The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

Рет қаралды 16,139

Күн бұрын

Was leaving behind our nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles a mistake? If so, why did so many different groups of people make the switch to farming? The researcher Andrea Matranga spent more than a decade looking at the transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic era and found that humanity’s decision to settle down was driven by climactic shifts and the need to insure against famines.
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Пікірлер: 128

@Sniblet Ай бұрын

I see your “the development of agriculture” and I raise you a “the development of advertising.” If we never started competitively deceiving each other for our livings…

@MultiCappie Ай бұрын

If you're talking the development of competitive deception and you're not mentioning religion, I find you, uhhh, possibly deceptive?

@Sniblet Ай бұрын

@@MultiCappie Darn! I was so sure I had you deceived! Frick!

@MultiCappie Ай бұрын

@@Sniblet hmmmn.

@stevenbrucci Ай бұрын

Well, there can be Andrea's next 10-year study that--again--has a seemingly obvious hypothesis: people felt they had to get rid of surplus production; so, why not advertise it?

@fishdude666ify Ай бұрын

Except for the fact that the human body was designed by a couple million years of evolutionary pressure to process a hunter gatherer diet, not a grain based diet. I've got a theory about the reason the white man's whiskey was so devastating to Native Americans was because they were still more hunter gatherers than farmers and therefore didn't have hundreds of years to adapt to grain based diets and what is whiskey but the distillation of grain? They're largely lactose intolerant as well.

@catc8927 Ай бұрын

So I guess in the end, agriculture is like any successful public health measure (vaccines, pasteurization) - the innovation was so successful at eradicating a deadly problem that people forgot the original problem it solved and are now questioning why we bothered with it in the first place.

@redfax Ай бұрын

absolutely!! Great point

@RonaldPetrin Ай бұрын

Then we have the laws of superposition, geological sedimentation thinking😊. We are now in a better position due to technological advancements leading to our better understanding as to what emerged after the Ice Age-to revisit rethink today.

@christopherellis2663 Ай бұрын

Interesting hypothesis. Many assumptions

@joannew3905 Ай бұрын

Are you maybe conflating being a hunter-gatherer with being nomadic? In some places there are mostly sedentary hunter-gatherers. And there are nomadic herders who are not hunter-gatherers. It depends on specific environments.

@ComeCleanAmerica Ай бұрын

"Sedentary" hunter-gatherers can live where animal populations are migratory.

@donbemont7901 Ай бұрын

It seems to me that there are two questions, best kept separate: 1) Which lifestyle was most successful in societies survival over the long haul? 2) Which lifestyle was better for the individual? It seems to me that this discussion focuses on wounded sensibilities over the second. First we have an older claim that individuals led a better life in hunter-gatherer societies, and now we have a perhaps valid corrective to that claim. All of which sounds a bit garbled to me because of not only the inherent subjectivity of which is better. But also the obvious: which individuals? Just as an example, a five-year-old child, a woman of child bearing age, and a young adult man might have very different individual preferences here. But the first question is only glanced at in this conversation. The point that globally agricultural societies came to dominate, at least in large part due to being able to support higher populations. And THAT was always my takeaway reading earlier writers on this topic. The moral of the story, uncomfortable as we might find it, is that history turns on things quite apart from what best fits the preferences of individuals. Maybe the hunter/gatherer lifestyle provided a more pleasant existence for 51+% of the population, maybe agriculture did. However, the eventual dominance of agricultural societies occurred independently of the answer to that debate. The implications for today are unsettling. Just as the norms for human life established during the ice ages became obsolete as the earth's tilt changed, it may well be that the norms of human life established during the centuries dominated by the printing press are becoming obsolete. And that new societal arrangements will come to dominate, quite independently of whether this provides for better or worse individual lives.

@98Zai Ай бұрын

I would have loved if you had also touched on the social changes that incurred with the agricultural revolution. Suddenly ownership became a big deal (I assume it was invented at this time, because of the importance of fertile land), family bloodlines were established as an important thing (ancestor worship) and keeping track of your offspring for inheritance. This was a huge change for us, we went from probably not caring much about who's children we were raising, likely raising them all collectively - to keeping tight control of which son was the first and the battles that then ensued. This was not only the birth of war, but also the start of hiding information and keeping secrets.

@ambasutori9053 Ай бұрын

Indeed, the historic birth of class society itself!

@98Zai Ай бұрын

@@ambasutori9053 It's definitely an interesting subject worthy of greater study!

@qn57 Ай бұрын

The Atlantic is a superb publication that I love to read. When it comes to Podcasts, however, you are facing stiff competition. It starts with much more pleasant voices and acoustics and culminates in conversations that are not only enlightening (as yours are sometimes), but have a natural flow (as opposed to the interviewee responding to the stereotypical “can you enlighten us on x” with “absolutely. Consolation: there are very few mastering all these skills - but we only need these few. The Atlantic is a master of the written word (but I’ll admit to Washington Week as the exception that proves the rule).

@riqpate7122 Ай бұрын

Worst mistake that seemed right at the time was trashing the Fairness Doctrine for radio and TV by Reagan.

@RockinRobbins13 Ай бұрын

There is no human activity so noble that it can't be ruined by inappropriate injection of irrelevant political propaganda.

@hhwippedcream Ай бұрын

Except.... Apart from the salmon, NW tribes likely practiced shellfish aquaculture with constructed stoneworks that allowed high tide in but not to the extent that predators could enter the pool and out again without taking shellfish spawn/food out again. It's like this practice occurred wherever suitable species existed in numbers suitable for the practice. See Hawaii for similar structures for fish farming. With reference to why they may have exhibited farming society traits - they were agriculturalists or rather aquaculturalists.

@hhwippedcream Ай бұрын

Mass production = mistake multiplier led to planned obsolescence which led to waste of iterative products which led to continued slave labor in the service of capitalism which leads to majority automation by AI which leads to iterative design by AI which leads to...... Highly efficient bull -S creation?

@kurtisengle6256 Ай бұрын

Simply, any rock you pick up while looking for food goes to the low tide line. The outgoing tide will be filtered by those rocks, and the incoming tide will bring those animals back into your sea garden. This is a construction. As distinct from an accident. It cultivates food.

@anachronistofer Ай бұрын

Discovery and use of fossil fuels. It may turn out splitting the atom wasn't such a great idea also.

@homewall744 Ай бұрын

If government didn't want to mass murder with nuclear energy, it would be great.

@mathematrucker Ай бұрын

We're living it up right now and making music. When the music's over, turn out the lights.

@archeanna1425 Ай бұрын

CLICK BAIT. This misses so much information. It really sounds like what someone who has never even gardened would come up with. There are broad generalisations about hunter-gatherers. Because some bones in one place showed growth problems doesn't mean growth problems happened anywhere else. The native plants of the Pacific coast are not easily farmed. There were no grains or potatoes or gourds. There was never going to be agriculture here because there was never going to be the seeds that would make farming occur as an idea. You leave out the evidence for ancient farming of potatoes in South America which started with the plants, not the people. This was a waste of time, perhaps not the worst mistake in the history of the human race but certainly the worst mistake of my morning.

@starkillerclub3755 Ай бұрын

If this topic is interesting to anyone, I highly suggest a book called Ismael by Danial Quinn, it's the counter argument to the points made here. With agriculture, humans have tried to separate themselves from the natural world, creating the narrative that we are above all other species, and therefore have the right to do whatever we want, no matter the effects on the eco system that sustains us.

@phaedrussmith1949 Ай бұрын

That's a great book.

@Pinkdam Ай бұрын

A good suggestion. I also recommend 'The Evolution of Man and Society' by C D Darlington, if you can get your hands on a copy.

@phaedrussmith1949 Ай бұрын

@@Pinkdam Many copies for sale online. The copyright has run out so it can also be downloaded for free.

@maxheadrom3088 Ай бұрын

Isiah Berlim argues that it is impossible to know if life in other times was better because it's impossible to put ourselves in other's shoes.

@networkimprov Ай бұрын

The "gatherer" in hunter-gatherer is a misnomer. Many indigenous peoples were more gardeners than gatherers, and engaged in other land management such as controlled burning to make lands more productive for hunting or gardening.

@ComeCleanAmerica Ай бұрын

The archeological evidence does not exist for controlled burning, but does exist that human caused fire had significant ecological impacts. Swidden agricultural cultures are a more recent development in tropical environments.

@networkimprov Ай бұрын

@@ComeCleanAmerica Native American groups are said to have practiced controlled burning in California, at least. Australian Aboriginal groups apparently wiped out a population of dangerous monitor lizards by burning their nighttime resting places. How would evidence for "controlled" vs "caused significant ecological impact" differ?

@gregjs9665 Ай бұрын

I see-the people who think hunting and gathering was better are all blindly projecting their modern-day concerns onto earlier periods while the people who think farming is better do no such thing and are all perfectly clear thinkers. And yet we are asked to believe that early farmers were motivated by “low construction costs”? Nothing anachronistic about that concern! It could be that winter was a main impetus to farming, but didn’t many hunters-gatherers practice seasonal migration-and yes, carried their babies with them (why would that be such a problem-modern day h-gs carry their babies most of the time)? And what about hunters who live year-round in cold, winter-like climates? Obviously farming isn’t an option for them, but the point is that it’s not a necessity for them, either. Also, does this “seasonality hypothesis” even hold true in the Fertile Crescent or many other sites of early agriculture? Finally, what are the statistics on how often most h-gs face genuine famine? This, too, sounds like more of a projection of modern concerns onto the past. Famine-the severe, deadly kind, anyways, not the periods of scarcity that merely show up in bone X-rays-seems to be much more of a Neolithic/modern phenomenon than a Paleolithic one. In general, even h-gs who have been pushed off onto much less desirable lands still manage to feed themselves with less work and less risk than farmers. They generally did not worry about dying of starvation (or of war, for that matter). Which leads to the question: To what extent did most h-gs freely choose to convert to farming versus to what extent did a few farming societies simply expand and use their greater numbers and weaponry to kill off or forcibly convert the many h-g groups whose lands they stole in order to feed their ever-growing populations? These climate-dietary-economic issues are important in assessing farming vs h-ging-but don’t even touch on the even more important psycho-social-cultural losses that go with the transition to farming.

@marketads1 Ай бұрын

So much great stuff to think about! Love this. I’m willing to eat this for my book when we escape to the woods and teach each other.

@98Zai Ай бұрын

Oooh, I love the idea of human bones having tree rings. Presumably it would be awful for the person (unless we were actually good at that, which we could be since we lived like that for hundreds of thousands of years) but it's very poetic to think that we grew at the same rate as the trees. Feels like we were closer to nature in many ways. I wonder if these rings would make the bone more durable for human activities, just like how wood is way better than stone for construction because it's bendy.

@BrickGriff Ай бұрын

The answer, folks, is a combination of religion, politics, and economics that motivated people to separate culture from nature. I'm not sure whether the chicken or the egg came first, but imperialism and industrialization destroys other cultures, not nature. People are actually pretty adaptable to the slow changes of nature. It's conquest and barbarism that causes civilizations to disappear. Yes, I am arguing that colonization also hurts the colonizer, in the long run.

@rynob356 Ай бұрын

Aw I was thinking it was surely the Kudzu debacle

@BrickGriff Ай бұрын

Right? I thought it was driving the Buffalo to extinction causing the Great Dust Bowl... Or like... The deforestation of the Amazon or something.

@geoffworley5275 Ай бұрын

Thought it was Industrial Agriculture and the reliance on immigrants as cheap labor.

@UAL320 Ай бұрын

Next time please put your CLICKBAIT title in “quotes”….thanks.

@christopherellis2663 Ай бұрын

Actually, we used to do an autumn hunt and butcher and airdry the meat for winter. Paleolithic period. A third of a million years ago in the Dordogne. Hunt game, gather firewood

@iantercero5380 Ай бұрын

Is famine really pronounced "fameyene?" I always said "famin." I feel betrayed.😢

@maxheadrom3088 Ай бұрын

How do we know they were independent? Well, air mail stamps were prohibitively high in those days!

@MichaelConlon-j7z Ай бұрын

"Fa - mIne" is used often by the guest. That pronunciation is incorrect, and I suspect it comes from him being a person who was brought up either with a non-english lingo, or a mixed upbringing, with english and something else. The right way to say it is with the second syllable being soft - "fa - mihn."

@tinyshepherdess7710 Ай бұрын

The hunter-gatherer lifestyle was WAYYYYY better for women.

@brett22bt Ай бұрын

"The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race"? Voting for Trump.

@aftonair Ай бұрын

My thoughts exactly.

@redfax Ай бұрын

@@aftonair Hint: When news titles include a question mark the answer to the question is generally "no".

@sarahinsf Ай бұрын

@@redfax True, but it's tricky in that our using agriculture to protect against starvation enabled us to build cities, spread much more over the planet, increase our population a huge amount, fight for resources and ultimately due to greed and short-sighted planning, massively impact the environment with pollution and climate change, which if we don't annihilate ourselves through nuclear war, will probably wipe out humanity. So... yes? Not sure whether to add a winky smiley face here or not for levity.

@JK-gu3tl Ай бұрын

Woodrow Wilson

@homewall744 Ай бұрын

Thinking voting for rulers who can only extort labor, bribe, lie and do massive violence so you can enjoy forced unity is democracy.

@Caperhere Ай бұрын

Wherever there are seeds, there will be animals.

@phil20_20 Ай бұрын

Civilization was built on farming.

@margaretjohnson6259 Ай бұрын

patriarch was built on civilisation and hu;mans began to really suffer.

@violetphase Ай бұрын

It sure was. Is there a point behind that, though?

@sammit8962 Ай бұрын

@@margaretjohnson6259 You have an idealised version of what the hunter gatherer lifestyle is like. Sure you may only work a few hours a day but you can just as easily starve if you are born disabled, die of thirst if there is drought, become riddled with parasites that cause malnutrition. Then there is exposure to the elements, one severe winter and people start dying of exposure. On the subject of disease and illnesses you'd have no access to vacines and medicine and treatments would be limited to whatever naturally occuring plants you can find. Minor injuries become fatal. Better not break a bone or get a bad cut, you might die of sepsis and/or gangrene. No local anesthetic, a limitation to crude hand tools for surgery and sterilisation limited to boiling water means survival rates and successful treatment rates will plummet. Not to mention the agony for patients. The majority of people don't even survive infancy. Survival depends on risking your life daily against dangerous predators using rudimentary weapons.

@sammit8962 Ай бұрын

@@violetphase the point is without farming you wouldn't be comfortably watching KZbin on an electronic device. Nature is beautiful and wonderful, but... she really doesn't care about you. If you fall over in the city, help is usually at worst minutes away. Often, help is instant, as in any public place somebody is likely going to pause to help you. Ambulance response time may vary, but you know the system exists. Many species have gone extinct without human intervention. Their is nothing wrong with wanting to not have to suffer under the indiscriminate wrath of nature for eternity, theirs nothing wrong with humans striving for a world more convenient and suitable for us, our ancestors have suffered for millions of years and they would do anything to live in the time we do they wouldn't give a care about "being one with nature" if that means they don't have a metre long parasite in their intestines and a cancer slowly eating away their bones.

@margaretjohnson6259 Ай бұрын

@@sammit8962 oh, no one really wants to go back to hunter-gatherer life. i'm just saying patriarchy came along with agriculture. there are downsides to every change.

@BrickGriff Ай бұрын

Wait.... Didn't have more to do with the development of property, territory, and concentrated power then any natural decline in nomadic lifestyles? The colonizing humans out-competed the ecological humans. Ecological lifestyles didn't simply betray their users. This is a weird analysis. This is yet another example of what I call the Treachery of the Plow. People like to say that the agricultural revolution was all about organization and tillage while omitting the need for cooperative landscape management and topsoil restoration.

@StephanieSoressi Ай бұрын

If you think farmers are sedentary, you must be a city boy. No one works longer hours than farmers do. Hunter-gatherers were more sedentary! Their average workday of hunter-gatherers was 2 hours!

@tonyhill2318 Ай бұрын

Farming as a way of life was not an organic thing that tribes started doing. It was a top down imposed way of life. It was way worse than hunting gathering for the people, but good for the leaders

@seansmith3058 Ай бұрын

A lot of isolated facts without an argument.

@MarcosElMalo2 Ай бұрын

And not even facts. Hunter/gatherers did and do store food for the winter. We have archaeological evidence of food caches from before the development of agriculture. This economist is not only a non-expert, he’s completely ignorant of established archaeological evidence.

@sundrawhitham5089 Ай бұрын

Famine did not cease with the advent of farming

@RockinRobbins13 Ай бұрын

But routine famine did. And older people ceased to be abandoned when they couldn't keep with the nomadic group.

@rjs8044 Ай бұрын

Breastfeeding reduces pregnancy.

@maxheadrom3088 Ай бұрын

Hunter-gatherers did save for winter and did control their population and did keep nature healthy. I wonder what an economist is doing playing anthropologist ...

@SteveBoyington-i1e Ай бұрын

New Coke?

@riqpate7122 Ай бұрын

Electing Reagan instead of the real human being, Jimmy Carter.

@RockinRobbins13 Ай бұрын

There is no human activity so noble that it can't be ruined by inappropriate injection of irrelevant political propaganda.

@AverageIowaGuyLiveStreams Ай бұрын

This was recorded using audio equipment in a climate-controlled environment, posted on the internet, by two people who would likely have died in childhood in hunter gatherer times and if they had lived into adulthood would probably have at least 3 parasites. I guess we can thank the advent of agriculture for this wonderful gift.

@98Zai Ай бұрын

We had 3 types of parasites well into the 20th century. Many, if not most people on the planet still do. This is from WHO "The total number of under-5 deaths worldwide has declined from 12.8 million in 1990 to 4.9 million in 2022. Since 1990, the global under-5 mortality rate has dropped by 59%, from 93 deaths per 1000 live births in 1990 to 37 in 2022." Remember, it's been about 10k years since we switched and we're just now catching up. If we could only rid ourselves of the strange new social structures we'd be set.

@fartsfartington9019 Ай бұрын

I thought this was going to be a podcast about my marriage!

@maxheadrom3088 Ай бұрын

That's an awesome clickbait! Let's see the size of the hyperbole!

@camerontolbert6738 Ай бұрын

It doesn't seem as though humans are good hunters at all. I dont think I could win a fight against the deer in my neighborhood; even with a stick. I could set a trap, though. Maybe we are great at trapping and gathering? A change wasn't from Hunter×Gathers to Farmers but from Trappers×Gathers to more organized Trappers×Gathers. Resources and organization being the key to the scale and expansion of what we naturally do and are still doing today.

@hwizell7478 Ай бұрын

Clean white paper prints Serious questions with charts Indigestion sharts

@Fents_Post_Productions Ай бұрын

Getting rid of SNAP will fix it. NOT.

@brucepeek3923 Ай бұрын

Yeah hunter gatherers didn't have as many kids cuz they have crummy food.. Until they learned how to ride horses at which time they greatly expanded their range and land they could use for their own carrying capacity- and then they hit the jackpot of raiding the dirt farmers and stealing their women and food. best Bruce Peek

@LeMotMista Ай бұрын

Moloch, hands down. (AKA, "the Profit Motive," run amok.)

@brucepeek3923 Ай бұрын

Yeah right - hunter gatherers had great lives, as they were stalked and eaten by Lions, Tigers and Bears, oh, and wolves.. They died whenever they came across other humans who carried new germs they died like flies.. Now it is common in the United States for adults to live to 73.. - Japan 83 because they have decent health care.. In hunter gatherer times people lived to what 45 - 50 years? C'mon dude catch a clue.. best Bruce Peek

@RockinRobbins13 Ай бұрын

_"In hunter gatherer times people lived to what 45 - 50 years? "_ You're much too generous. Try 1 of two never reached 14. The average life expectancy was between 20 and 30. Almost nobody lived past 40.

@jamesharkins6799 Ай бұрын

The worst mistake in the history of the human race... so far.

@kurtisengle6256 Ай бұрын

Agriculture? No. Advertising. Worst mistake in the history of Man.

@RockinRobbins13 Ай бұрын

Every idea has to be sold.

@dalehalliday3578 Ай бұрын

great stuff.

@sirloin869 23 күн бұрын

yup

@jamesrobertson2361 Ай бұрын

Kids are an advantage to farming. Cheap labor.

@MultiCappie Ай бұрын

Religion.

@tristan7216 Ай бұрын

This fellow has odd pronunciation, and I think he's a native English speaker. Sall-mon, fam-yne, scar-city, some other words' syllable stressing is odd... what is that?

@503mcbee Ай бұрын

A little late to be brining this up.

@Papawcanner Ай бұрын

Beer started it all

@geoffworley5275 Ай бұрын

Man does not live on bread alone,..

@RonaldPetrin Ай бұрын

Hey Grasshopper…

@Devona-b7v Ай бұрын

Why is this the ant and the grasshopper. OMG. Is this for real. I thought this was based on a fairy tale. And yes, it is an Aesop fable. This is why books should not be banned dumbasses. The Ant and the Grasshopper Aesop's fable about the virtues of hard work and forethought. This is why English Degrees should not be at the bottom of the scale. The worst mistake in American history is no one reads. Farming, really, talk to the farmers who were forced to sell out tobacco crops for synthetic chemicals and tobacco. This is a sad broadcast. Who are you two.