Against the Grain

There is another great debate about farming: did it spread through imitation, or did it spread because migrant populations of farmers displaced the hunter-gatherers? The answer in Europe seems to be the latter. The provisional evidence suggests that the early agriculturalists from Anatolia arrived as migrants in Western Europe around 6000 BCE and l

With the possible exception of the early stages of farming, past transitions have always involved periods of social chaos and heightened violence due to disorientation and breakdown of the old system. Corruption, moral decline, and inefficiency appear to be signal features of the final stages of a system. The growing importance of technology in sha

the high productivity of agriculture, which supported these large populations, also made possible a sophisticated division of labor, the development of writing systems, the rise of scientific knowledge (mathematics, astronomy, metallurgy, agronomy), and the novelty of governance of large populations.

The Indians, then, who had the wisdom and the grace to live in this country for perhaps ten thousand years without destroying or damaging any of it, needed for their travels no more than a footpath; but their successors, who in a century and a half plundered the area of at least half its topsoil and virtually all of its forest, felt immediately tha