despite having a job as a laundress, still goes home and continues working while her husband ends his work at closing hours. It persists in the idea of the stay-at-home mom “not working”. I wonder whether it was the men or women doing all the nut processing?
The interesting thing about this is that the author claims that work, whether gathering or processing, was spread pretty equally between men and women.
Even so, it’s telling that his economic model is one that sharply divides household/non-household work. I need help from economists on this.
Good luck with your project.
Interesting! I’ll have to read the study – might be able to include it. Yes, the paradigm of the researcher always affects the study, and it’s particularly evident in fieldwork from the 60s.
If you look carefully, I have a link to a pdf of the relevant chapter. Just click on the link for chapter 9. Is the influence of overarching sociopolitical theories on the fieldwork of the 60s much discussed in anthropology? Do you have a reference? Would love to know it.
Ah, thanks – have saved them all, as I’m actually working on that chapter today. There is awareness of paradigmatic shifts – I’m an archaeologist actually, so one of the foundation texts for this is Binford 1981 “Paradigms, Systematics, and Archaeology”:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3629594
Although shortly thereafter, Conkey & Spector 1984 published their landmark paper on gender in archaeology, pointing out that actually no previous work had considered the role of women, even Binford’s New Archaeology (linked and discussed here http://www.thesubversivearchaeologist.com/2011/12/touchstone-thursday-margaret-w-conkey.html)
Additionally, a critique of much of the work done in that era is that it’s overly colonialist and patronizing, which is a critique that still carries through to fieldwork today despite pushes for local involvement.
Feel free to email for more – stacy hackner (at) gmail dot com
Hi, Stacy, Thanks so much for all this. War, babies, old people. So much to take into account. And, ah, so that’s the context for Binford and the new archaeology. Very useful references, thanks again.
I’m a Jared Diamond detractor as much as anyone, but he isn’t solely to blame for spreading the agriculture-as-mistake hypothesis beyond anthropologists. It was circulating in the ecological/new age/neopagan community around the same time: I first saw it in Daniel Quinn’s “The Story of B” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_B; I’ve never inquired much further into the question. If you want a copy, I’d be happy to send mine to a good home…
Jon, I’d never run across Daniel Quinn. Yikes. And thanks for the offer of the book but if I add any more to my collection my husband will, well I’m not sure what, but it won’t be pleasant. I may have over-estimated Diamond’s influence because of the PBS series and the fact that my granddaughter was assigned GGS in high school.
Little discussion here on division of labor. When a forager no longer has to forage because someone else is farming a surplus he or she can study medicine to help the sick, invent tools to facilitate building a home, build roads to facilitate travel etc. Abundance of food probably led to less warfare over foraging turf. What happened to forager who broke a leg and could no longer forage? What about women raising children, both of whom couldn’t forage?
Good points all. There are many, many aspects to the transition to agriculture and I have picked only one.
I can only argue that abundance of food did not lead to a reduction in war: the opposite, if only because there were more humans to have conflicts. Conflict over territory still happens, and has happened since at least the first writing. Archaeological evidence of war is from the Paleolithic – Jebel Sahaba in Sudan (13000BP) and the recent discovery at Lake Turkana, announced this week. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/science/prehistoric-massacre-ancient-humans-lake-turkana-kenya.html?_r=0
For children, the argument is that “female hips” are wide enough that a woman can carry a child on her hip with one arm while gathering with the other. (I’m convinced of the antiquity of baby slings, though there’s no archaeological evidence). More likely infants were taken care of by older people past childbearing age. There’s a theory that humans started living past childbearing (the grandparent theory) in order to help raise the next generation and pass on knowledge, although it’s tenuous as other primates can have long life spans under good conditions. Additionally, there’s proof from 500,000 years ago that humans (and other Homo sp) were taking care of the injured, disabled and elderly. http://news.discovery.com/history/disabled-elderly-human.htm
Rachel, you bring a needed female (not necessarily feminist) perspective. It’s blatantly sexist to ignore food processing, cooking, child care and everything except gathering nuts and say you’ve counted work hours.
Agreed Pearl, though I was a little surprised to see how much Lee emphasized that both men and women were involved in procuring and processing food. So it’s a slightly angled perspective from the one often presented.
If one reads Greek mythology – in particular the myths of Athena [olive tree] Demeter [cereal goddess] the ancient Greeks believed that civilization itself happened when man began living in permanent settlements, growing and processing his food {flour and olive oil – later Dionysis and grape wine].. In fact barbarians to the ancient Greeks were those lived beyond the region where olive trees grew. From what I understand, men were the hunters and women did the gathering [and we assume, cooking, but the male hunters were definitely even in those days in charge of the BBQ, just read Homer if you don’t believe me!]
I have written extensively about food in ancient Greek mythology and anyone who cares to explore this further can contact me at lmakrisambrosia@gmail.com. Very interesting that anyone in this day and age would think that mankind would be better off searching far and wide for his food and then eating it raw. Getting back to natural, less processed foods is another matter, but sustainable agriculture is the name of the game these days. Very interesting debate. Linda Makris, Athens Greece
Thanks for this, Linda. Couldn’t agree with you more. Chinese mythology also celebrates agriculture, as do many others. I will contact you by email.
Hi Rachael, Thanks for another super crunchy blog post. Your words have just rewired my mind on this subject.
This finds me out in Trans-Pecos Texas, where in times past the indigenous hunter gatherers, whom I imagine had all the girth of say, Ziggy Stardust, had to do some verily prodigious food processing. Scattered around the various oases out in the deserts here are not only rock art sites but deep holes in the rock made from their grinding seeds.
Over in California, the processing of acorns– the staple food there where they did not have corn– was also impressive, as my sister, then a school teacher, informed me. Her class was soaking a pot of acorns, to remove the tannins, part of the long preparation for making gruel and/or flour. One can now buy acorn flour on-line but, boy howdy it is pricey, because of the labor involved. Imagine: I grew up in California (vaguely recall 4th grade California history which involved making a mission out of a shoebox and papier mache) and had no idea that anyone ever actually ate acorns! All of which is to say, the disconnect between so many historians and the vital importance food processing doesn’t surprise me.
Thanks again, and regards from your fan,
Hi Catherine, You are not on that buffalo jump trip, are you? If so, I am green with envy. Yes, grinding seeds in holes in the rock must have been a pretty time consuming business, fine in spring and fall, not much fun in the heat of summer or the cold of winter. I shall check out acorn flour on line. And think of you making missions out of shoe boxes and the disconnect between that and the grand buildings in the center of Coyoacán. And yes, there is a huge disconnect.
If there was no agriculture, were we here to discuss all this? With all our free time and with all our brains? Aren’t we able to discuss – to abstact – because we’ve grown up as human beings that could give themselves enough food? Don’t we thank that to agriculture? Could hunting/gathering have provided us of this much and variated food?
And don’t we have time to think and to discuss all these things because we don’t need to work and work and work thanks to mechanisation. Well, I am glad to be a farmers daughter in a next generation than that of my hard-working beloved parents. They milked ten cows two times a day, fed the pigs and took the eggs. Looks like pastorale to people of these days. To them a few days ‘nothing’ would be a pastorale.
Sorry Rachel, quit this reaction if you think it has nothing to do with your subject, because it’s not about the time needed to provide your family a meal, but about the blessing of agriculture.
I’m a farmer’s daughter too Ineke and equally proud of it. At least in the English-speaking world, though, this idea that hunter gatherers had a leisured life has become near-orthodoxy in the past half century. Naturally that ignores all the cultural and social benefits that came with agriculture.
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Hi Dr. Laudan, great post as usual! It’s important to note, though, that feminists make similar accounting critiques of modern economics. Many have point out, for example, that modern accounting of “employment” doesn’t factor in a lot of the work women perform, especially inside the home. So it’s not clear that a full analysis would cut against hunter-gatherers in this respect. After all, modern women still spend a fair bit of time cooking — and as you point out, Rachel, it was only until relatively recently that food processing technology enabled women to avoid processing food for typically several hours each day. So before about 1900, the post-agricultural workweek would still look pretty bad for women; after 1900, the apparently benefits of agriculture are potentially confounded by the severe environmental effects of heavily-industrialized economies. So I don’t think we can rule out yet the idea that agriculture has on the whole been a step backwards.
Another interesting thing to note is that nuts are pretty low-reward compared to other goods obtained by “primitive” methods. Fruits typically require no processing, and yet they average 4750 calories per hour. (Although it must be said that there is high variability for the profitability of fruit foraging, even the low end is significantly higher than processed mongongo nuts.) Similarly, growing shoots typically require no processing, and provide about double the calories per hour of processed mongongo nuts in hunter-gatherer societies. (These figures are from the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History.)
Hi Robert,
Thanks for the thoughtful comments. As I have said to several other people, I’m not sure this is a male hunt/female process issue since females did a lot of the gathering and men a good bit of the processing. And after agriculture, men still do much of the processing of grains, for example. So I’d like to separate, at least conceptually, the acquisition and processing of raw materials from the question of men’s work versus women’s work. And as to the environment, my sense is that if you try to deal with all the factors at once, you just end up with confusion. So I’d like to keep it to the labor for now.
Fruits are nice, but seasonal, and not really consumible in large quantities except for a few starchy ones such as bananas and breadfruit. And because they are seasonal, they do need processing if they are to be a year round food.
So all very complicated. Thanks for the reference to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History. I must take a look at that.
I think you’re right that it’s best to keep the question of “female work” separate from modern vs. hunter-gatherer workweeks. That said, we should still include unpaid work in the modern workweek if we’re to have a proper comparison to those of hunter-gatherers. OECD citizens typically spend about 50 minutes a day cooking, and a little under half of that shopping. Adding these factors, along with commute times, makes the industrial workweek a lot less relatively desirable to hunter-gatherers’ than before.
I wouldn’t discount fruit so readily. In tropical and Mediterranean regions, where the large majority of humans live, fruits of some kind or another are available year-round. Even when fruits are scarce, tender greens — another fantastic source of nutrition, as any 400-pound gorilla will tell you — are typically plentiful. There are also many fruits that do not require processing to be eaten long-term: Certain squashes don’t ripen until months are coming off the vine, lots of other fruits need to be “bletted” in cold weather to be palatable, etc.
I also have to contest your assertion that fruits are not consumible in large quantities: over the summer I typically eat 70-80% of my food as fruit, and I’m pretty active. High-fruit diets are consistent with human physiology, as humans’ closest relatives eat large quantities of fruits, and the human digestive system has not changed in any ways that would make fruit harder to digest.
I realize now that I left off a link to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History entry, which made my post less helpful. So here you go: my figures were from p.395. https://books.google.com/books?id=ssNMAgAAQBAJ&pg=RA1-PA395&lpg=RA1-PA395&dq=mongongo+nuts+calories+per+hour&source=bl&ots=5Tlg2Y3b_5&sig=OVQ7m5vSQvN88bqkhQhW-26uWww&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjpzN_O0MvKAhWC0hoKHSFGBK4Q6AEIITAB#v=onepage&q=mongongo%20nuts%20calories%20per%20hour&f=false
Cheers!
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If agriculture is so great then tell me why people’s average lifespans decreased and why they got degenerative diseases? Part of the reason the huns and indo-european tribes could so easily conquer europe was because they had a diet that consisted entirely of meat and milk, while the native europeans ate almost nothing but grain based food which turned them into weak farmers who had to constantly battle against starvation. Also, your critique of the hard labour involved in nut processing is overstated. People did eat nuts occasionally but the majority of vitamins and proteins came from meat. Further, many regions didn’t have nuts, like the central asian steppes or the cold scandinavian north. People had no choice to eat nothing but meat and guess what, they did quite well.
This whole plant eating thing is exaggerated in anthropology. I can eat half a kilo of walnuts, a bunch of berries and after two ours I’m hungry again. Meat on the other hand satiates for a very long time so you’re wasting less time gathering edible plants when you’re already full and are set for the rest of the day. If you hunt big game and smoke it, then you’re set for several weeks. Imagine hunting a moose, smoking the meat and having free time for the next couple weeks. This is not possible with farming. Since agriculture our food supply has always been fragile and unstable. The great famine in Ireland would have never happened if people there hadn’t been farmers in the first place. If you are dependent on a two or three types of grain and animals that live closely to each other (infectious disease risk), then you put yourself in a very dangerous position.
We still haven’t solved all the problems that agriculture brought us 10.000 years ago (social stratification, division of labor, marginalization and oppression of women, wealth hoarding, culture wars etc.) and yet we cling to it. Maybe after all this time and numerous failed attempts to create lasting civilizations we should admit that the domestication and the attempt to dominate nature was indeed a terrible mistake.
I am guessing this comment was someone who has never hunted a moose with primitive weapons, then processed it with flint edges – food processing efforts are conveniently ignored by urban post-modernist “philosophers” – or tried to smoke a piece of meat in subzero temperatures in a howling blizzard. And who thinks that primitive hunter-gatherer society was – as those profs like to say – a paradise of equality and nonviolence. The pre-Columbian mass graves discovered all over North America would seem to put a question that conceit. This stuff is easy to spew when you are sitting in a climate controlled office somewhere pounding the keyboard on your laptop (delivered by airfreight) after a fruit salad for lunch (out of season delivered by airfreight from Chile) and…. well you get the drift.
No quarrel with your comments!
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