agriculture

Giving someone the fig: the Renaissance equivalent of giving someone the finger.

“Don’t eat the figs.” Livia to soon-to-be Emperor Tiberius in the Masterpiece Theater adaptation of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius.

The development of agriculture was quite possibly the most significant event in human history. Prior to the domestication and cultivation of plants, humans across the globe were engaged in hunting and (predominantly) gathering. This is the way we evolved to eat—subsisting mainly on gathered plants with occasional meat hunted or scavenged. Once thought to be a primitive method of obtaining sustenance, hunting-and-gathering is now recognized as in many ways healthier and less time consuming than agriculture. The problem is that hunting-and-gathering cannot sustain a large population except under very unusual conditions. Northwest Coast Indians in America and the Jomon culture in ancient Japan are exceptions. Northwest Coast Indians had huge amounts of salmon, and Jomon huge amounts of shell fish to sustain them in large and happy numbers. But in general, hunting-and-gathering requires small family groups to have access to large areas of land.

The success of agriculture was not that it was easier or more nutritious. It never has been. The effort spent feeding oneself through agriculture is backbreaking and almost devoid of leisure, while hunting-and-gathering takes far less time and effort per calorie consumed. Furthermore, archaeology shows that human health declined sharply when humans switched to agriculture, probably because a rich and varied diet was usually replaced with a monotonous, grain-based diet.