September 21, 2003
Quote of the Day
The case against agriculture's being a natural cultural advance began to gather momentum with the surprising discovery that hunting and gathering isn't such a bad way to make a living. The !Kung San, Richard Lee found in the 196os, work just a few hours a day - hunting, digging roots, harvesting mongongo trees - and then it's Miller time. In 1972, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (a former cultural evolutionist turned skeptic of cultural evolutionism) dubbed hunter-gatherers "the original affluent society" on grounds that "all the people's material wants are easily satisfied."
And the problem isn't just that primitive agriculture may have been a regression in terms of sheer efficiency. The more populous villages that farming ushered in would presumably foment disease; and the low-protein, high-starch content of some staple crops might be unhealthy. Studying the bones of early farmers, some archaeologists have concluded that they had shorter lives, and more rotten teeth, than hunter-gatherers.
Robert Wright
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
pp66-67
