YouTube video transcript

We were first hunter gatherers,

and we lived in groups, about 20 to 50 people. And we roamed the land looking for food. It was uncertain, it was unstable. And then suddenly there was a revolution. We discover farming. And farming provided a stable source of food that we could control, okay? The word we use is domestication,

okay? Domestication just means that we bring it under our control.

And because of farming, we can now create more food than we need. The word we use for this is surplus.

And because there's a surplus, people now could do things besides farming. So, for example, we could have

leaders, which creates the idea of politics, right? We could also have priests, which introduces the idea of religion.

And we can have creative people, which then gives us arts. And slowly, over time, these villages grew into cities. And because there was a lot of people in our surplus, we could now have literature, reading and writing. So we can now store knowledge and then pass it from generation to generation and across cultures, okay? We can now have science and technology. And slowly, over the course of this process, we create modernity, okay,

which is the world that we live in today.

So the pivotal step towards modernity was this transition into agriculture. And this is traditionally what we believed about the world.

Unfortunately, there's no evidence for this, okay? And in fact, the more evidence we collect, the more we realize this is not true. In fact, what we now know is it was actually pretty stupid to transition from hunter gatherer into farming for a variety of reasons. The first reason is that when you're a hunter gatherer, it's actually a pretty easy life because there's food everywhere, okay? When you're a farmer, it's a hard life because you have to grow that food. So maybe as a hunter gatherer, you're working maybe an hour a day, but as a farmer, you were working six, seven hours a day. It was very hard to grow that food. So in the book Sapiens, there is really

historian named Yuwel Harari. He's very famous Sapiens also very famous book. There's a very famous sentence, okay? The sentence is like this. We did not domesticate wheat.

Wheat domesticated us, okay? So we thought that we made wheat, okay, the food, wheat, into our slave. But in reality, wheat made us its slave. And the reasoning for this is this. Out in nature, if you're wheat and you want to survive, you have to make yourself attractive to other people and to animals, okay? So you have to be tasty and you have to be easy to find. You have to do a lot of work. But when you're on a Farm, and in your wheat, you can just lay back, do nothing, and make humans do all the work. Okay? So it was a bad deal for humans and a very good deal for wheat. Okay? So that's the first problem. You actually do more work on the farm than you do as a hunter gatherer, which means that now you have to have more children, right? You need to have labor to do all that work, which creates a problem of overpopulation, which means that you are using too much land, and then eventually the land becomes dead, okay? Or

not arable anymore. So it's the first problem. Second problem is that we're able to dig up the skeletons of hunter gatherers and farmers. And what we see is that hunter gatherers are a lot taller than farmers. Why?

Protein. Right? Food. As a hunter gatherer, you have access to meat. You have access to fruits and nuts and vegetables, okay? Your diet is varied and very nutritious. But as a farmer, you're eating only what you grow, which is mainly wheat and some vegetables, okay? So you're not getting that much nutrition. Then the third problem is that is as a farmer, you are much more likely to die early than if you're a hunter gatherer. Why?

Have you guys been to a farm? What's the problem on a farm?

Exactly. Thank you. Pigs, right? Animals, they're everywhere. Plus, where do you put the garbage? Where do you go to the restroom, right? So because people are together in a very unclean place, it's much more likely to contract disease and then die, okay? So for these three reasons, the transition from hunter gatherer to farming makes no sense. And even today, we are not able to explain to you why this transition happened, okay?