I was expecting the burning of the Library of Alexandria or the Library of Baghdad ("House of Wisdom").
I love Jared Diamond's work, but I think that this essay is incomplete at best and only raises more questions.
If agriculture was a last-resort method, why didn't smaller fractions splinter off from the groups and continue their hunter-gatherer lifestyle?
Diamond writes, "Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to." I don't think that's true. Very little engineering was done before agrarian societies, and I'm fairly certain that most ancient wonders required no small amount of engineering chops. And while great sculptures may have arose 15,000 years ago by hunter-gatherer societies, no violins or pianos certainly came about. I think he is downplaying the effect that art and engineering have had here.
In the last paragraph Diamond calls the hunter-gatherer lifestyle the "longest lasting" lifestyle, which is trivially true (it was there first). But he also calls it the "most successful in human history."
Successful how? In terms of happiness? In terms of overcoming various maladies? If they were almost all completely crushed by agrarian societies, as he illustrates in Guns, Germs & Steel, wouldn't that be considered unsuccessful?
> "Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to."
I think he actually mentioned a possible reason
Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others
that's engineers and artists and thinkers. They can completely specialize in what they do because they don't have to work to get food. Usually it was because they had a Maecenas who exploited legions of other people to provide (mainly) for himself and (a little) for people who he found interesting (or they provided him with entertainment). And those people created the most innovation, I believe. Innovative farmers would be concerned with how to work on the field so that their backs hurt less, but major advances required seeing the bigger picture.
Successful in that humans survived that way without major issue for 98% of their existence. We've only been industrialized for a tiny period of our racial history, and we already have and had a host of problems.
(the human race is estimated to be 200,000 years old. Egypt arose at best 5,000 years ago.)
By the way- I don't think you can assume ancient man was unhappy. It's been shown in the past that wealth and higher standards of living do not directly correlate to greater happiness, and frankly our species would have had a hell of a problem if we were chronically depressed for 195,000 years.
"If agriculture was a last-resort method, why didn't smaller fractions splinter off from the groups and continue their hunter-gatherer lifestyle?"
I think he mentions implicitly that agriculture cannibalizes resources that were once diverse and auto-regenerative, in the comment about hunter-gatherers being forced into some of the worst real-estate in the world today.
There's a secondary point that heaps of knowledge about the natural world have been lost, since even the modern, technologically advanced life sciences of today do not reconstitute the "working knowledge" that humans had of how to live off of wild plants and animals for food, medicine, and shelter.
Current events certainly bolster Diamond's argument in some ways. Look at the speculation/agriculture-driven burning of the world's rainforests, for example, for the conversion of mass tracts of biologically diverse (and productive) land into monocultures of diminishing returns.
"Very little engineering was done before agrarian societies, and I'm fairly certain that most ancient wonders required no small amount of engineering chops."
"Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."
Life expectency is now 67 years. I'll take the extra 40 years and deal with the lack of "essential" amino acids.
Of course the real problem with this essay is the nonsensical premise. Agriculture can't be a mistake because it wasn't a decision. There may have been some individual people who decided to switch from hunting to agriculture, but there was no species-wide vote. There is no reason to imagine that there could've been such a vote, or that today there could be a decision for humanity to switch back.
Of course individual people can decide to embrace the hunter gatherer life. I find it interesting that the author is reaching for pen & paper and not loin cloth & spear.
I have a hard time sympathizing with those pining for the days of high infant mortality and periodic semi-starvation. While I don't argue that many people now are unhappy and working too hard, if you're privileged enough to be reading hacker news in your free time you have a shot at a significantly better outcome.
e.g. I went to a public school, worked for 2.5 years out of college, then saved enough to pay off debts and take a year and a half off to go travel. I'm in great health, I have a beautiful wife that I love dearly, my house is never cooler than 65 degrees, and when it rains I don't have to get wet. You can keep your hunting and gathering.
Just because most people now are suckers doesn't mean you have to be one. Smart fiscal and dietary choices open a world of possibilities totally inaccessible to pre-agrarian (or even pre-industrial) humans.
This is a bit like saying "we are happier as babies than as adults so growing up is the worst mistake we ever make".
A charming thought perhaps, but not literally true.
Trying to compare the happiness of cavemen with modern people demolishes whatever vague definition of "happiness" we might already have. And if we fall back on "do modern people want to be cavemen?" then the answer is no.
Agriculture has profoundly changed every aspect of human existence many times over. Can we label the last few millenia of human history collectively as "good" or "bad"? Compared to what?
I have learned a great deal from Diamond's books and articles, but even he shows elsewhere that the two leading causes of death across hunter-gatherer societies are combat between tribes and homicide within tribes. Agricultural civilization didn't introduce cruelty and ignorance into the human race. As smart and creative a thinker as he is, I don't think he adequately corrects, when he compares overall human well-being today with that of 10,000 years ago, for his perspective as someone who has never gone hungry with no idea of when he would eat again, and who is able to study the sweep of human history only because of the human advances in physical and intellectual resources of the past tens of thousands of years.
The hunter-gatherers did not necessarily chose a farming lifestyle, they were likely displaced by the sheer numbers of the farmers. However, modern agriculture requires very few people (proportionally), under 5%. The second worst mistake in human history would be to stifle agricultural and industrial development. There is the great opportunity to lift the other 2/3 of the world out of "farm slavery". Not only to just feed them, but raise their standard of living too.
You could interpret a pre-industrial economy as working on a flat per-capita capital increase. People grew as fast as capital, so there was little opportunity for accumulation (outside the very small ruling class). That is no longer the case, although there are powerful ideologies that would undo it.
I'm not sure the point is to stifle industrial development as much as it's to show we've built our society on several "facts" that might not be entirely accurate. Further I think the author is trying to say people in our society don't question these supposed facts and that society is worse off because of it.
In this case his point is that modern society takes hunter/gatherer cultures that still exist and tries to change them to agriculture based cultures without questioning whether it's best for them.
In your very reply you proved the second point. Let me lay it out...
- His central argument is against the assumption that agriculture is proven to be better than hunting and gathering. He showed evidence of hunter/gatherers spending less time acquiring food and getting a better balanced diet in spite of that.
- You replied that agriculture is great without giving any evidence to refute his argument. The fact that modern agriculture requires fewer people than it once did is only relevant to his point if you have numbers that say modern agriculture's time to acquire food has fallen below that of hunter/gatherers. Otherwise it's irrelevant. Plus you didn't even address the balanced diet argument.
So you've proven the author's main point in that you fell back on the assumption that agriculture automatically equals the best solution.
The article is based on a false dichotomy. Hunter/gatherers farmed, and farmers hunted and gathered. Some did more hunting and gathering, while others did more farming, but for most early societies the labels "hunter/gatherer" and "farmer" describe the same people. See a fantastic (and fantastically short) book on this by Colin Tudge: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300080247.
Exactly. When farmers outnumber you, guess who's winning any land disputes? Even if land changes hands peacefully, a farmer can give you more food for your land than you could possibly gather on it. As Diamond points out, today's gatherers live on land that's not good for farming.
There is a very good reason why hunter gatherers never built the Parthenon, and in general why their technological development is sorely lacking: they lack specialists. Masons, blacksmiths, and later scientists, engineers, and professors are only able to make a living because other people engage in agriculture.
I'm definitely sympathetic to this argument; I might even fall into the primitivist hippie camp. Whatever. Yes, I do think I'd be happier running through the jungle naked than sitting here debugging JavaScript to pay off the insurance, banking, and real estate cartels, so I can continue to occupy a 200 sq-foot box inside an ugly human anthill in a pollution-choked, overcrowded, violence-and-poverty-plagued megalopolis.
Whereas hunter-gatherers were dependent on keeping the environment in a healthy state to survive. The agricultural lifestyle has caused many to regard nature as superfluous, unnecessary. It's the origin of "humanity is the superior race" thinking. So we can bulldoze everything, kill what we can't use and don't find "fuzzy and cute". Because it's all about the "economic value" for us...
I'm not a hippie and am not preoccupied with restoring things as they were 100,000 years ago. But I'm also not sure what we're doing now is the right way. I wish we were behaving less like a plague.
1987: simpler times. I can't help but wonder what to author would have written today given the order-of-magnitude larger mistakes we've made since then, such as reality TV.
About sexism .. there were many hunter-nomad cultures where rape and kidnapping was the normal way of acquiring a bride.
The writer talks about deaths caused by disease and overcrowding from agriculture but he neglects to mention that those people would not have been born in the first place because there wouldn't have been enough food to support them using the hunter-gatherer model. If agriculture causes + 1k births and -100 deaths then it's still net beneficial. This may seem like callous mathematics but would it not be even more cruel to deny existence for those other 900 souls?
>"How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming?"
there is no "better" in progress. Using the same analysis, the Industrial Revolution made working peoples life worse than lives of farmers. So what? It isn't about better. It is about species survival and dominance.
Humans are predators with extremely high killing instinct. Wait until the interstellar space annihilation drive invented. Any intelligent species which doesn't have photonic torpedoes may start learning history of Incas and Native Americans. It is easy to imagine how human emission of green house interstellar dust will increase the ratio of Galaxy kernel's X-rays kept inside the Galaxy and causing global galaxy warming and slow down of its rotation.
what this article does not mention is that the viability of hunter-gatherer lifestyles may have eroded significantly during the (ongoing) quaternary extinction event that began in the late pleistocene. the proliferation of hunter gatherers and their comparative excellence at hunting may have in fact caused this extinction (see overkill theory). furthermore, declining game reserves places strong incentive on creating reliable alternative food sources, so agriculture may be a direct consequence of this success of our ancestors' lifestyle.
when considered as an alternative to sudden, significant population decline as a result of collapsing prey biomass rather than to a literal (and possibly the mythological origin of) eden, the choice to live agriculturally is the best mistake we've ever made.
i tend to think that agriculture was a necessity based on population density and the formation of towns/cities. too many people in one place means there needs to be a renewable source of food. hunting and gathering for hundreds would eventually result in too little to feed everyone.
The basic question, as Prof. Diamond puts it is: "How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming?" One can extend this: How do you know the Industrial Revolution made people lives better (read Dickens to see the inhuman conditions), or the nuclear revolution (Chernobyl, Japan), or the Internet revolution (the ADD generation texting, sexting, etc). Prof. Diamond thesis seems to be that we made a huge mistake by moving from hunter gatherer to agricultural society, which, inevitably, brought about most of the evils we are fighting with now. Proof? Just look at the idyllic life of current hunter gatherers.
To back his claim, he puts forth arguments ranging from absurd
"As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to."
to anecdotal, i.e. no proof at all
"Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well... 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. Once while on a field trip ..."
And the final stroke, the masterful FUD-laden last paragraph:
"As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us? "
Setting aside that there is no global shortage of food (does not mean that nobody's is hungry, but the reasons are complex and food shortage is not one of them), most of this is, at best speculative.
If you liked his point of view, than you may also like Prof. Eric Pianka's thesis that there are too many people on earth and if an airborne Ebola virus kills 90% it would be a good thing (http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Everybody.html).
The problem with these views is that they resonate with a certain mindset, people who think we have too much science and technology in our lives and it would have been better to live like the "so-called" primitive people. One recent example that comes to mind is the movie Babies (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020938/). Here, the life of the two babies living in primitive (not so-called, really primitive) conditions in Africa and Kazakhstan is discreetly shown to be better and more free than their counterparts in the US and Japan.
As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers.
I think this is actually true, in a weird way. We work, including commuting, personal errands, and house chores, about 2700 hours per year. Most pre-agrarian people did not work as many hours. Their "work" was a lot more dangerous (throwing spears at angry, large animals) and probably more intense. The stakes were also a lot higher: if they fail, they die. That said, they probably only worked about 1600-2400 hours per year because there wasn't all that much work for them to do. During the off-season (hunting-wise) and during the winter (for gatherers) it's also likely that they slept 10-18 hours per day due to low metabolism/semi-hibernation. (Many medieval people in the Alps went into semi-hibernation in the winter, sleeping 16-20 hours per day.) Whether this is to be considered "free time" is uncertain and probably somewhat subjective. It's unclear what they did. It's likely that their lives were very boring by our standards, exciting only on account of the extreme danger.
I understand where the author is trying to go and I was rooting for him, but it looked like he lacked the depth to do the analysis, so he kind of meandered around. Some parts were better, some parts were worse. This kind of counter-factual discussion (what would the world be like if Hitler had won? How about if the Neanderthals hadn't died out?) has a tendency to get fluffy pretty quickly. Fun for a paragaph or two, or a tweet, but very tough to pull off in essay or longer format.
I'd take the risks and rewards of agriculture over billions of years of repetitive nomadic hunter-gathering, where no generation does anything different than its ancestors.
If we take 'happiness' to be the fitness function of human evolution and a driver for adaption then I think it highly unlikey humans would ever change to become less happy. Infact, I might suggest that human happiness (amount of) is likely to be the one thing in common to modern civilizations as to those 200,000 years ago.
In addition, be careful to use the word 'evolution' with timeframes as miniscule as 200,000 years - the author correctly uses the word 'adoption'.
My first question upon looking at this article: is there really enough evidence available to presume the ability to make a conclusive judgment / argument?
There is enough to begin a discussion about it. What is one of the top 2-3 things everyone wishes for? Health. He makes a convincing argument that hunter-gatherers were considerably more healthy than agriculturalists.
It's funny, just a couple of hundred years ago, the belief was that the human race used to be happy and successful, and then declined. For intellectuals: Greece, Rome, even the Central/South American civilizations. For every one else: Eden or Atlantis, etc.
Progress isn't always a straight line. Early automobiles were poor replacements for horses or horse-powered vehicles, but the potential was there.
[+] [-] simonsarris|15 years ago|reply
I love Jared Diamond's work, but I think that this essay is incomplete at best and only raises more questions.
If agriculture was a last-resort method, why didn't smaller fractions splinter off from the groups and continue their hunter-gatherer lifestyle?
Diamond writes, "Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to." I don't think that's true. Very little engineering was done before agrarian societies, and I'm fairly certain that most ancient wonders required no small amount of engineering chops. And while great sculptures may have arose 15,000 years ago by hunter-gatherer societies, no violins or pianos certainly came about. I think he is downplaying the effect that art and engineering have had here.
In the last paragraph Diamond calls the hunter-gatherer lifestyle the "longest lasting" lifestyle, which is trivially true (it was there first). But he also calls it the "most successful in human history."
Successful how? In terms of happiness? In terms of overcoming various maladies? If they were almost all completely crushed by agrarian societies, as he illustrates in Guns, Germs & Steel, wouldn't that be considered unsuccessful?
[+] [-] yread|15 years ago|reply
I think he actually mentioned a possible reason
Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others
that's engineers and artists and thinkers. They can completely specialize in what they do because they don't have to work to get food. Usually it was because they had a Maecenas who exploited legions of other people to provide (mainly) for himself and (a little) for people who he found interesting (or they provided him with entertainment). And those people created the most innovation, I believe. Innovative farmers would be concerned with how to work on the field so that their backs hurt less, but major advances required seeing the bigger picture.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|15 years ago|reply
(the human race is estimated to be 200,000 years old. Egypt arose at best 5,000 years ago.)
By the way- I don't think you can assume ancient man was unhappy. It's been shown in the past that wealth and higher standards of living do not directly correlate to greater happiness, and frankly our species would have had a hell of a problem if we were chronically depressed for 195,000 years.
[+] [-] pandeiro|15 years ago|reply
I think he mentions implicitly that agriculture cannibalizes resources that were once diverse and auto-regenerative, in the comment about hunter-gatherers being forced into some of the worst real-estate in the world today.
There's a secondary point that heaps of knowledge about the natural world have been lost, since even the modern, technologically advanced life sciences of today do not reconstitute the "working knowledge" that humans had of how to live off of wild plants and animals for food, medicine, and shelter.
Current events certainly bolster Diamond's argument in some ways. Look at the speculation/agriculture-driven burning of the world's rainforests, for example, for the conversion of mass tracts of biologically diverse (and productive) land into monocultures of diminishing returns.
[+] [-] sedachv|15 years ago|reply
Göbekli Tepe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe) disproves that assumption, and calls to question many others about pre-agrarian society.
[+] [-] ajscherer|15 years ago|reply
Life expectency is now 67 years. I'll take the extra 40 years and deal with the lack of "essential" amino acids.
Of course the real problem with this essay is the nonsensical premise. Agriculture can't be a mistake because it wasn't a decision. There may have been some individual people who decided to switch from hunting to agriculture, but there was no species-wide vote. There is no reason to imagine that there could've been such a vote, or that today there could be a decision for humanity to switch back.
Of course individual people can decide to embrace the hunter gatherer life. I find it interesting that the author is reaching for pen & paper and not loin cloth & spear.
[+] [-] imcdowell|15 years ago|reply
e.g. I went to a public school, worked for 2.5 years out of college, then saved enough to pay off debts and take a year and a half off to go travel. I'm in great health, I have a beautiful wife that I love dearly, my house is never cooler than 65 degrees, and when it rains I don't have to get wet. You can keep your hunting and gathering.
Just because most people now are suckers doesn't mean you have to be one. Smart fiscal and dietary choices open a world of possibilities totally inaccessible to pre-agrarian (or even pre-industrial) humans.
[+] [-] extension|15 years ago|reply
A charming thought perhaps, but not literally true.
Trying to compare the happiness of cavemen with modern people demolishes whatever vague definition of "happiness" we might already have. And if we fall back on "do modern people want to be cavemen?" then the answer is no.
Agriculture has profoundly changed every aspect of human existence many times over. Can we label the last few millenia of human history collectively as "good" or "bad"? Compared to what?
[+] [-] bfe|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iwwr|15 years ago|reply
You could interpret a pre-industrial economy as working on a flat per-capita capital increase. People grew as fast as capital, so there was little opportunity for accumulation (outside the very small ruling class). That is no longer the case, although there are powerful ideologies that would undo it.
[+] [-] TomOfTTB|15 years ago|reply
In this case his point is that modern society takes hunter/gatherer cultures that still exist and tries to change them to agriculture based cultures without questioning whether it's best for them.
In your very reply you proved the second point. Let me lay it out...
- His central argument is against the assumption that agriculture is proven to be better than hunting and gathering. He showed evidence of hunter/gatherers spending less time acquiring food and getting a better balanced diet in spite of that.
- You replied that agriculture is great without giving any evidence to refute his argument. The fact that modern agriculture requires fewer people than it once did is only relevant to his point if you have numbers that say modern agriculture's time to acquire food has fallen below that of hunter/gatherers. Otherwise it's irrelevant. Plus you didn't even address the balanced diet argument.
So you've proven the author's main point in that you fell back on the assumption that agriculture automatically equals the best solution.
[+] [-] Umalu|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stretchwithme|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zeteo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pandeiro|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wladimir|15 years ago|reply
I'm not a hippie and am not preoccupied with restoring things as they were 100,000 years ago. But I'm also not sure what we're doing now is the right way. I wish we were behaving less like a plague.
[+] [-] edoloughlin|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dusklight|15 years ago|reply
The writer talks about deaths caused by disease and overcrowding from agriculture but he neglects to mention that those people would not have been born in the first place because there wouldn't have been enough food to support them using the hunter-gatherer model. If agriculture causes + 1k births and -100 deaths then it's still net beneficial. This may seem like callous mathematics but would it not be even more cruel to deny existence for those other 900 souls?
[+] [-] duopixel|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VladRussian|15 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory#Overview
>"How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming?"
there is no "better" in progress. Using the same analysis, the Industrial Revolution made working peoples life worse than lives of farmers. So what? It isn't about better. It is about species survival and dominance.
Humans are predators with extremely high killing instinct. Wait until the interstellar space annihilation drive invented. Any intelligent species which doesn't have photonic torpedoes may start learning history of Incas and Native Americans. It is easy to imagine how human emission of green house interstellar dust will increase the ratio of Galaxy kernel's X-rays kept inside the Galaxy and causing global galaxy warming and slow down of its rotation.
[+] [-] dennyabraham|15 years ago|reply
when considered as an alternative to sudden, significant population decline as a result of collapsing prey biomass rather than to a literal (and possibly the mythological origin of) eden, the choice to live agriculturally is the best mistake we've ever made.
[+] [-] noodle|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kahawe|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jun8|15 years ago|reply
To back his claim, he puts forth arguments ranging from absurd
"As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to."
to anecdotal, i.e. no proof at all
"Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well... 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. Once while on a field trip ..."
And the final stroke, the masterful FUD-laden last paragraph:
"As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us? "
Setting aside that there is no global shortage of food (does not mean that nobody's is hungry, but the reasons are complex and food shortage is not one of them), most of this is, at best speculative.
If you liked his point of view, than you may also like Prof. Eric Pianka's thesis that there are too many people on earth and if an airborne Ebola virus kills 90% it would be a good thing (http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Everybody.html).
The problem with these views is that they resonate with a certain mindset, people who think we have too much science and technology in our lives and it would have been better to live like the "so-called" primitive people. One recent example that comes to mind is the movie Babies (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020938/). Here, the life of the two babies living in primitive (not so-called, really primitive) conditions in Africa and Kazakhstan is discreetly shown to be better and more free than their counterparts in the US and Japan.
[+] [-] michaelochurch|15 years ago|reply
I think this is actually true, in a weird way. We work, including commuting, personal errands, and house chores, about 2700 hours per year. Most pre-agrarian people did not work as many hours. Their "work" was a lot more dangerous (throwing spears at angry, large animals) and probably more intense. The stakes were also a lot higher: if they fail, they die. That said, they probably only worked about 1600-2400 hours per year because there wasn't all that much work for them to do. During the off-season (hunting-wise) and during the winter (for gatherers) it's also likely that they slept 10-18 hours per day due to low metabolism/semi-hibernation. (Many medieval people in the Alps went into semi-hibernation in the winter, sleeping 16-20 hours per day.) Whether this is to be considered "free time" is uncertain and probably somewhat subjective. It's unclear what they did. It's likely that their lives were very boring by our standards, exciting only on account of the extreme danger.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|15 years ago|reply
I understand where the author is trying to go and I was rooting for him, but it looked like he lacked the depth to do the analysis, so he kind of meandered around. Some parts were better, some parts were worse. This kind of counter-factual discussion (what would the world be like if Hitler had won? How about if the Neanderthals hadn't died out?) has a tendency to get fluffy pretty quickly. Fun for a paragaph or two, or a tweet, but very tough to pull off in essay or longer format.
[+] [-] gojomo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tcarnell|15 years ago|reply
In addition, be careful to use the word 'evolution' with timeframes as miniscule as 200,000 years - the author correctly uses the word 'adoption'.
[+] [-] patrickgzill|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackinthebochs|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larrik|15 years ago|reply
Progress isn't always a straight line. Early automobiles were poor replacements for horses or horse-powered vehicles, but the potential was there.
[+] [-] 5teev|15 years ago|reply
This statement can be applied recursively all the way back to the dawn of civilization.