0:00 Skeletons from early farming villages in Greece and Turkey show the average man was five-foot-three — a full five inches shorter than the hunter-gatherers who came before them.0:12 A stark data point, I'll give you that.0:14 It's more than a data point.0:16 Last week on History's Flashpoint, we debated singular moments that changed everything.0:22 But what if the most important one wasn't a general's decision, but a farmer's?0:28 I think that decision to plant a seed was the single biggest mistake humanity ever made.0:34 Oh, come on.0:35 A mistake?0:36 The Neolithic Revolution was the moment we stepped out of the cave and into the world.0:41 It was the beginning of...0:43 well, EVERYTHING.0:44 Food surplus, stability, the very idea of a home.0:48 Without agriculture, there are no towns, no cities, no specialization.0:53 There's no one to be a potter, or a priest, or a builder, because everyone is spending every waking moment just trying not to starve.1:02 I hear you, but that’s the grand, sanitized narrative.1:06 The reality on the ground—in the bones—tells a different story.1:10 Those shorter skeletons?1:12 They also show signs of malnutrition, iron-deficiency anemia, and horrible dental decay from carb-heavy diets.1:19 Hunter-gatherers had a hugely varied diet.1:22 Early farmers had...1:24 wheat.1:24 Or rice.1:25 And when that one crop failed, they starved on a scale previously unimaginable.1:30 That’s a transitional phase!1:32 Of course there were growing pains.1:35 But you're missing the forest for the trees.1:38 That surplus, even when precarious, allowed for population growth.1:42 More people means more minds, more innovation.1:45 We get the wheel, we get writing to track grain stores, we get complex societies capable of building wonders like the pyramids or Stonehenge.1:55 You don't get that from a handful of people chasing a gazelle.1:59 You get something else, though.2:02 You get egalitarianism.2:03 Anthropologists find that foraging societies are fiercely egalitarian because you can't accumulate wealth.2:11 What you call "specialization," I call hierarchy.2:14 The moment you have a grain silo, you have someone who controls the grain.2:19 And you have someone who guards the grain.2:22 Suddenly, you have classes.2:24 You have the haves, and the have-nots, for the first time in human history.2:29 And you have the ability to survive a bad winter!2:32 I mean, you're romanticizing a life that was, for most, nasty, brutish, and short.2:38 A failed hunt meant death.2:40 A broken leg meant death.2:42 Agriculture is a buffer against the raw, unforgiving state of nature.2:46 It’s the first step in mastering our environment instead of just being at its mercy.2:52 We didn't master it, we chained ourselves to it!2:56 And to the clock.2:57 Yuval Noah Harari put it perfectly: we didn't domesticate wheat; wheat domesticated us.3:03 It turned us from free-roaming apes into frantic, overworked laborers.3:08 The average farmer worked FAR harder than the average forager, for a worse diet and a sicker life.3:15 For a chance at a future!3:16 A forager's life has no trajectory.3:19 A farming society does.3:20 It can build, plan, and grow for generations.3:23 It creates the stability needed for complex culture, for art, for philosophy.3:29 You can't sit under a tree and ponder the meaning of life if you're constantly worried about where your next meal is coming from.3:38 But that's just it!3:39 Most people in agricultural societies weren't pondering anything.3:44 They were breaking their backs in a field to support a tiny elite who got to do the pondering.3:50 This wasn't a leap forward for the species; it was a fantastic deal for a tiny minority and a catastrophe for everyone else.3:59 It created patriarchy, it created armies, and it created plagues from all those domesticated animals we suddenly started living with.4:08 Okay, but consider this—without that "catastrophe," there is no medicine to cure those plagues.4:14 There is no political philosophy to question that hierarchy.4:19 There is no archaeology to even let us have this debate!4:23 You are using the fruits of the Neolithic Revolution to critique the Neolithic Revolution.4:29 That's the ultimate irony.4:31 It was the necessary, painful, and maybe even tragic first step towards becoming who we are now.4:37 And I'm arguing that "who we are now" is a species built on a foundation of disease, inequality, and toil.4:45 We traded a million years of relative health and freedom for a few thousand years of...4:51 this.4:51 And we've never been able to go back.4:54 Because for all the flaws, nobody wants to trade the hospital and the grocery store for a spear and the constant threat of starvation.5:03 The system it created gave us the tools to fix its own problems.5:07 Or it just created bigger, more complex problems we're still wrestling with today—climate change, social stratification, pandemics.5:16 We're still living in the shadow of that first harvest.5:20 I suppose we are.5:21 The question is whether it's a shadow we can step out of, or if it's the very thing that makes the light possible.5:29 And that really gets to it, doesn't it?5:32 The debate isn't about grain at all.5:34 It's about whether civilization itself was a good bargain.
