Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

12.
 Tribal warfare in New Guinea between two farming communities (1960). Such scenes were probably
widespread in the thousands of years following the Agricultural Revolution
.
Many anthropological and archaeological studies indicate that in simple
agricultural societies with no political frameworks beyond village and tribe,
human violence was responsible for about 15 per cent of deaths, including 25 per
cent of male deaths. In contemporary New Guinea, violence accounts for 30 per
cent of male deaths in one agricultural tribal society, the Dani, and 35 per cent in
another, the Enga. In Ecuador, perhaps 50 per cent of adult Waoranis meet a
violent death at the hands of another human!
3
In time, human violence was

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brought under control through the development of larger social frameworks –
cities, kingdoms and states. But it took thousands of years to build such huge and
effective political structures.
Village life certainly brought the rst farmers some immediate bene ts, such as
better protection against wild animals, rain and cold. Yet for the average person,
the disadvantages probably outweighed the advantages. This is hard for people in
today’s prosperous societies to appreciate. Since we enjoy a uence and security,
and since our a uence and security are built on foundations laid by the
Agricultural Revolution, we assume that the Agricultural Revolution was a
wonderful improvement. Yet it is wrong to judge thousands of years of history
from the perspective of today. A much more representative viewpoint is that of a
three-year-old girl dying from malnutrition in rst-century China because her
father’s crops have failed. Would she say ‘I am dying from malnutrition, but in
2,000 years, people will have plenty to eat and live in big air-conditioned houses,
so my suffering is a worthwhile sacrifice’?
What then did wheat o er agriculturists, including that malnourished Chinese
girl? It o ered nothing for people as individuals. Yet it did bestow something on
Homo sapiens
as a species. Cultivating wheat provided much more food per unit of
territory, and thereby enabled 
Homo sapiens
to multiply exponentially. Around
13,000 BC, when people fed themselves by gathering wild plants and hunting wild
animals, the area around the oasis of Jericho, in Palestine, could support at most
one roaming band of about a hundred relatively healthy and well-nourished
people. Around 8500 
BC
, when wild plants gave way to wheat elds, the oasis
supported a large but cramped village of 1,000 people, who su ered far more
from disease and malnourishment.
The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA
helixes. Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the
number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so
the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its
DNA. If no more DNA copies remain, the species is extinct, just as a company
without money is bankrupt. If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success,
and the species ourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better
than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the
ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.
Yet why should individuals care about this evolutionary calculus? Why would
any sane person lower his or her standard of living just to multiply the number of
copies of the 
Homo sapiens
genome? Nobody agreed to this deal: the Agricultural
Revolution was a trap.

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The Luxury Trap
The rise of farming was a very gradual a air spread over centuries and millennia.
A band of