The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race Analysis

The “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”, from Discovery Magazine (May 1987), pp. 64-66., by Jared Diamond, he opposes the progressivist opinion and he expresses his beliefs that Agriculture was mankind’s biggest blunder.

Jared Diamond is a well-known American author/scientist popular for his works “The Third Chimpanzee” and “Guns, Germs and Steel” (for which he won a Pulitzer Prize)

He’s a Professor of Geography at University of California, Los Angeles. He earned his B.A from Harvard College and got his Ph.D. in Physiology and Biophysics from University of Cambridge. Being an expert at human physiology and having produced books that provide insight on evolution and societal development, he’s indeed well qualified to write

64-66), author Jared Diamond claims that agriculture as opposed to popular belief, didn’t help civilization bloom, but instead proved detrimental to human lives ever since its introduction. He states that the progressives believe agriculture was adopted due to its efficiency and how it complimented our race. He contradicts this view with multiple studies and expert sources. According to his research, modern day humans are much worse off than their hunter gatherer counterparts due to a variety of lifestyle changes ranging from greatly deteriorated nutritional quality to increased sexual discrimination. He gathers the support from various archaeological research conducted on various remains found in Chile, Greece, Turkey, etc. Archaeologists can further point out the date at which this switch (from Gathering to agriculture) took place. He further establishes that Hunter gatherers may have chosen to change ways with the preconceived idea that the capability to feed more people and reducing the burden on mothers (hence allowing them to bear a child every 2 years instead of 4) would in turn drastically improve quality of life. He concludes the article by emphasizing on how it created disparities between the elite and the commoners and by defending his own kind for having discovered mankind’s biggest mistake and the motive behind

He adds to the support he already garnered from the Chilean mummies with another example from Greek tombs, which suggest that the royals had a better and fuller diet and had better teeth than the average person. Diamond shifts the focus onto modern day life, where people are still suffering from this gap between poor and wealthy, using the contrasting examples of Americans and Ethiopian farmers, proclaiming that the Kalahari hunter gatherer lived a far more comfortable life than the Ethiopian farmer. In addition to that, he also deliberates over the sexual inequalities in modern day as well. Speaking about an incident he himself witnessed in New Guinea, where women were forced to carry more weight/load than men cementing his argument that it’s still the same as the Chilean example. Creating a bridge between then and now, and relating these situations help add more substance to his argument. It feels almost surreal to the reader now, how the author’s initial ideas actually seem to be a reality and how one’s preconceptions of a better life now were just propaganda that our text books and media seem to drill into our