I have long been familiar with Jared Diamond's works. I was first exposed to them in the mid-90s when, during a lay-over at some monstrosity of an airport, I happened upon and subsequently bought The Third Chimpanzee. Doing so has
led to a long fascination with several of the things he proffered in said tome. As I clicked on the above link to his work, I was struck almost instantly by something he asserts that is patently false. Mr. Diamond alleges:
With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.
I guess Mr. Diamond has never read
A journey from Prince of Wale's Fort in Hudson's Bay to the northern ocean by
Samuel Hearne.
Mr. Diamond goes on to allege that in hunter gatherer societies, "Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving."
I can only assume that Mr. Diamond has never read
Eskimos Prove and all Meat Diet Provides Excellent Health by Vihjalmur Sefanson or
Fatal Passage which is about the Arctic expeditions of
John Rae.
Mr. Diamond continues,
It’s almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.
While it may be true that starving is inconceivable for a bushman, to believe that starvation was inconceivable for hunter-gatherers as a whole would be a very selective telling of what we know. For instance, Samuel Herne tells of starvation among the indian tribes upon his being forced by the French to retire from Prince of Wale's Fort. Additionally, given the wholesale slaughter common among the aboriginal peoples he encountered, murder was just as an effective check as starvation on human population numbers to prevent overuse of natural resources. Lastly concerning this point, not all hunter gatherers made use of diets as varied as the Bushmen he uses as an example. For instance, the aboriginal peoples that Herne traveled with gained sustenance almost exclusively through hunting. And when a person became too old to keep up with the rest of the tribe, the rest of the tribe simply walked off from them and let them die of exposure, starvation, predation, etc.
Mr Diamond also says that,
modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors
However, genetic analysis suggests that modern Greeks (I don't' know about the Turks) are not of the same genetic stock as the pre-Agrarians that originally inhabited that land. So in this example at least, a partial telling of the truth unfairly skews the point in his favor.
Mr. Diamond gives seemingly grudging acknowledgement that there is another school of thought that states, concerning humans crowding together,
it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.
I would allege that farming would tend to scatter people out. All of the farmers that I know live relatively remote lives. Farming requires the use of relatively sizable parcels of land. Joel Salatin lives on a 500
acre farm and as such, he and his family live a relatively isolated existence. Contrast that to modern factory workers that live in subdivisions, in houses situated on lots so small they can spit on one another without either the spitter or spittee ever leaving the dead-center point of their respective back yards. The ones that crowd together are the excess of humanity that do not farm, not the farmers. And contrast that even further with hunter-gatherers that live in close proximity to one another at all times except when they are actually involved in the business of hunting or gathering. Every time I have ever watched a documentary about some tribe in the Amazon that still practices a relatively primitive lifestyle, they always live their day-to-day lives in some large communal arrangement. I know of no examples to the contrary.
It isn't agriculture that causes humanity to group up. Rather it is the natural human tendency.
And it isn't agriculture that causes division of the classes, rather it is part of the natural human psyche.
It isn't agriculture that causes war, despotism and social parasitism, rather it is part of the human condition.
Special attention needs to be placed on Mr. Diamond's assertion that,
Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed.
Mr. Diamond commits perhaps his worst of all selective-telling-of-the-truth-which-is-another-way-of-saying-lie with this knee slapper. If Mr. Diamond believes that women in hunter-gatherer societies weren't treated as beasts of burden then he has education in the matter is woefully lacking. Indeed, it is the rule that women in every society, be they hunter-gatherer or agrarian, were/are worse than beasts of burden for the men rape their beasts of burden relatively infrequently compared to to how often women were/are raped in damn nigh every place on earth where the law of the jungle holds sway. The instant that the protection of law breaks down, the men enjoy a sexual nirvana and the women, a sexual hell. Read Samuel Heane. Read about the rape of German women by the Soviet troops after Berlin fell. Read about the recent rape of the Haitian women in refuge camps. Hell, read about ANY society where the rule of law breaks down or where there is no rule of law to begin with. When the law of the jungle reigns, you don't own anything that another is strong enough to take away from you - and that includes your "right" to your body.
The above linked book written by Samuel Herne is perhaps one of the most enlightening works of literature I have ever been exposed to. It forever changed the way I see the world. And if you take my advice and read it, do so without thinking ill of the aboriginals. Think instead that you are reading your own unwritten history for the only thing that separates what Samuel Hearne saw and your own ancestors is that writing had been invented by the time Herne made his journey and was able to record what he saw. I would be willing to bet a life-times income that if we ever invent a time machine and we go back to study my (your?) own European (or another other) ancestors, we would find conditions identical in all material respects to what Herne found.
As to the diet of ancient humans conveying greater health benefits, after some years of casual study and personal experimentation, I'm prepared to say that I think that the hunter-gatherer diet is VASTLY superior in every possible way to a
vegetarian diet.
Yacouba’s two main techniques are the Zaï hole & the Contour Stone Bund (Cordons pierreux?). In the most basic sense, Zaï holes are ~1ft[sup]3[/sup] pits packed with manure or compost to improve soil and the CSBs are rows of fist-sized stones for water management (when it actually rains). I suggest reading up on it for further details.
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