Agriculture: Humanity's Best, Worst Invention

Imagine this: you wake up in a beautiful meadow after a long, restful sleep. You watch the sunrise sparkle through the morning dew as you pick a hearty breakfast of nuts, berries, and mushrooms. Seeing storm clouds on the horizon, you head back to camp and find your family already packing together. You push your hand-carved canoes into the river and make your way downstream, past mountains and valleys teeming with life.

The river is so full of pink salmon that for dinner you simply snatch one from the river. At night, you sit around the fire. You've been rowing all day, but you're not exhausted, so you dance, kiss, hug, and tell each other stories as the warmth of the flames envelops you. When the stories end, you fall to the ground, hold your partner, and stare up at the sky, the Milky Way filling you with awe until you close your eyes for the night.

This was once the average day in the life of a human being. For nearly 300,000 years, we went where we pleased, wherever, whenever we pleased. We stayed fit, we explored a world mostly untouched by human hands. We ate a wide variety of rich, healthy, first-picked food, and without work to tie us down, we spent almost all of our time with the people we loved the most.

But then, things changed. In the Middle East around 10,000 BC, a few bands of hunter-gatherers started planting seeds rather than eating them—grains like barley and emmer. Other bands in China, Africa, and Central America would soon do the same, all independently of each other. We can only guess why. Maybe they grew tired of living in uncertainty. As hunter-gatherers, food was abundant but not infinite, and if they ran out, they went hungry. They could travel, of course, but venturing into new territory is always a gamble.

Without networks of communication or trade, it's impossible to know what lies on the other side of a mountain. There might be new dangerous predators or rival tribes ready to protect their land by force. You wouldn't, and you couldn't, know. The simple act of putting a seed in the ground freed humanity from that fate. It promised us stability and control. If you can make your own food supply, you can make sure you'll never go hungry. You can settle down, roots rather than stray into the unknown. You can control the world rather than be controlled by it.

This was the beginning of human civilization, the simple act that set the modern world in motion. But when it comes to human happiness and well-being, some argue that planting seeds was our greatest mistake.

Imagine this: you wake up before dawn and eat two handfuls of wheat. On your walk outside, you pick stray oats from your rotting teeth. You spend the entire day beneath the harsh sun, as the field of grain offered no shade to shelter you. By midday, your back already aches from bending over again and again to water plants, pull weeds from the ground, and chew away pests.

When you finally return to the comfort of your home for another serving of wheat, you learn that your child is sick. They collapsed, falling under this way of some kind of curse. The village shaman feeds them a poppy flower to soothe their suffering, but he can't stop the curse itself. It's an illness hastened through the goats they kept. Viral diseases were rare among hunter-gatherers, but forcing other animals to live alongside us changed that.

When you go next door to ask for support and advice from your friend, you pass it to him, and he passes it to his family. As humans now live together in enclosed spaces, even those who don't know you soon fall ill. By the end of the summer, half the village is dead. When a blight hits your fields just before harvest time, killing off the one genetically identical crop you chose to grow, those few who remain soon starve.

This is admittedly a worst-case scenario. While we could imagine a similar horrible year in the life of a hunter-gatherer—one where your brother gets eaten by a lion and your grandmother dies of exposure—the day-to-day lives of agriculturalists were unambiguously worse than those of their ancestors. Farmers worked much longer, had fewer new and exciting experiences, and were more vulnerable to illness.