The Long Way Back to Ourselves

2.3

Agriculture: Progress or Trap?

This episode asks whether agriculture, which arose independently at least seven times worldwide, actually improved human life, and the skeletal evidence says no: declining body height, worse teeth, and new infectious diseases among early farmers. It tests and rejects Marshall Sahlins's claim that foragers worked only two or three hours a day, undermined once food processing and travel are counted. It corrects the idea that people chose farming as an improvement, proposing instead a ratchet mechanism in which each sensible step toward settlement raised birth rates, tested against cemetery data showing a demographic transition. It ends by naming the storehouse as the invention that first let a person own more than you could carry.