The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (1987)
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Given that "Turks" proper are a Central Asian people and not the original inhabitants of Turkey I have to wonder exactly what ancestors he is referring to.
Another point... maybe the skeletons before agriculture were taller, could be, but I'm guessing there are many more skeletons available from the agricultural period, so if the goal is maximum net skeletons, the agricultural period takes the prize (can't support a lot of people hunting gathering). There are probably plenty of tall skeletons from this period as well. Rulers who had the malnourished masses doing their work for them. But a malnourished skeleton still has more mass than a skeleton that just plain isn't there because the lifestyle never would have brought it into existence.
I've never been a fan of Jared Diamond. I think his analysis is too one dimensional and neglects myriads of factors in his quest for "the reason". I realize he is very popular and he does raise some somewhat interesting points at times. He just gives them too much credit for causing everything. Frankly, this piece sounds like it was written by a guy who wants to have a life a little bit freer than it is right now.
For instance, in Japan, the Jomon hunter/gatherers persisted long after they might have been supplanted by settled agriculturists just across the water. According to Jared Diamond in his later edition of Guns, Germs and Steel, the sheer fertility of Japan's land and seas allowed the Jomon people to maintain a relatively sophisticated culture, mitigating advances which might otherwise have arrived from the fertile crescent via Korea.
So as I see it, they may have 2 intentions : 1) actually suicide themselves. But then why are they writing articles and also, no suicide ... So while this is their declared intention, it can't be their real intention.
2) increase their own success and, therefore increase their own environmental impact, success (and therefore kids) and all they say is evil.
This would also make them lying hypocrites : they're not looking to improve the environment, they're looking to make it worse.
Interesting conclusion. Can you elaborate how you got there? Did you perhaps fall victim to the "no free time" fallacy, that somehow agriculture gave us more time for leisure, study, etc?
Diamond writes modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers - and this in land that is marginal, since we farmer-society-types have pushed them there.
A more intriguing line of argument might have to do with settled communities, etc.
Regardless of your line of argument, please ensure you do not succumb to survivor bias (because we got here this way we could only have gotten here this way, because no hunter-gatherer society got here, none can).
I look forward to rigorous reasoning.
Hunter societies could never, ever have become this productive. There's just no leverage there. And ultimately, the local environment has a strict limit on supporting apex predators (hunters), which is orders of magnitude smaller than the environment 'tamed' and groomed for agriculture.
The whole hunter-is-better argument is silly, from a civilization point of view.
They may be equivalent. Tough to tell. One may be better than the other. Tough to tell.
But to assume that just because we have agriculture and just because we did all this cool stuff the two are necessarily related is to make a logical error of the first order. History is contingent, not inevitable.
After all, how many thousands of years did we have agriculture with only the slowest of overall technical progress? Consider that life in the 18th century was, but for gunpowder and the printing press, essentially the same as life 18 centuries before the modern era, and about the same as life about 18 centuries before that.
Find the contingencies that caused rapid technical advancement starting roughly at the end of the 18th century, find the contingencies that made the last two (2!) centuries so much different that the 100 centuries that preceded them, and you might be on to something.
Now demonstrate that those contingencies simply could not have happened with the leisure time available to the hunter-gatherer.
I'm not saying one is better than the other. I simply refuse to make any assumptions. Survivor bias is a bitch.
How exactly would a nomadic tribe be able to build the infrastructure required for space travel?
Even though it's not fully realized, it's an entirely likely and plausible outcome of agriculture.
[1] http://www.universetoday.com/90798/every-way-devised-to-defl...
[2] http://www.space.com/21333-asteroid-nuke-spacecraft-mission....
This is, I suppose, well within means of current space technology, provided that we have enough time, e.g. several years or at least many months, to get the rockets to the asteroid.
The article doesn't give any reason why this would be the case, and it seemed a little stretched, anyone know why would farmers really want to kill hunters ?
ps: >Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others.
This feels naive at best. Biology creates classes, strong, witty, devious, etc etc
http://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Savag...
Even at my place of work, which has an implied hierarchy with force backing it up, I strive for this. When people need to pull rank or exert force, something is wrong. People who work together well work together without force.
Force is how you get people to do what you want when they don't want to do it. The only way you can think force is inevitable is if you think you can't live harmoniously with other people. To look beyond force as a means of social organization, one must be an optimist, but when you do that, you find all around you possibilities. The relationships that nourish and support us most fully are the least violent ones.
Force is probably cleaner given the choice.
But what would I do if some unenlightened person sought to compel me through the threat of force?
Of course that's a little facetious. There's more to resisting force than simply meeting it with force in opposition. People live lives of resistance in all walks of life, and finding ways to get around hard, inflexible enforced conditions is useful to even powerful people. In general, the answer to your question is exactly determined b y the nature and context of the force.
Personally, I am a nonconfrontational person. I think avoiding confrontation has helped me find ways to deal with people who throw their authority around. On the subject of physical violence, well I don't want to spill personal details like that on a public forum.
Please note that the Roman Empire came after the Roman Republic, the French Empire (which, granted, didn't last all that long) came after the first French Republic, and Nazi Germany (another god-king situation) came after the Weimar Republic.
History doesn't run just one way, unfortunately.