The Fate of Humanity Part 3: How many of us will there be?

Jared Diamond wrote this famous essay in 1987, although the link is to a 1999 reprint. He calls the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture " The worst mistake in the history of the human race. " He seems to have a point. Hunter-gatherers were healthier, taller, lived longer and had more leisure time than farmers. In fact life expectancy at birth pretty much throughout the planet fluctuated in a narrow range of around 40-45 years from the dawn of agricultural civilization some 12,000 years ago (and more recently elsewhere of course) until the late 19th Century. And in all that time, the majority of people lived at a bare level of subsistence, although the agricultural revolution did enable priestly and warrior castes to capture surplus and rule over the masses. Hunter-gatherer societies, in addition to being relatively healthy, are egalitarian. The reason people adopted agriculture was not because it made them more prosperous, but because it was necessary to support the growing hunter-gatherer population.But then population growth pretty much stalled. Until something happened.There began to be a bit of an increase at the end of the Middle Ages, but the really dramatic inflection point is in the late 1700s. Life expectancy began to increase linearly in many places in the early 1800s. According to an analysis published in 2012, Swedes for example had life expectancy similar to that of hunter-gatherers in 1900, and now of course their life expectancy has nearly doub...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs