Agriculture's Impact on Society

• Archaeology is challenging the idea that human history has been a progressive journey.
• Agriculture led to negative consequences that continue to affect us.
• Agriculture brought about social inequality, sexual inequality, disease, and despotism.
• Modern life has some advantages over the Middle Ages, cave dwellers, and apes.
• Modern advantages include abundant food, advanced tools, longer lifespans, safety from starvation and predators, and access to energy from oil and machines.
• Hunter-gatherer societies involve hunting wild animals and foraging for plants.
• Hunter-gatherer life is often perceived as difficult, with constant food searches and a risk of starving.
• Agriculture started around 10,000 years ago, when people started domesticating plants and animals.
• Agriculture spread globally and now hunter-gatherer tribes are scarce.
• According to the ecological modernization perspective, agriculture is more efficient at producing food with less work.
• Agriculture can lead to storing crops and reduces the time needed to pick food.
• Agriculture enabled building Roman architecture and composing classical music like Bach and Beethoven.
• Progressivist views of agriculture are hard to prove regarding how the population was 10,000 years ago.
• Modern-day hunter-gatherers have plenty of leisure time and do not work as hard as farmers.
• The Bushmen dedicate only 12-19 hours per week to obtaining food.
• Hunter-gatherer diets offer more protein and balanced nutrients than the high-carbohydrate diets of farmers.
• Bushmen consume 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein per day.
• Hunter-gatherers are pushed into the world's worst real estate.
• There is an eco-modernist view that primitive people's lives improved when they switched to farming but this may not be correct.
• Archaeologists study the remains of wild and domesticated plants and animals found in prehistoric garbage dumps to understand when this all changed.

Paleopathology

• Paleopathology is studying signs of disease in ancient remains.
• Mummies and feces give insight on diseases from hookworm and other parasites.
• Skeletons reveal information such as sex, weight, and age to calculate average life spans.
• Paleopathologists use enamel defects on teeth to deduce growth rates of those who had childhood malnutritrion
• Paleopathologists recognize bone scarring caused by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.
• Skeletons from Greece and Turkey indicate hunter-gatherers were taller than people who adopted agriculture. The average height was 5’9 for men and 5’5 for women.
• By 3000 B.C. average heights dropped to 5'3" for men and 5' for women.
• At Dickson Mounds, skeletons show health declined when a hunter-gatherer culture switched to intensive farming.
• Farmers had a 50% increase in enamel defects (malnutrition), a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia, a threefold rise in bone lesions, and more degenerative spine conditions.
• Life expectancy at birth decreased from 26 years for the pre-agricultural community to 19 years for the post-agricultural community.
• The Indians at Dickson Mounds took up farming because they had to in order to provide basic needs to a growing community.

Agriculture Was Bad for Health

• Agriculture was bad for health as Hunter-gatherers had a more varied diet, while early farmers only ate staple crops.
• Farmers got lots of calories, but at the expense of poor nutrition.
• Farmers risked starvation if their limited crops failed.
• Agriculture creates crowded societies, which spreads parasites and infectious diseases.
• Crowding leads to increased risk of diseases.
• Epidemics cannot happen when populations are scattered.
• Tuberculosis and diarrheal diseases needed farming, while measles and bubonic plague needed large cities.

Agriculture and Artistic Expression

• Modern hunter-gatherers have just as much free time as farmers.
• Hunter-gatherers produced paintings and sculptures 15,000 years ago.
• Agriculture may led to the elites getting better, whilst the masses got worse.
• Farming sustains more people than hunting and gathering.
• Hunter-gatherers have low population densities; farmers have high population densities.
• Nomadic hunter-gatherers nurse their children for extended periods and are spaced four years apart.
• Farm women can bear a child every two years.
• Population densities of hunter-gatherers grew slowly at the end of the ice ages.
• As there was a need to feed more or limit growth, people failed to anticipate evils of faming.
• There was a need to force out or kill the sensible who refused to abandon lifestyle.
• Agriculture is considered to be the worst mistake as there waas a choice to limit a population which led to trying to increase food, starvation, warfare, and tyranny.
• Hunters and Gatherers hold the most successful and longest-lasting lifestyle.
• Humans struggle with agriculture and cannot solve it.
• As agriculture was adopted, the plight of famine-stricken ancestors gradually spread.

Explore agriculture's profound and lasting effects on society. Agriculture has brought social inequality, sexual inequality, disease, and despotism. While modern life offers advantages over hunter-gatherer societies, agriculture's consequences continue to shape our world.