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Was the Neolithic Revolution good or bad for humanity? In what American political scientist and anthropologist James Scott calls the “standard civilizational narrative”—which is advocated by everyone from Thomas Hobbes to Marx—the adoption of settled agriculture is assumed to be an “epoch-making leap in mankind’s well-being: more leisure, better nutrition, longer life expectancy, and, at long last, a settled life that promoted the household arts and the development of civilization.”[14] The alternative to the standard civilizational narrative sees prehistoric hunter-gatherers as the real-world equivalent of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.[15] Humans lived in a milieu of happy abundance until we decided to take up farming. This may have had the benefit of allowing us to produce more food, but it also led to the emergence of despotism, inequality, poverty and back-breaking, mind-numbing work. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is perhaps the most notable champion of the “Fall of Man” theory, and more recently Jared Diamond argued that the adoption of settled agriculture was the “worst mistake in the history of the human race.”[16] Graeber and Wengrow argue that both of these grand theories oversimplify the argument. They assume that the adoption of settled agriculture—in particular cereal-farming and grain storage—led to the emergence of hierarchies and states. In the standard civilizational narrative this is the best thing that ever happened to our species; for Rousseau and Diamond it is the worst. But the link between farming and civilization is far from straightforward. The earliest examples of complex states don’t appear until six millennia after the Neolithic Revolution first began in the Middle East, and they didn’t develop at all in some places where farming emerged. “To say that cereal-farming was responsible for the rise of such states is a little like saying that the development of calculus in medieval Persia is responsible for the invention of the atom bomb.
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