The Switch From Hunter-Gatherers to Farmers Created Elites
Conventional wisdom, especially in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, saw the Neolithic Revolution as a tale of human progress fueled by a growth in human intellect. As evolution made our ancestors steadily smarter, some of them presumably had a “EUREKA!” moment. They discovered how to cultivate wheat, then cheerfully abandoned the hunter-gatherer life and settled down as happy farmers. However, hunter-gatherers actually had an easier lifestyle than farmers, and it took them less time and effort to feed themselves. Not just feed themselves, but feed themselves a richer, more varied, and more nutritionally balanced diet than farmers. As a result, most hunter-gatherers’ waking hours were spent not at work, but on leisure activities. By contrast, agriculture left farmers with more difficult lives.
Farmers had to work harder in order to lead a less satisfying life than hunter-gatherers, and ate a worse diet as well. When they got good enough at farming to produce steady surpluses, the surpluses led to the emergence of a civilization and its elites – kings, priests, and nobles. They lived well off the farmers’ toil even as they derided them as peasants, and frequently reduced them to serfs. Still, the long term consequences of the Neolithic Revolution were great for mankind. From a global human population of only a few million 10,000 years ago, we now number eight billion, have filled every habitable niche on the planet, and are poised to venture into the stars. By evolutionary standards, our species has been extremely successful, and the foundation of that evolutionary success was agriculture.
