In a short magazine article of 1987, the scientist Jared Diamond wrote that the move from hunting and gathering to farming was “the worst mistake in human history”. Early farmers, he showed from their skeletons, were shorter, sicker and shorter-lived than the hunter-gatherers before them, and farming brought inequality between rich and poor, and may have encouraged inequality between men and women. Therapeutic Shamanism shares the view that farming was a disaster, though it dates the worst of it to the rise of the first city-states, and it takes care to separate true hunter-gatherers from farming peoples when it comes to violence.
What is Jared Diamond’s background? #
A scientist and writer whose work crosses physiology, evolutionary biology and geography. In his own words, “Since completing my Ph.D. in 1961, I have divided my scientific research efforts between two fields: molecular physiology on the one hand, evolutionary biology and biogeography on the other hand.” His books describe him as a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles.1 His best-known books are Guns, Germs and Steel (1997), which won the Pulitzer Prize, Collapse and The World Until Yesterday (2012).
What did “The Worst Mistake” argue? #
That farming, usually seen as the great step forward in human history, was in many ways a step backwards. Diamond wrote the article for Discover magazine in 1987, against what he called the “progressivist perspective on which I was brought up”, the view that farming freed people from a hard and hungry life and gave them leisure.2
His main evidence is the skeletons of the people who made the change. In Greece and Turkey, he reports, the average height of hunter-gatherers at the end of the last Ice Age was about 5 feet 9 inches for men and 5 feet 5 inches for women; with farming it fell to about 5 feet 3 and 5 feet, and people there have still not regained it. At Dickson Mounds in Illinois, where a hunter-gatherer people took up intensive maize farming around AD 1150, the skeletons show more tooth defects, about four times as much anaemia, three times as many signs of infection, and a fall in life expectancy at birth from about twenty-six years to nineteen.3
He gave three reasons. Farmers relied on a few starchy crops; they risked starvation when a crop failed; and crowding and trade spread disease, though he noted that some archaeologists think it was the crowding, not farming itself, that did the harm. Farming also made possible the first real divisions of class, since “there can be no kings” without stored food, and, he suggested, it may have brought harder lives for women, with more frequent pregnancies and heavier work.4
Why did people take up farming, if it was so bad for them? #
Often not by choice, Diamond suggests, though some bands chose it without foreseeing the cost. Farming could feed many more people from the same land, and “a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter”. As farming peoples grew in number, hunter-gatherers were pushed into the places farmers did not want.5 In Guns, Germs and Steel he adds that there was “not even a conscious choice”: the change happened slowly, step by step, without anyone foreseeing where it would lead.6
He ends the article with an image. If the whole history of our species were a single day, with each hour standing for a hundred thousand years, we would have farmed only since six minutes to midnight. “Hunter-gatherers practised the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history.”7
What does Therapeutic Shamanism say about it? #
It shares the same view. What does seem absolutely clear is that hunter-gathering was the most successful and longest-lasting culture in the whole of human history, and that agriculture threw us into a mess that it is unclear whether we will survive.8 There is a qualification: “the first seven thousand years of agriculture did still seem to go reasonably well too; maybe not a golden age, but a silver one”, until the rise of the first city-states around 4,000 BC, the period called the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer. Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel explains why some farming cultures spread more widely than others.9
Where Diamond’s case is mainly about health and inequality, Therapeutic Shamanism also sees farming as the beginning of a break in our relationship with the rest of the living world: the start of our own domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this, and of the belief that we own the land. See What does domestication do to us? and What is the Fall?
Didn’t Diamond also say that hunter-gatherers were violent? #
In his later book The World Until Yesterday (2012), he writes that rates of killing in war were high in many “traditional societies”, higher on average than in modern states. The question is who counts as a hunter-gatherer. Diamond’s sample of traditional societies mixes hunter-gatherers with farmers and herders. One of his main examples, the Dani of New Guinea, are farmers who irrigate and till gardens. And by his own figures, drawn from one survey, farmers’ rates of death in war were nearly four times those of hunter-gatherers.10
Therapeutic Shamanism makes this point about other writers who describe early humans as violent. People often imagine tribes ruled by chiefs “because they are thinking of agricultural tribal societies, rather than hunter-gatherer ones”, and “it is a common mistake to lump them together”.11 The same holds for the archaeologist Lawrence Keeley: “most of the examples Keeley gives of ‘pre-civilisation’ cultures being violent are not in fact examples of hunter-gatherer cultures, but settled, agricultural cultures.”12 Douglas Fry and Patrik Söderberg, in a study of nomadic foragers alone, found that their way of life is “not conducive to making war”, though killings did occur from time to time.13
None of this means hunter-gatherers were saints. “Although they were not warlike, hunter-gatherers were not pacifists, either”, and their lives, often hard and dangerous, are not to be romanticised.14 See How did hunter-gatherers keep their societies equal?
What else does The World Until Yesterday offer? #
Much on how children were raised. Diamond writes that “most hunter-gatherer bands do minimal physical punishment of young children, many farming societies do some punishment, and herders are especially likely to punish.”15 Therapeutic Shamanism draws on this: “although corporal punishment existed in some hunter-gatherer cultures, it was rare. Most hunter-gatherer adults did not hit children.”16 Diamond also refuses to romanticise the past, and lists things modern people can be glad to have left behind, among them infanticide and living in constant fear of attack.
Do others agree with him? #
Not entirely. A large study of skeletons published in 2023 found that changes in body size after the coming of farming varied widely from region to region, rising in some places and falling in others.17 His figure of a hunter-gatherer working week of only twelve to nineteen hours rests on studies from the 1960s; the anthropologist Vivek Venkataraman reports that later work, including a recalculation by Richard Lee himself, puts it nearer forty hours.18 And The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, criticises the idea, which it finds in Diamond, that farming put an end to equality “everywhere and forever”.19
