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How Climate Change Is a Carnival
All that power is getting flipped upside-down
One of the great mysteries of human history is something we take completely for granted today: about ten thousand years ago, humans started farming. Why?
It seems obvious to us now that farming is how we get food, but as with most things we’re used to in the 21st century, this was not always the case. For the vast majority of human history, we didn’t really farm. We didn’t need to.
The conventional narrative that the dawn of agriculture marked a new era of abundance for a human species that had previously been eking out a meager survival does not stand up to historical fact. There is ample evidence to show that hunter-gatherer societies lived lives of material abundance, arguably putting far less labor towards survival than we expend today.
Farming was much more labor-intensive than relying on wild food and offered a far less-nutritious diet. Agriculture also upended social organization, drastically reducing the ability of humans to be nomadic and rapidly expanding the population. Dense, settled agricultural societies brought with them a myriad of social problems such as overcrowding, pollution, disease, increases in violence and warfare, divisions of social class, and greater oppression of women.
