Before Agriculture: Was It Humanity’s Biggest Mistake?

SPEAKER_01 0:00 Was agriculture humanity's biggest mistake? Many historians now widely agree the answer is yes. Sure, it gave us an abundance of food, allowed us to spread globally, to become the most dominant species on earth, but we'll give you six compelling reasons why agriculture made life as a human much worse.

SPEAKER_00 0:23 With some important caveats, as I think this topic is pretty easy to romanticize. To do this, we have to look back at what life was like before agriculture. And imagine a world where farming never took hold.

SPEAKER_01 0:38 Yeah, and before we go deeper, I do want to say this is um a lot of this is central to the argument of James C. Scott in his book Against the Grain, A Deep History of the Earliest States. And then Yuval Noah Harari famously said the agricultural revolution was history's biggest fraud.

SPEAKER_00 0:56 And Jared Diamond says the adoption of agriculture was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. Basically, good for the species, but bad for the individual.

SPEAKER_01 1:12 Yeah, so this isn't just our opinion. There is some basis for this argument. Even anthropologists like Marshall Saulins have argued that hunter-gatherers may have actually lived more leisurely, more balanced lives than we do today. And I even recently heard historian Rutge Bregman make a similar point. But I want to let you make your mind up.

SPEAKER_00 1:32 Now, to be clear, agriculture didn't directly cause all of these things, but it created the conditions that made them possible, like urbanization, industrialization, and things like that. So before agriculture, we lived our lives as hunter-gatherers. We were foraging for food. And we were sometimes traveling to find the next best place to eat. Sometimes when natural resources were abundant.

SPEAKER_01 2:02 Yeah, exactly. But all of that changed with agriculture, right? So agriculture turned food into a system you can store, control, and scale. And without agriculture, large-scale hoarding of wealth is really incredibly difficult. I mean, certainly not the immense hoarding that we see with multimillionaires and billionaires today. That probably, well, that certainly couldn't exist before agriculture. And actually, early states were able to form thanks to the growth of serial landscapes. So you had fields of corn and wheat that needed labour from people who didn't need to move.

SPEAKER_00 2:37 Yeah, and with everyone staying in one place, you know, tied to the land, the seasons and the harvest cycles, you suddenly enable land ownership, borders, and territorial conflict. And this is where we go from hunter-gatherers, where it's pretty difficult or even impossible to store anything for very long, to having surplus grain, which is storable and measurable. So people accumulate it, tax systems form around it, and the elite classes rise up, and that creates vast wealth inequality. And that is only growing day by day, even now. Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 3:22 And once this happens, you get ruling classes, right? So you get monarchies, you get dictators that can command vast armies. Essentially, we become easier to control. Like you can't tax a moving target, and agriculture, I guess, sort of made humans trackable.

SPEAKER_00 3:40 Yeah, in it I can see that. And also with with stored wealth, theft also becomes an issue. We we created property that people wanted to steal. So we had to invent punishment systems to deal with thieves. Prisons and obviously much more barbaric solutions in the past. They likely weren't needed in the same way pre-agriculture. Justice would have been kind of like informal and collective, likely more like restorative justice than punitive.

SPEAKER_01 4:16 Yeah, and maybe there would have been inequality in hunter-gatherer societies too, in that, you know, certain people are naturally drawn to different roles in a group, but probably not the huge differences that we see between the rich and the poor of the modern world. You know, there would have been people who fit the role of leader a bit better than others, but there is good evidence from the Hadza tribe in Tanzania, which is a modern-day hunter-gatherer community, that they are quite strongly egalitarian. So they don't have formal leaders. And, you know, if they go out hunting for meat, they bring it back and share it across the entire camp. It's not kept by the hunter or kept by uh the the leader to distribute in that way.

SPEAKER_00 4:58 I I'm sure there was probably, you know, s conflicts between tribes, but I guess like, you know, the the the control from above and then like mobilizing people in that way is just difficult when you don't have the the kind of infrastructure that we have today. And similarly for the Kung San people, they they have a strong cultural norm of sharing food and possessions, and they actually actively discourage arrogance or any form of hoarding. But in parts of the world where resources are high and movement isn't sort of essential for survival or as essential for survival, people would likely stay in place a bit more, and then some hierarchies would likely begin to form as a result. So some hunter-gatherer groups have been seen practicing hereditary slavery, where slaves are captured in raids and traded between groups and used for labour, status display, and sometimes even ritual purposes.

SPEAKER_01 6:03 Yeah, so a world without agriculture doesn't necessarily lose all of the ills of human nature, right?

SPEAKER_00 6:10 No, but this is not common among modern-day hunter-gatherer tribes. And even still, the the hierarchy displayed here still doesn't rival the likes of which we see now.

SPEAKER_01 6:22 Yeah, no billionaires, no extreme wealth inequality. It all sounds good, right? Um but the caveat here has to be that life was challenging. So you imagine spending large parts of your day hunting for food, or hoping you will actually find any. I imagine there were times when it was a stretch even to know if there was food available. That's really tough. It's tough on your body, starvation is a possibility, being attacked by a wild animal as well. Um I guess these were all daily threats, which we can't just brush under the carpet and say, oh, it was so much better pre-agriculture. Um because being able to store food uh and the recent ad advent of fridges, uh, which we covered in another episode with Nicola Twille, has definitely allowed us to worry a lot less about food, and we can now eat very rich, exciting, and exotic diets as a result of agricultural life.

SPEAKER_00 7:17 Yeah, there's undoubtedly a reason why we progressed to having agriculture in our lives, right? There's it did solve many problems and we reap the rewards of that today, uh, or many of us do, but this has really only been in the last hundred years where food has been quite so abundant. In just the 1701s, the working class would often suffer periods where grain prices would skyrocket, food was just harder to come by, and starvation and rickets would set in for entire families. The risks of poor seasons and crop failure, especially back then, could really be catastrophic. And the labour cycle associated with this, you know, just you'd have to just keep constantly working.

SPEAKER_01 8:09 Yeah, and we essentially, ironically, created the conditions for famine to exist. Um, you know, agriculture was meant to solve food insecurity, but it actually created dependence on a few staple crops and then vulnerability to crop failure. And actually, um that might be truer now than we realize. I mean, if you just look at the food prices shock that we're seeing right now because of the US war in Iran, you've got oil prices shooting up because of the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, and as a result, food prices are also on the rise and food security is uncertain. People are even saying maybe we should start stockpiling food or or getting ready in case there are shortages. So it's an age-old problem, actually, that we've not solved at all.

SPEAKER_00 8:59 Yeah, I think we sort of have got quite complacent. We just think that food will always be there in the shops, don't we? Um, and especially in the UK, you know, we import a lot more food than we um produce locally. That's a single point of failure. And maybe we don't have in our recent memory that we have famines. Obviously, we have things like the uh Irish potato famine, etc. But um rations during the war. Rations longer war. But maybe in in our generation we don't really have anything to sort of uh look at apart from price rises going up with Well and toilet roll shortage during COVID. Yeah, I was gonna say COVID, the war in Ukraine, the the recent war in Iran, all of these are affecting it, but we somehow just think, ah, but there's always gonna be food.

SPEAKER_01 9:50 Well, there were the crop failures in in Russia that caused global wheat shortages um not that long ago as well. So we have experienced in our lifetime these shocks. I don't think we feel them quite so keenly necessarily as famine. We we we see them in increasing food prices, but actually I think the food system is much more precarious than we are led to believe.

SPEAKER_00 10:14 Yes, I think we spoke about this in that episode with Nicola Twille that actually a lot of it being private as well runs on pretty thin margins. So if there's any disruption to that, there's there's a good potential, um, or just the logistics not working out for whatever reason, then you just don't have the way that we rely on food now.

SPEAKER_01 10:38 And actually, I guess if we were living pre-agriculturally as hunter-gatherers, it's very unlikely that we would have just starved out entire ecosystems of available food because of the natural cycle of um the way that ecosystems work. Uh there's some give and there's some take. So there's predators and there's prey. And um usually there's a quite quite a good balance um in natural ecosystems, which stops uh resources from being starved out completely. So, you know, you could argue that starvation was a real threat for ancient humans, but maybe not quite as pronounced as we think it was.

SPEAKER_02 11:19 Hmm.

SPEAKER_00 11:19 If we actually if we look at early farmers, you know, those that who were there at the beginning of agriculture, there's actually evidence that they had a decline in their health when agriculture took hold, not an improvement. Archaeological evidence kind of shows worse dental health and malnutrition markers. With just a few staple crops, their diets became like narrow and their lives more sedentary.

SPEAKER_01 11:47 Yeah, they even got shorter and weaker, uh believe it or not. So they ended up less healthy than before, which amazes me. And even forgetting the current food crisis unfolding, if we compare this whole situation to the modern day, sure we don't have the tough job of hunting for food every day, but we do work a hell of a lot. A famous study from the anthropologist I mentioned earlier, Marshall David Saulins, found that hunter gatherers spent roughly three to five hours per day on who uh on food gathering, and the rest of the day was socializing, resting, rituals, and storytelling.

SPEAKER_00 12:22 Exactly. And direct studies of the Kung San show they spend roughly 15 to 20 hours per week gathering food, doing around two to three days of work per week. It's it's not like they were doing nothing the rest of the time, but they certainly weren't fixed to eight-hour work days that creep into nine or ten and then into your evenings and then into your weekends. Yeah. Um, but not only that, work has necessarily become repetitive, time-locked, and unavoidable. We have to do kind of the same thing every day, or many of us do, day in, day out. You specialize in one particular task over and over again. Uh, that's kind of the reality of the modern world, and it's even become our identity. These days, the question of what do you do for a job defines you. I I always hear like Americans, I'm not sure it's all Americans, but they introduce themselves as like Matt Powell, software developer.

SPEAKER_01 13:29 Yeah, yeah. It's the first thing you ask somebody new at a party, isn't it? Oh, hi, nice to meet you. Yeah, what do you do? Like, that's the most important part of who they are, is what they do for a job. But you know, the another caveat, we wouldn't be able to eat strawberries throughout the winter, uh, pre-Hunt to Gatherer Life. We wouldn't have delicious donuts or some of my favourite foods like pizza and curry. Um, we wouldn't even be able to grab a morning coffee, which honestly might be the deal breaker for me. But then again, maybe eating locally and seasonally is well, it's no bad thing for our health, and it's exactly what people are starting to move back towards anyway, isn't it? And also, you know, agriculture may have softened the impact of starvation. How real that was, I don't know for sure. But now we have obesity to contend with.

SPEAKER_00 14:18 Yeah, you know, it's opened the door to that alongside, you know, capitalism and being able to damn capitalism had to squeeze that one in. But being able to market and refine foods in such a way to basically be addictive. I think these things wouldn't exist, obviously, in a pre-agriculture world. And there's there's also another form of inequality that agriculture seems to have intensified, and that's the inequality between men and women. Because as we've said, in hunter-gatherer societies, there's good evidence that many groups were relatively egalitarian, but agriculture changes the equation. Once you settle down and food production becomes tied to land, suddenly population becomes an advantage, and that means you need to sort of produce more children.

SPEAKER_01 15:15 Well, you need to, and can produce more children because it suddenly becomes possible. But biologically, that burden falls disproportionately on women. In nomadic societies, women tend to have fewer children simply because you can only carry so many. But in farming society, uh, you know, birth rates increase. Children become uh labour assets, workers for the land, and that leads to more frequent pregnancies and a much greater physical toll.

SPEAKER_00 15:43 If we go back, actually, we can see some archaeological evidence that shows higher rates of disease and nutritional stress in female skeletons from these early farming communities. And on top of that, as land becomes property and inheritance becomes important, social structures often become more patriarchal. Control over land becomes tied to control over lineage, and ultimately that led to control over women.

SPEAKER_01 16:17 Again, this isn't universal, not every society followed the same path, but there is a strong argument that agriculture didn't just create inequality between rich and poor, but it did it did deepen this inequality between men and women too. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 16:32 So if pre-agricultural life meant healthier diets and less work, that leads us to our next point. Agricultural life has made it easier to be stressed out. And it it doesn't seem to matter how connected we are virtually to everyone in the world. It's very clear that reports of loneliness are on the rise in the modern world. It turns out friendship through a screen isn't the same as in person. And a sea of people around you can actually make you lonelier. Especially now we're living in a society where individualism and the atomic family are prioritized above everything.

SPEAKER_01 18:12 Yeah, and before agriculture, we lived in much smaller communities with stable social units. We didn't have these massive organizations that controlled everything. And also we worry about so many abstract things these days, like how we're going to afford our tax bill or our mortgage, whether we've saved enough for a pension, what the terms and conditions were on the last contract you signed. You know, things that well, they they just don't exist without well, all of these structures that come as a result of the settled life that we create through agriculture. And before, you know, just a small band of 20 to 40 people who we dealt with face to face, that was I don't know, I I it was a lot less to think about. We had a common goal, we worked almost as one. And we know that social connection is deeply connected with happiness and also better health outcomes generally and a reduced sense of loneliness. And that's kind of what it was part and parcel of daily life was social connectedness. And science even shows you can reduce your risk of getting dementia just by strengthening your social life. So there are reasons to feel optimistic about what those small um hunter-gatherer communities would have done for your mental health.

SPEAKER_00 19:30 Yeah, there's these um these knock-on effects that just kind of snowball from uh agriculture to settled kind of societies to let's create all these structures to, oh, I have so much stress in my life uh because I have to think about all of these um completely invented things that have been a result of solving numerous problems, no doubt. But you know, we are now born into a very sophisticated society that has had iteration over iteration, and then you're just like, okay, uh now I have to do all of these things that you wouldn't have had to do uh if you were living off the land a bit.

SPEAKER_01 20:12 And also then we start building things that attempt to deal with all the stresses that we created, only compounding the issue.

SPEAKER_00 20:19 Yeah, and again, I think there's got to be an element of kind of um devil's advocate here, in that I think it's it's we solved a lot of problems with agriculture. Um, but we're highlighting the problems that were created as a result. So with the mental health point, actually, you know, we can't actually measure mental health in the past in the same way, but maybe we wouldn't have an anxiety epidemic or a depression epidemic or whatever mental health epidemic here that we're seeing on the rise in the modern day. We don't know. That's pure speculation, but instead of our minds dealing with physical threats, chronic stress is rife because we have not adapted to have so many competing concerns at once, and all of them really have no physical payoff.

SPEAKER_01 21:17 Yeah, not like a a lie, you know, the threat of a lion chasing you when the lion stops chasing you, that's that threat's over, you can regulate and go back to baseline. I think that's sort of the famous example people give, but it's it's a good one. And not to mention in the modern day all of the concern for status that we have, like wanting to be somebody uh or achieve some ideal standard of who of who you are. I know I feel that pressure daily, and that exists because we've made it possible to think about those things because we're not occupied with immediate needs and dangers.

SPEAKER_00 21:49 Yeah, and we don't know that those things wouldn't exist without agriculture, but given all of the points that we've mentioned, I think it's much harder for that to happen. It's also harder for the other technological advances and medical advances and everything else. But yeah, the that's certainly a very good point. And another caveat, the trade-offs are severe. It's it's common to believe that hunter-gatherers only lived into their 30s. But actually that figure is largely skewed by the high rates of infant mortality that occurred before agriculture. So you can expect bereavement of lost children would have been very prevalent and devastating. And with limited medical rescue when accidents or injuries occurred, death would have been a constant in their lives. So there's the need to deal with the mental health implications of that.

SPEAKER_01 22:44 Yeah, that must have been horrific. Um and I mean, it is actually really only in the last hundred and fifty years, though, that we've managed to get infant mortality down as much as we have, uh believe it or not. So it used to be around 20 to 30 percent of children dying. Before the age of five in many pre-modern societies. Now globally, it's closer to 4%, and in countries like the UK, uh, it's well under 1%. So agriculture didn't solve this issue immediately, but still, I think that is definitely a win for the world we've built today, because you know, there's very few things more devastating than that. And even if I think to my own childhood, um, I had really, really bad asthma. I was in and out of the hospital on a weekly basis. If I had been born in a hunter-gatherer society with that level of asthma, I probably wouldn't have made it.

SPEAKER_00 23:41 And you to your point about 100 to 150 years ago, I mean, even less, really. I mean, I was doing my family tree quite recently and I was looking through um some census data. Um, maybe it was about a hundred years ago, actually. I think it was my great-grandparents. I think they had something like 10 children and one survived. Wow. Um, and that happens to lead to me being born eventually. Yeah. Um, but you know, it's an insane thing to think about and to to continue going and to continue having more children through that. I mean, that's uh it's almost impossible to imagine.

SPEAKER_01 24:21 Yeah, and this is where the arguments and our third argument starts to get quite tricky, really, because it's it's so hard to balance out the good and the bad. I I think this argument of whether agriculture is totally bad for the human species is is almost impossible to have absolutes about. Um, because the third point we're going to discuss now is health. And so in a world before agriculture, there would be far fewer things like large-scale epidemics. You know, diseases would would emerge for sure, but they would just struggle to persist in small groups.

SPEAKER_00 24:56 That's true. Uh, because a lot of the health and disease patterns that we see in the modern world come from domesticating animals for farming. Many major diseases, including ones like COVID-19, they emerge when humans and animals live in close proximity. And agriculture massively increased those interactions. Many crowd diseases end up becoming endemic. Measles, for example, requires very large connected populations to keep feeding off of.

SPEAKER_01 25:27 Yeah, and agriculture arguably created the conditions that made things like the Black Death possible. You know, by the 1300s, Europe was densely populated, uh, and then you've got these overcrowded medieval cities with poor sanitation kind of being the ideal place for disease transmission. You've got large trade routes, ships letting the disease spread rather than staying local and burning out quickly. And this is all only possible with large settled populations. So I'm not saying agriculture itself created the Black Death, but it certainly created the conditions for it to explode.

SPEAKER_00 26:03 Yeah, I think this is a general point, isn't it? That a lot of these things, it's not that agriculture directly resulted in this thing, but it's like agriculture allowed settling that allowed industrialization, it allowed cities to exist. Um, and in the same way, uh, if you think about the dental health side of things that we mentioned earlier, hunter-gatherers would have suffered from their teeth wearing down because of tough foods, sure. But there certainly would be a lot less tooth decay. Nowadays we eat so much sugar and refined carbs that our teeth can't handle it. Uh we can brush our teeth and use things to combat that, but there were and there were no fillings pre-agriculture. No. Um But another point that I I read something in um a very good book by James Nestor uh Breathe. He argues, or well, some of the evidence that he's uh looked into argues that um when you look at the the skulls of people, you know, many, many years ago, pre-sort of agriculture, pre-refined foods as a result of capitalism, what you see is that their teeth are actually in much better shape than ours. Um and that the the the shape and this the size, the volume um inside your mouth is also larger. This has knock-on effects to the the the quality of your breathing, the amount of oxygen you can get to your brain, and things like that. But also, we both have suffered with with uh misaligned teeth, Ollie, and I'm sure plenty of us have. And there are arguments that this is as a result or made worse by the soft kind of diet that we have now, where we're not kind of using the muscles and use you know, chewing tough food like we normally would.

SPEAKER_01 28:01 Yeah, um, it's a really good point, and it is interesting how how prevalent those because I've always wondered, you know, in the animal kingdom, uh it's very rare that you see crooked teeth, isn't it? Um usually they're quite uniform, but it's very, very common in the human population.

SPEAKER_02 28:18 Yes.

SPEAKER_01 28:19 And also modern chronic illnesses like obesity, type 2 diabetes, things like that, that would also likely not exist or be incredibly rare if they did, because without food abundance, our bodies wouldn't have the same strain put on them by modern diets and inactivity. And that's not to say it would have been rosy for hunter-gatherers, right? Diseases that did hit them would have been much more likely to be deadly. You've got parasites like worms, lice, ticks, which were very common because they were constantly exposed to natural environments, and uh these could cause skin infections, among other things.

SPEAKER_00 28:55 Yeah, um, some of this is directly as a result of agriculture that we don't have to deal with them, but also indirectly because, as we've said, the knock-on effects lead to health improvements and bacterial infections is another thing, that those from injuries could could just kill a lot easier. You don't hear of this very much, but when you someone hurt cuts themselves and gets an infected wound, it you know, you just get it treated. Back then, um, you know, you'd get cuts and wounds from hunting or conflicts, and they would get infected. Broken bones might also become septic, or you just might not be able to walk uh or move, and then you can't hunt, and then you can't gather waterborne illnesses from contaminated water sources, that they would have obviously been a lot of trouble, and even some small scale zoonotic diseases passed on by wild animals and hunted prey. In a world without modern medicine, germ theory, or our incredible and intimate understanding of the human body, and crucially no antibiotics, small afflictions could cause huge problems. And there's another important trade-off here, the physical toll on our bodies. You know, walking all day, hunting, carrying things, it must have been exhausting. And yes, their lives were physically demanding. They would have walked long distances every day, climbed, carried, dug, thrown, using their entire bodies in ways most of us simply don't anymore. I know I don't sat on my chair most of the day. And injuries were a real risk. So, you know, it is easy for us to look back and think of all the negatives of agriculture while we're sat in our chairs for the seventh or eighth hour. Yeah, with lumbar support. Yes. Yeah. Um so we can't pretend it was easy. But that physical effort wasn't constant in the way modern work is. It came in bursts.

SPEAKER_01 31:08 Exactly. So you'd hunt, you'd gather, then you'd succeed, and then you would have a rest. Um as we've mentioned before, the work days were shorter. So you wouldn't have been sitting in the same position all day for eight straight hours uh or repeating the same exact movement thousands of times, like you know, when you get RSI in your hand from typing too much or clicking on your mouse too much, um, which definitely sounds like a bit of a uh you know modern problem. Oh no, I've got RSI in my hand. I w I wish I could hunt and gather for my own food. But the reality is we have traded off some of those um physical struggles for other physical struggles because movement back then was varied and it was natural, it was built into life itself. But um now, well, we can't get enough movement.

SPEAKER_00 31:57 Yeah, that's true. Um the gym is probably well, it's definitely uh a modern invention that wasn't needed back then. No. Uh as a result, you know, their bodies were often stronger in certain ways, and this is functional strength, you know, like stronger bones, better joint development, more balanced full body movement. When you compare that to today, where many of us spend the majority of our day sitting at desk or in a car or on the sofa, instead of acute injuries, we get chronic ones like back pain, neck pain, muscle loss, joint issues, and long-term diseases linked to inactivity.

SPEAKER_01 32:39 Yeah, so in a strange kind of way, hunter-gatherers risked breaking their bodies, but we s we risk slowly degrading ours. Um, they were pushed hard, but in sort of short, buried bursts, and we spend a lot of the time underusing our bodies, well, constantly, really. Um so while we've made life physically easier, it's possibly actually been a worse outcome for our bodies in the long run.

SPEAKER_00 33:06 So while agricultural living has enabled us to come up with a variety of amazing solutions to many of the worst health issues that impact humanity, it also enabled them to happen in the first place. It's like we're firefighting to put out our own fire. And and now on that note, and this next one's very relevant. Before we figured out how to make food abundant, there were far less people roaming the earth. Instead of eight billion and climbing, there were single-digit millions of people. One to twenty million at most, by some estimates.

SPEAKER_01 33:43 Yeah, and you know what that means? There would be no man-made climate crisis. Uh like the Earth has been through many crises of climate catastrophe. Uh you've, you know, major ice ages, rapid heating, asteroid impacts that blocked out the sun. You had volcano eruptions in our distant past releasing masses of CO2. So that's not to say there would be no climate catastrophes at all. But many of these changes, they unfolded over thousands to millions of years. Now we're seeing them unfold over decades.

SPEAKER_00 34:17 Yeah, absolutely. Um, and again, it's like some of this is a direct result of agriculture, some of this is a direct result of industrialization that could happen because of agriculture. And also industrialized agriculture. Um, I think farming is one of the the largest, if not the largest, causes of CO2 emissions. As farming massively increases food supply, and that supports the billions of people, it requires a much higher energy demand. And then the only way you can do that, or the only way you have been able to do that in for for a long time was fossil fuels. Yeah. Demand for the energy that fossil fuels provides becomes continuous, large-scale, and non-negotiable. And since not everyone needs to find food anymore, people become builders, lawyers, web developers, leading to economic, industrial, and technological growth. And as all this happens, the pressure for more energy grows. Forests get cut down, coal gets burnt, water becomes used in massive quantities. And now modern agriculture itself requires fossil fuels to run. Again, back to the war in Iran, fertilizer prices have skyrocketed because all prices have, leading to food price shocks. And then there's the tractors and machinery, irrigation systems, the global food transport. It's all a feedback loop. And fossil fuels didn't create that system, but they do sustain it.

SPEAKER_01 35:59 But if we didn't go down the route of agriculture, well, humans would have likely been concentrated around coastal regions and rivers and wetlands and things like that, with their populations remaining small. You know, just like it does for the rest of the animal population. As I mentioned earlier, natural ecosystems sort of keep numbers in check because you well, you end up living harmoniously as part of the circle of life, uh as the Lion King might put it. Um and and so I I guess it would just be impossible to pillage nature for all it's worth. We'd have been part of it, actually. And I mean it's not that we wouldn't have had the chance to make tools needed for fossil fuel extraction, obviously, because humans have been making tools for uh you know thousands of years. But it's it's just the fact that we probably wouldn't need those tools in the first place.

SPEAKER_00 36:50 Yeah, your point of pillaging nature really um rings true for me, because I think that's that's probably the main argument that that works for me is that agriculture is is great for a number of reasons, but sustainably doing agriculture would be would probably be the dream that we're we're aiming for. I'm not convinced what we're going in that way. If we look environmentally at a non-agricultural world, it's very likely to be more biodiverse and less transformed. Today, agriculture is among the most extensive forms of land use change globally, and land and sea use change is repeatedly identified as a major direct driver of biodiversity decline. So would we be arguing now whether we should limit global warming to one and a half degrees or shift the goalposts to something higher, like 1.7 or two? Or would none of this be a worry that even crosses our minds? Probably the latter, uh again with all the caveats that we've said before.

SPEAKER_01 37:58 Yeah, and one of the major caveats um is that we've created a lot of very cool stuff as a result of harnessing this energy and fossil fuels. And we are making cleaner versions as well with solar and wind, but you know, all the technology that you see around you today is kind of a result of the world that we've built. And I, for one, am a massive, massive fan of computers and the internet and video games, all of that stuff. Um, my job literally relies on me having access to the internet and being able to broadcast my voice. So, yeah, that would suck not to have that. So, like going back would be really difficult. But maybe if we never had it in the first place, maybe we we just wouldn't mind.

SPEAKER_00 38:39 Maybe not. Um, I think we have to be grateful for what we do have and what we do like about it. You're right. I'm grateful that I don't have to stress about the fact that I might not be able to hunt food, or I might not, you know, if I break my leg, well, that's it. Yeah. Um or if I want to have a family, then I know that I can find the care that I need for them, you know, that kind of thing. But yes, there's definitely arguments to say, well, these big problems that we have, global problems that we have, those those wouldn't exist in hunter-gatherer society kind of uh human life, right?

SPEAKER_01 39:20 Yeah, and actually you don't uh also the other argument against all the technology stuff is you don't miss what you don't know is possible. So hunter-gatherers weren't thinking, God, I really wish I could play a video game right now.

SPEAKER_00 39:31 I'd love to ask ChatGPT how to hunt deer or something. Yeah. Because I'm really bad at it. I'm sure ChatGPT would know. But that's how we would handle it now if we were stuck in a hunter-gatherer situation, right? You'd reach on your phone like how to hunt.

SPEAKER_01 39:50 So true.

SPEAKER_00 39:51 Yeah, so I think our hunter-gatherer ancestors would be ashamed of us actually with all this technology. I don't think they'd be sitting wishing, like, oh, I wish we had all the stuff that they have. Yeah, for sure. Uh maybe they'd want some of the stuff like warmth and everything else.

SPEAKER_01 40:07 Yeah, and that kind of brings us on to argument number five in our list, doesn't it? Um, the fact that we do live now in extremely comfortable, central heated homes, protected from the elements, protected from wild animals and danger. We've got lovely insulated walls and soft beds. And if you compare that to life before agriculture, it's a very different picture, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 40:29 Yeah, most hunter-gatherers lived in temporary or semi-permanent shelters. If you think about huts, tents, or simple structures made from wood, grass, or animal skins. They were built quickly but abandoned just as quickly as well.

SPEAKER_01 40:45 Yeah, and you had caves as well. Uh we spoke about this with uh Steve Pritty on the music episode Caves would have been a very likely structure where they played lovely music.

SPEAKER_00 40:56 Yes, um, but the the recurring theme is that they they weren't designed to last or build structures that would be there for a long time. They were designed to move, uh, which means that yes, life would have been colder at times, would have been more exposed, less physically comfortable than what we're used to today. You can't just shut the door and turn the heating on when it gets a bit chilly.

SPEAKER_01 41:21 Yeah, but there is another side to this because while we've made shelter incredibly comfortable, we've also made it incredibly expensive. Like a house today isn't just somewhere that you live, it's a financial asset. It's a lifelong commitment that you well, you can lose it. You got mortgages, you got rent, housing markets, entire economies built around the idea of owning a place to sleep. That just simply didn't exist before agriculture.

SPEAKER_00 41:48 Yes. And central heating and plush beds and many of the modern perks that we associate with homes haven't existed that long. Even medieval houses could be incredibly uncomfortable. They were poorly insulated, drafty, heated by open fires. In winter they could be bitterly cold.

SPEAKER_01 42:09 Well, there are many people today who live like that, battling to keep their heating on. In countries that are naturally too cold for humans, um, you know, people have to make a decision, do I pay for food today or do I pay to put the heating on? And in hotter parts of the world, it goes the other way. So during extreme heat waves, people do die. Um, not just because it's hot, but because their homes can't protect them from the heat. So if you're living in a building that traps heat, uh there's no good access to cooling systems, you've got maybe no reliable electricity, there just simply isn't anywhere to escape. So that tends to hit the poorest communities the hardest. So yeah, we have made incredible progress when it comes to comfort, but it's not universal. It's not something that everybody has.

SPEAKER_00 42:56 No, definitely not. It's not evenly distributed. And but when we were hunter-gatherers, shelter wasn't something you spent decades paying off. It was something you built, then you used it, and then you moved on from when you needed to. So, yes, we're warmer, safer, more comfortable, but we've also turned one of the most basic human needs into one of the biggest sources of stress in modern life.

SPEAKER_01 43:21 Yeah, and also I do want to make the point that um humans evolved in Africa, right? Where it is just naturally warmer. So we could argue that without all of the shelter that was that we've been able to be build as a result of post-agricultural life and industrialisation and all those things, the shelter we we've built protects us from the elements, certainly, but we um travelled to cold places. Um before we we were living in a place which was actually quite well suited to us uh to our survival, and the warmth was was fine, we could deal with that. So, I mean that that's a that's a big caveat to say that um maybe they were more comfortable than we think. And this brings us on to argument six, which is very much related to housing, and that is sleep. Because you might assume that without modern homes uh and comfortable beds, and also this sort of total control over your environment, that people in the past must have just had terrible sleep. But the evidence suggests something a little bit more surprising than that.

SPEAKER_00 44:25 Yeah, that's right. So studies of modern hunter-gatherer groups like the Hadza in Tanzania or the San people in southern Africa show that they sleep roughly the same amount as we do, around six to seven hours a night on average.

SPEAKER_01 44:40 Well, yeah, the newest studies show that we do sleep a little bit longer, which is odd since we have computer screens and chronic stress and junk lighting to deal with. But it does it seems to be true that we sleep just a touch longer. But even if we are getting a bit longer in bed, the quality of that sleep may have been very different. For one, there Sleep was tied to natural light. So, you know, they'd go to bed after sunset, they wake up after with the sunrise. They didn't have phones and this artificial lighting, and they weren't doom scrolling at midnight.

SPEAKER_00 45:13 Yes. Um, yeah, it seems it's a common theme that we create we solve some problems and we create new ones that we have to solve again. So it seems like their circadian rhythms are just right. Yeah. And ours, we have to like make sure that we wear special glasses to block blue light and things, crazy things you would never have to consider. Um and their sleep wasn't always one long, uninterrupted block either. It was more flexible. They were waking during the night, sleeping in segments, napping during the day if needed. Much less rigid and pressured.

SPEAKER_01 45:51 And interestingly, rates of insomnia in these groups appear to be much lower than in modern societies. So studies on modern-day hunter-gatherers show chronic insomnia is really quite rare. It only affects about one and a half to two and a half percent of individuals. But in industrialized nations, it affects 10 to 30%.

SPEAKER_00 46:12 Well, you you it's it's mm-crazy because on the surface you would imagine that some of the stresses you think like, oh, I don't have it so bad because I have abundant food, I have a comfortable place to sleep and stuff. And insomnia isn't really maybe tied to just this physical thing, but our mental health. And interestingly, the mental health, if that's the case, is is kind of okay seemingly, if this is just one marker of that, in people who don't have all of the comforts that we enjoy. So despite the fact that they're sleeping on the ground in a simple shelter with all this noise and unpredictability, it's just not about comfort at all in our in our in our modern world, the modern sleep problems that we have, but it's about our lifestyle.

SPEAKER_01 47:06 Yeah, and I think this sort of raises an interesting question. Have we optimized sleep for comfort, but actually made it worse in the process? Some even argue the very beds that we sleep on today, these soft plush mattresses, are a big cause of back pain, which is why some people say you should sleep on uh a futon, because they're harder. They got you know traditionally made of these tatami mats. So maybe we need to go back to making beds out of grass sedges and straw.

SPEAKER_00 47:34 I I do see the argument. I think I'll stick to my uh memory foam mattress for now. But no, I I am aware of, you know, um I've heard of people just sleeping on wood and saying that it's been wonders for their for their back and mobility and even their sleep quality. So I can kind of see the point, and you can kind of imagine that the things that on the surface seem to make sense to us, like, oh, I could I have to have the most comfortable soft mattress, um, because it feels nice in like this immediate dopamine kind of way, but maybe it's just not the way that we evolved. We didn't we didn't have that, you know, hundreds thousands of years ago.

SPEAKER_01 48:20 Yeah, and it's been a long part of our history that we didn't have that, it's been very a short part of our history that we have.

SPEAKER_00 48:26 Yeah. So it kind of leads to this ending question about agriculture, which is why did we do it anyway? Why did we why did we decide to go all in on this, especially considering all the problems that we've laid out. If we were perfectly happy as hunter-gatherers, surely we wouldn't have looked for an alternative.

SPEAKER_01 48:49 Yeah, but perhaps we stumbled into it. We were like unaware of the future we would wrought for ourselves. Um as we seem to do with basically everything like the internet, we were totally unaware. It seemed like you know, the hazy days of the early internet was like, oh, it's all rosy. Uh, and now people are are sort of regretting it in a way, and AI as well. We just stumbled into it, and now look where we're where we are. Um so I I just don't see that agriculture was this one grand decision. It wasn't like a group of humans got together, sat down one day and said, Right, enough of this, let's invent tax bills, kings, epidemics, and climate change.

SPEAKER_00 49:29 Yeah. It was slower than that, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_01 49:32 Yeah. Uh you know, there was a bit of gathering some wild grains, a little bit of storing food here, there, and everywhere, maybe some tending to plants that were useful. And then over generations, those small shifts begin to add up, things get noticed, and and also timing mattered as well. So for a lot of human history, the climate was just too unstable for farming to really take hold. But after the last ice age, when the uh climate became more stable, then agriculture became much more possible. So there's there's this timing element and then probably some luck.

SPEAKER_00 50:04 Yeah, timing, luck, and just iteration over time where problems arise and you solve that, and then you know, a new problem arises as a result of your solution, or you know, as a result of the population growing. And actually, on that point, with the population, agriculture may not have produced a better quality of life at first, but it could produce more food from one patch of land and support more people, and that matters. So even if farming made individuals less healthy, shorter, more stressed, and more controlled, it may have made human populations larger. And once numbers begin to rise, you can't easily go back. You need a way to feed everybody, and that sort of is the trap, if you want to put it that way, of agriculture.

SPEAKER_01 50:58 Yeah, you can't go back because you can't just rightly say, right, we're just gonna let vast swathes of the population die off so that we can go back to baseline. Yeah. Because yeah, farming creates surplus, and surplus supports more children, and then more children create more pressure on the land. So suddenly, you know, it it begins as um an option, this this thing that you've discovered, and then it suddenly it becomes a necessity. Uh, you can't stop doing it because the consequences are so severe. And then you've got competition. So once some groups adopt farming and settle down and start storing grain, they build larger organized societies as well. So neighbouring groups become like well, they're they're put under pressure, aren't they? Uh they they might be displaced, outnumbered, conquered, perhaps, or forced to adopt similar strategies themselves just to compete and and stay alive.

SPEAKER_00 51:53 Yeah. Um, I mean you can imagine if if you're a hunter-gatherer and another tribe, you know, is taking animals from where you would normally be hunting, it would be a pain, uh, and you might fight over it. If you come across um a civilization and they have a load of food stored, or they have you know this abundance that you don't have, that's where we can see this kind of conflict. That's where you can see the competition and the potential.

SPEAKER_01 52:25 Or if they start cutting down loads of the land and the area that you used to use for hunting so that they could grow monocrops. Yeah. So, you know, you you push them out of their environment.

SPEAKER_00 52:36 And that happens now, you know, in the Amazon, as just an example. Uh the spaces are getting smaller where we aren't moulding the world to this vision. Um, it's it's quite scarce now, I think. Uh more scarce than ever. And I think the last kind of um point on this is that agriculture itself, it in my opinion, probably isn't the problem in the scale that we have today in the in the in the world, but it's it's the fact that coupled with industrialization, you have the mass of uncontrolled agriculture that allows such a huge population to decimate the earth's resources and to uh pump out carbon and turn it into this kind of factory of food. Um so agriculture back then it may not have spread because everyone thought it was wonderful. It it may have spread because once it started, it was just incredibly hard to compete with.

SPEAKER_01 53:50 Yeah, in other words, well, maybe agriculture was wasn't humanity's best idea. Um maybe it wasn't our worst idea, maybe it was just humanity's most successful trap, uh, you know, and and it was the start of everything that came. But one thing I do want to address is how we think of a post-agricultural world and the advent of capitalism, damned capitalism, um we think that it's allowed us to advance r so spectacularly as a species and and in the last few hundred years super fast as well. And look around our technology, there's that you know, that's definitely true. But this isn't to say that a world without agriculture would have been static. You know, humanity wouldn't have lived through this sort of static stone age.

SPEAKER_00 54:41 No, it wouldn't have just not progressed. Archaeology shows that non-farming societies can actually achieve high cultural sophistication. For instance, in parts of East Asia we see pottery being created by hunter-gatherers long before farming. There's also evidence of intensive fishing, long distance exchange and even early metal working using copper. So who knows what hunter-gatherer species would have invented given enough time? It wouldn't have happened so fast, maybe, but do we really need all the stuff we've invented? Or maybe if we created it all a bit slower and a bit more sustainably, maybe the earth could keep up, or maybe we could find better frameworks for the crazy uh growth that we've had in the last hundred, two hundred, three hundred years.

SPEAKER_01 55:33 Yeah, it is hard to say for sure which would be better, though, isn't it? Like, as we said at the start, it's very easy to romanticize this topic and think it would be much better to go back. And actually, there's been this uh I don't know if you've seen it, this medieval resurgence recently. Um, people sort of saying, Oh, actually, life back in the medieval times was so much better than the life we're living now, if you really look on it and reflect on their daily lives and things like that. Uh they kind of fantasize about going back to it. But medieval life was extremely tough. So let's just uh put that out there. Yeah. So yeah, romanticising that this topic is well, it's fraught with problems.

SPEAKER_00 56:12 That's a trap, definitely. Um because and and the the point as well, really, is that you can't take agriculture in a silo. You can't say like this is it comes with all of the other things that happen over time in in in life as well, right? So the medieval point, I mean, agriculture existed in medieval life. What what didn't exist was you know, if you're a woman, you probably didn't want to go back to medieval times. If you were if you're poor, you you definitely don't want to go back. Um, so I think that people just probably watch uh some TV or read about history about the heroes and the the really cool things, and they're like, ah, wouldn't that be so much better than worrying about mortgages and landlords and Russia? Yeah. And maybe that's true. Um, but as humans, we're we're always complaining about our lot in life. No matter how comfortable we get, we find something to complain about. We're sort of doing it now. Uh in the in this. Um, I'm sure ancient hunter-gatherers complained and thought life was very difficult. Um, and a lot of the things, it's very difficult to argue that their life was easier than ours.

SPEAKER_01 57:31 Yeah, and honestly, as the father of two children, um, bringing down infant mortality to under 1% is such a big win for our modern world that to me that trumps a lot. But what do you think? Are humans worse off because of agriculture? Was it our biggest mistake or our biggest trap? Or do we just need to remind ourselves of how lucky we are in the modern age?

SPEAKER_00 57:56 Yeah, let's do a quick non-utopia check. Without agriculture, there would be high child mortality, injuries were often fatal, there were no antibiotics or surgery, life was less secure, less buffered against risk. So there's a lot of trade-offs, many of which I didn't mention. Is it a better world or just a different one? We'd love to hear your thoughts, and thanks for listening to what we did before. I'm Matt. And I'm Ollie.

SPEAKER_01 58:29 Please subscribe, it really helps us out massively. See you next time.