The Worst Mistake

Many of us take for granted that our life today is better than it would have been a thousand years ago, and better still than ten thousand years before then. In his essay, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”, Jared Diamond, noted scientist and author, argues the opposite. He suggests that the human race’s transition from bands of hunter-gatherers to societies based on farming was a terrible error, and one that we have yet to recover from. He bases his argument on two major claims. [...] The first is that the diets of the young farming societies were worse than those of the hunter-gatherers, thus leading to less healthy, and therefore lower quality, lives. Furthermore, Diamond posits that the various inequities in our society, such as sexual and economic, were only possible with the introduction of agriculture. He also dismisses the widely held …show more content…
In his essay, Diamond writes that hunter-gatherer groups have, “[...] no concentrated food sources,...Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses” (Diamond 76). By saying this, he asserts that material wealth is the only determinant of status. This is something that many of us today would argue strongly against. Although wealth is a very important factor in determining social status, other things, such as occupation, are significant as well. While it is true that the vast majority of adults in hunter-gatherer societies forage for food, there are often still individuals with specialized skill sets. In their essay, Wealth Transmission and Inequality Among Hunter-Gatherers, Eric Alden Smith et al