The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race

Elnara Khurshidova

21 September 2015

What Has Agriculture Caused

Agriculture has been around for hundreds of years. With its negative effects on humanity, agriculture has greatly affected the environment. Many archeologists believe that adoption of Agriculture was not an improvement but a disaster for humans in many ways. Jared Diamond, the author of the article called “The worst mistake in the history of the human race” argues that hunter-gatherers were better off than the farmers. In a way agriculture is believed to cause many problems for humans such as sexual inequality, deep class division, changed their diet which later led to poor health and diseases.

One of the problems that agriculture caused is sexual inequality between men and women. This problem was already around, but it was more obvious after the adoption of agriculture. Farming have encouraged inequality between the sexes. Since women did not have to transport babies in traveling existence, women after

agriculture had more babies than the hunter-gatherers and therefore poorer health. According to Jared Diamond, women are doing more work now than they we’re doing before agriculture. For example, he states that in today’s society “women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the man walk empty-handed” (Diamond 6). This proves that in an agricultural community women tend to be looks as both inferior and as of less value which creates an inequality between men and women. “Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made of beasts of burden”. Additionally, in the book of Genesis it is believed to be that men and women were created equally and had equal rights, however agriculture has changed this and forced women do more work than they were supposed to do.
Another main problem that agriculture caused is deep class division. Agriculture allows food to be stockpiled and enables some people to do things other than to look for food. This resulted in deep class division between those who had access to food and those who did not. Hunter-gatherers had little chance to gather belongings. According to Jared Diamond “Hunters and gatherers can have no kings, no special parasites who grow fat on food seized from others” (Diamond 4). They created groups called Elite who ruled as kings. Elites got the best food and were the healthiest of all. With agriculture, the elite became better off, but most people became worse off. With all these came the potential for deep class division.
Another way that agriculture caused problems for humans is their diet.

In an agricultural society people started to farm and there were less to no hunting which changed their diets dramatically. When people were hunting and gathering they were getting a healthy and a well-balanced diet. Before agriculture people ate many various wild plants and animals therefore, they had better nutrition. For example, the Kalahari Bushmen’s daily intake was “2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein” (Diamond 2). Also when Diamond is comparing the two societies, he talks about the balance of nutrients and diet, also he states that the “Kalahari Bushmen eat a variety of 75 or so different wild plants” and receive more calories than needed. As the people switched over to agriculture, the amount of food they had become more plentiful and predictable but unhealthy. Nowadays, more people are overweight especially in the western area of the world. This proves that people before agriculture were healthy and had a decent

diet.
Even though there was more food to support a family, it increased the human population dramatically. As the population increased it became more crowded and the overall human health had decreased. Large amounts of people and children interacting with each other caused many diseases to spread. And later on people ended up dying because of the diseases. Also paleopathologists have learned from skeletons in Greece and Turkey that the “average height toward the end of the ice age was 5’9’ for men and 5’5 for women” (Diamond 3). This method was repeated after the agriculture and found that the average heights have been shrunk to 5’3’ for men and 5’ for women. The Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors. This shows the decrease in nutrition after the adoption of agriculture caused many problems.
To conclude with, Jared Diamond argues that agriculture is the worst mistake in the history of the human race. It is believed to cause many problems in humanity. It caused sexual inequality between men and women, Deep class division, it changed their diets and later in life caused diseases. I agree with the author and think that agriculture did cause problems for humans and they have never recovered from it. The examples above were the best way to explain the problems that the agriculture caused for humans and the environment we live in.

Works Cited
Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover Magazine, May 1987, 1-6.
Diamond, Jared, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover Magazine, May 1987, 1-6.