Book Review: “Pandora’s Seed” by Spencer Wells. Ian Welsh. Aug. 27, 2017.
There have been a number of technological revolutions during humanity’s existence. Perhaps the most important was the stone age tool revolution, really, but that’s not one we tend to focus on, it being so far in the past. Instead we focus on the Agricultural revolution and the Industrial revolution.
Pandora’s Seed is about the agricultural revolution. As the title suggests, Wells thinks that agriculture was something of a disaster.
This isn’t a novel argument any more, most people have heard it made, and certainly any long time reader of this blog knows I think it is essentially true.
The argument is simple enough: when we look at hunter-gatherers from before the agricultural revolution, they’re healthier and they live longer. After the agricultural revolution, and especially the later hydraulic revolution, we are sicker and die sooner. We have a lot more disease. We have gum disease and tooth decay. We are shorter. The hips of women are narrower, meaning childbirth is harder and the women are less healthy, hip size correlating quite nicely with overall health in women.
Most of these metrics don’t recover for thousands of years. It is not until Hellenic civilization that most of them are exceeded, and when Hellenic civilization collapses, that ends.
Women’s hip width has STILL not recovered.
And remember that average age statistics average in childhood deaths. Take them out, and the lifespans of many ancient societies look a lot better. The general consensus wasn’t that the natural lifespan was 35 years, it was that it was about 70, and people who didn’t get that didn’t get it due to privation, disease, violence or death in childbirth.
We evolved as hunter-gatherers. It is that simple. We are adapted for that sort of lifestyle. We have made some genetic adaptations to the agricultural lifestyle, without question, but we are not fully adapted to it. The use of cultural change instead of genetic change has led us ill adapted to the way we live.
This has become, in certain respects, even more extreme post-industrial revolution. It is unquestionable, for example, that we have far more mental illness than our forbears. Humans handle living in industrial society even worse than they do in agricultural societies. We have rampant obesity, because humans are not meant to have easy access to this much sugar and empty carbohydrates while sitting on their asses all day.
When we do do labour, whether agricultural labor or industrial, it is generally bad for us. The human body is made for hunting and gathering, not rote unnatural repetitive movements, over and over and again.
So in agricultural or industrial societies we eat in ways we aren’t adapted to, and we work in ways we aren’t adapted to. And it makes us sick and unhappy.
That is not deny to the obvious benefits of industrialization in particular, simply to not its underside.
As for agriculture, it won because those who took it up (or herding) tended to win wars. Hunter-gatherers were happier and healthier and lived longer, but they lost wars, and because they didn’t shit nearly as much where they ate, they didn’t have the disease resistance of sedentary agriculturalists. Just going near agricultural settlements would have often been a death sentence.
The core point here is simple: social and technological advancement is not the same thing as increases in human welfare. Mistaking one for the other is vastly stupid. Social or technological advancements win if they out-compete other models, and that competition is not based on “is nicer”, it is based, ultimately, on violence. (Most of the world, having been conquered by Europeans after the industrial revolution, is real real clear on this.)
Agriculture didn’t run humanity off a cliff. But the industrial revolution and our advancements in military technology (aka. nukes) offer us the ability to win ourselves to extinction, while making ourselves vastly unhappy doing so.
Perhaps it is time to learn how to take to conscious control of our technology and society, before our unconsciousness causes catastrophes we cannot handle.
This is an important book, to nail into our heads the facts of how advancements work, in a time period long enough ago that we can hopefully look at it with the faintest shard of objectivity.
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