Farming Made Us Way More Violent
Unlike hunter-gatherers, farmers got most of their calories from a few staple crops, and sometimes from just a single crop, such as wheat, rice, or potatoes. If that crop failed, famine frequently followed, and killed farmers by the thousands, or even millions. Farming also led to more violence. Farmers depend for their survival on the crops planted in their fields. They thus have far more of an incentive to defend their territory hunter-gatherers, who often can simply move on to avoid violence from interlopers. By contrast, to move and abandon their fields often meant death from starvation for farmers. Conflicts between settled farmers and interlopers thus led to greater violence than humans had ever experienced before. To gauge the likely levels of violence in early farming communities, anthropologists studied primitive agricultural communities in New Guinea. They discovered than in some agricultural tribes, violence accounts for 35 percent of male deaths.
It is even worse in some primitive agricultural tribes in South America, where 50 percent of all adults, of both sexes, meet a violent death at the hands of other humans. In addition, farming set the stage for civilization, and civilization eventually led to the subjugation of most farmers by new elites. Chiefs, priests, and warriors who formed an aristocratic caste, seized the surpluses produced in farms, and reduced the farmers to a caste of downtrodden peasants and serfs. That inequality and injustice was the foundation upon which civilization was built. While civilization was and is generally a good thing, it should not be forgotten that it was built upon the often unwilling, aching, and sometimes flogged, backs of the soil’s tillers. Those downtrodden farmers were the vast majority of humanity throughout most of human history.
