The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race

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Recommended: Origin of agriculture and civilization

Elnara Khurshidova
21 September 2015
What Has Agriculture Caused Agriculture has been around for hundreds of years. With its negative effects on humanity, agriculture has greatly affected the environment. Many archeologists believe that adoption of Agriculture was not an improvement but a disaster for humans in many ways. Jared Diamond, the author of the article called “The worst mistake in the history of the human race” argues that hunter-gatherers were better off than the farmers. In a way agriculture is believed to cause many problems for humans such as sexual inequality, deep class division, changed their diet which later led to poor health and diseases. One of the problems that agriculture caused is sexual inequality between men and women. This problem was already around, but it was more obvious after the adoption of agriculture. Farming have encouraged inequality between the sexes. Since women did not have to transport babies in traveling existence, women after …show more content…

In an agricultural society people started to farm and there were less to no hunting which changed their diets dramatically. When people were hunting and gathering they were getting a healthy and a well-balanced diet. Before agriculture people ate many various wild plants and animals therefore, they had better nutrition. For example, the Kalahari Bushmen’s daily intake was “2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein” (Diamond 2). Also when Diamond is comparing the two societies, he talks about the balance of nutrients and diet, also he states that the “Kalahari Bushmen eat a variety of 75 or so different wild plants” and receive more calories than needed. As the people switched over to agriculture, the amount of food they had become more plentiful and predictable but unhealthy. Nowadays, more people are overweight especially in the western area of the world. This proves that people before agriculture were healthy and had a decent

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