The Pre-Agricultural Period Was NOT Better

In this episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into one of the most pervasive myths of our time — the idea popularized by Yuval Noah Harari’s bestselling book Sapiens that the Agricultural Revolution was “history’s biggest fraud” and that life was better for pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers.

From the viral Primitive Technology videos to nostalgic comments romanticizing mud huts and “living off the land,” this meme just won’t die. But was life really better before farming? Shorter work hours? Healthier diets? No diseases or violence?

We break down Harari’s claims with historical evidence, anthropology, and skeletal data — showing why early agriculture had growing pains, but civilization quickly made life vastly better in nearly every metric: health, lifespan, safety, leisure quality, and human flourishing.

We also explore why this myth appeals to both far-left anti-GMO types and far-right “Bronze Age” nostalgists, and why romanticizing pre-agricultural life ignores the brutal reality of violence, disease, boredom, and early death.

Episode Outline with Links

Let me set the scene:

* It’s 2015 and you know what people can’t stop watching? You know what the hot video is???

* Not some viral dance

* Not some celebrity scandal

* No, it was a pale dude in the woods silently banging on sticks with a sharpened rock to make a mud hut

* “Primitive Technology: Wattle and Daub Hut”, the first video published on the YouTube channel Primitive Technology, now has over 32 million views.

* For scale:

* Charlie bit my finger has 888 million views

* Bed Intruder song has 158M views

* So obviously it didn’t take over the world, but it’s still HUGE for an eleven-minute, no words, no music video of a man building a mud hut

* The channel has 11 million subscribers (note that Asmongold has 4.21M subscribers)

* What’s going on here? Who might we have to blame for this?

* I’m going to argue it was the Admiral Akbar of agriculture himself, Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

* In 2014, the book Sapiens was published in English (had first been published in Hebrew) and it took the world by storm.

* It quickly became one of the top‑performing narrative nonfiction titles of the past decade, with tens of millions of copies sold worldwide and a very long run on major bestseller lists.

* Estimates from publishers and industry analyses put Sapiens’ total worldwide sales at around 40–45 million copies across all formats and languages.​

* The book has been translated into roughly 60–65 languages, indicating very broad international penetration for a serious nonfiction title.

* It repeatedly appeared in the NYT top 10 and has been described as a New York Times “top 10 bestseller” over a multi‑year period

* And importantly, what did that book do?

* More than others in the past (such as Guns, Germs, and Steel), it radicalized people against modernity and the agricultural revolution

Some choice quotes:

* “We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.”

* “The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.”

* “Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species… These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.”

* “This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.”

* “Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with more difficult lives and a less nutritious diet than hunter-gatherers… The Agricultural Revolution was a trap.”

But are we really worse off because of agriculture?

Let’s take a good faith look at the issue.

Sapiens

Overarching Thesis: Human history is fundamentally the history of imagined realities (fictions) that enable massive cooperation. Almost everything we value—nations, money, human rights, corporations, gods—exists only in our collective imagination. These fictions have been extraordinarily useful, but they have also caused immense suffering and now threaten our future. The next stage of history will likely see us abandon the last remnants of biological humanity altogether.

Harari argues:

* The Agricultural Revolution (c. 10,000 BCE) is widely considered humanity’s “biggest mistake.”

* Harari characterizes the Agricultural Revolution as “history’s biggest fraud,” arguing that it trapped humans in more difficult, labor-intensive, and less healthy lives than those of hunter-gatherers. He suggests that the extra food from farming led to population growth and class divisions, not a better quality of life for most people

* Harari’s analysis is related to, but distinct from, the idea popularized by others—such as Jared Diamond, who called agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”

* Farming allowed population explosion but dramatically worsened the quality of life for individual humans: harder work, poorer nutrition, crowded conditions, new diseases, social hierarchy, and inequality.

* It was a trap: once populations grew, there was no way back to hunter-gatherer life. From the perspective of the human species it was a success; from the perspective of individual happiness it was a disaster.

Specific ways Harari argues pre-agricultural life was better and post-agricultural life was worse:

1. Working Hours

* Hunter-gatherers: ~20–35 hours per week spent obtaining food and basic needs (citing modern studies of the !Kung, Hadza, etc.).

* Early farmers: 50–60+ hours of back-breaking labor (plowing, weeding, harvesting, grinding grain, carrying water, tending animals).

2. Diet and Nutrition

* Hunter-gatherers: Extremely varied diet (dozens of plant species, nuts, fruits, game, fish, honey). High in protein, vitamins, minerals; low in starch.

* Farmers: Became heavily dependent on one or two staple crops (wheat, rice, maize, potatoes). Led to nutritional deficiencies (iron-deficiency anemia, protein shortages, dental caries from high-starch diets). Archaeological evidence shows shorter stature, worse teeth, and more signs of malnutrition in early farming populations.

3. Health and Disease

* Hunter-gatherers: Few epidemic diseases because of small, mobile bands and diverse diets. Parasites existed, but not on the scale of settled communities.

* Farmers: Lived in crowded, permanent settlements surrounded by human and animal waste → explosion of infectious diseases (smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, plague). Close contact with domesticated animals introduced zoonotic diseases. Skeletons from the Neolithic show dramatically higher rates of disease markers.

4. Physical Toll and Injuries

* Hunter-gatherers: More accidents (falls, animal attacks), but generally robust, well-exercised bodies.

* Farmers: Repetitive stress injuries (arthritis in spine and knees from grinding grain and hoeing), higher rates of osteoporosis, herniated discs, and skeletal deformities from constant heavy labor.

5. Child Mortality vs. Overall Population

* Farmers had higher fertility (women could wean earlier because of soft porridge), but much higher child mortality from disease and malnutrition. Net result: population exploded, but most individuals still died young.

* Hunter-gatherers had lower birth rates but higher survival rates for those born → fewer starving or sick children per family.

6. Social Equality

* Hunter-gatherers: Relatively egalitarian (food sharing norms, no way to store surplus for long, little private property).

* Farmers: Surplus → private property → inherited wealth → sharp class divisions, patriarchy, slavery, and warfare over land.

* First off, it is bizarre to bemoan better resources on average just because some outliers have far more resources

* Excuse me, pre-agricultural societies absolutely had slaves (e.g. captives from war)—and let’s be clear, you are LUCKY to become a captive slave in pre-agricultural society, because most men were just killed

* Complex, delayed-return hunter-gatherers of the Pacific Northwest (e.g., Kwakiutl, Haida, Tlingit) and a few other resource-rich coastal or riverine groups even practiced what anthropologists consider to be “true slavery”—raiding neighbors specifically to capture slaves for labor and prestige.

7. Psychological and Existential Quality of Life

* Hunter-gatherers: More leisure time, more varied and stimulating daily activities (tracking animals, storytelling, dancing), stronger community bonds in small bands.

* Farmers: Monotonous, exhausting labor from dawn to dusk; lives dominated by the crop cycle and fear of drought, flood, or locusts.

8. Life Expectancy (at birth vs. if you survived childhood)

Harari repeatedly stresses that average life expectancy at birth dropped after agriculture because of skyrocketing infant mortality. An individual who reached adulthood might live about as long as a hunter-gatherer, but far more children died before age five.

Harari’s own blunt summaries (direct quotes)

* “The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return.”

* “Luxury trap”: Farmers could now have storable food → more babies → larger population → even harder work to feed everyone → no escape.

* “From the viewpoint of individual suffering, the Agricultural Revolution was probably the worst thing that ever happened to Homo sapiens.”

He does concede that agriculture was a stunning success for the species (billions of humans instead of a few million) and for wheat (which spread across the planet), but insists that for the individual human being, it was a dramatic deterioration in almost every measurable aspect of life. That is the core of his “biggest fraud” argument.

Pre-Agricultural Life vs. Modern Life

Where it clearly sucked:

Based on paleopathology, modern hunter-gatherer studies, and ethnographic records. Life expectancy at birth was low (∼30–35 years), but if you survived childhood, reaching 60–70 was not rare. Death was usually brutal and/or lingering rather than quick.

Traumatic & Violent Deaths (very common)

* Interpersonal violence: skull fractures, parry fractures on forearms, embedded projectile points (arrow/spear wounds). Many forager skeletons show healed and unhealed weapon injuries.

* Hunting accidents: falls from trees/cliffs while pursuing game, goring by large animals (aurochs, mammoth, bison), trampling.

* Accidental trauma: broken necks from falling out of trees, drowning while fishing or crossing rivers.

Infectious Diseases & Parasites (far fewer than later, but still nasty)

Crowd diseases (measles, smallpox, influenza, plague) essentially didn’t exist yet because populations were too small and mobile. But you still had:

* Wound infections & sepsis: any deep cut or compound fracture from hunting/fighting often led to Staphylococcus/Streptococcus infections, gas gangrene (Clostridium perfringens), or tetanus (Clostridium tetani — lockjaw and violent spasms, ∼50–80% fatal).

* Chronic osteomyelitis: bone infections that ate away limbs over years.

* Tuberculosis: present in pre-agricultural humans (DNA found in 9,000-year-old skeletons), probably from eating infected game. Slow wasting, coughing blood, death over years.

* Treponematoses (non-venereal syphilis-like diseases: yaws, bejel, pinta): disfiguring skin and bone lesions, common in tropical foragers.

* Parasites galore:

* Tapeworms (Diphyllobothrium from raw fish, Taenia from undercooked meat) — could grow >10 meters in your gut.

* Hookworm & other intestinal worms → chronic anemia, stunted growth.

* Malaria (already present in Africa before agriculture; Plasmodium falciparum DNA found in 5,000+ year-old skeletons).

* Leishmaniasis (protozoan parasite from sandflies) → cutaneous ulcers or visceral form that destroys liver/spleen (“kala-azar,” 95% fatal untreated).

* Hydatid disease (Echinococcus cysts from dog/wolf feces) → huge cysts in liver/lungs that eventually rupture and kill.

Dental Horrors

* Abscesses: no dentistry → an infected tooth often became a fatal brain or neck abscess.

* Extreme wear from grit in food → exposed pulp → constant pain and infection.

Starvation & Nutritional Diseases (especially seasonal)

* Winter or dry-season famine: many modern foragers experience “hungry seasons.” Sudden starvation or slow marasmus/kwashiorkor in children.

* Vitamin C deficiency (scurvy) during long periods without fruit.

* Rickets from low vitamin D in high-latitude foragers.

Childbirth Deaths

* Extremely high maternal mortality: obstructed labor (no cesarean), postpartum hemorrhage, puerperal fever from Streptococcus (childbed fever). Probably 5–15% lifetime risk per birth.

Slow, Ugly Deaths from Chronic Conditions

* Osteoarthritis and spinal degeneration from carrying heavy loads all life → eventually immobilized people who then starved or were abandoned.

* Brucellosis (from raw milk/meat of wild goats, cattle) → years of undulating fever, joint destruction, heart valve failure.

* Chronic zoonotic infections like Q fever, tularemia, anthrax.

Miscellaneous Nasty Ones

* Snakebite & insect envenomation (no antivenom).

* Botulism from poorly cached meat in warm climates.

* Trichinella spiralis cysts from bear or boar meat → weeks of muscle pain, heart failure.

* Rabies (extremely rare but 100% fatal and terrifying).

In short: before agriculture, you were far less likely to die of plague or cholera, but if you got a compound fracture on Tuesday, you were probably screaming in agony with a high fever by Thursday and dead (or wishing you were) by Sunday. Violence, trauma, and zoonotic/parasitic infections were the main killers—slow, painful, and very personal.

Where it’s mixed:

Aspect

Hunter-Gatherers (pre-agriculture)

Early Farmers (Neolithic/Chalcolithic)

Average adult height

Tall (men often 170–180 cm in favorable areas)

Dropped 5–15 cm (men often 155–165 cm)

Life expectancy at birth

30–40 years (high infant mortality)

Similar or slightly lower

Life expectancy at age 15

Often 50–70+ years (many lived into 60s–70s)

Dropped; fewer people reached old age

Dental health

Excellent; very low caries, moderate wear

Dramatic increase in cavities (20–300% higher)

Skeletal signs of anemia

Rare (porotic hyperostosis, cribra orbitalia)

Very common (iron-deficiency anemia from grain-heavy diets)

Infectious disease

Low (small, mobile groups)

Much higher (permanent settlements, animal domestication, density)

Skeletal stress markers

Low to moderate

High (periostitis, osteoarthritis from repetitive labor)

Nutritional diversity

100–300+ species per year

3–10 staple crops (often just 1–3 dominated calories)

Workload

15–30 hours/week (ethnographic average)

50–70+ hours/week of hard physical labor

Violence/interpersonal trauma

Moderate to high in some groups

Often decreased (more centralized authority)

When and Where Things Eventually Improved

* Bronze Age onward (after ~3000 BCE in the Near East, later elsewhere): Better storage, plows, irrigation, and dietary supplementation (e.g., legumes, dairy in some areas) began reversing some trends.

* Iron Age and Classical periods: Heights and health partially recovered in many regions.

* Full recovery to (and surpassing) hunter-gatherer health markers only occurred in the last 100–150 years with modern sanitation, medicine, and dietary abundance.

Non-Agricultural Life Today

Aspect

Non-Agricultural Societies (e.g., Hadza, Tsimané)

Average U.S. Resident (2025)

Key Differences/Substantiation

Life Expectancy at Birth

21–37 years (avg. ~30–33); high infant/juvenile mortality (20–40%) drags down average

78.4 years (slight rebound from COVID lows; varies by state: 80.7 in HI, 71.9 in MS)

U.S. ~2x longer due to vaccines, sanitation, and infant care; hunter-gatherers lose ~30% to childhood diseases

Life Expectancy at Age 15

50–60 years (many reach 60s–70s+; modal age ~68–78)

~63–65 years remaining (total ~78–80)

Comparable adult spans, but U.S. edges out via chronic disease management; Hadza/Tsimané adults often outlive U.S. peers without medicine

Infant Mortality

15–25% (infections, accidents)

<0.6%

U.S. vastly superior; hunter-gatherers lack neonatal tech

Chronic Diseases

Rare: No obesity, diabetes, hypertension, or heart disease; low cancer rates; diverse microbiomes from wild diet

High: 42% obese; 13% diabetic; 50%+ with CVD risk; leading causes of death

Hunter-gatherers’ active lifestyle (8–12 km/day walking) and plant-rich diet (~100g fiber/day) prevent “affluence diseases”; U.S. diet/sedentary life drives epidemics

Physical Function & Aging

High lifelong: Maintain speed/strength into 70s; exceed WHO activity guidelines (173+ min MVPA/day); minimal sarcopenia

Declines post-50: 25%+ inactive; rising falls/arthritis in elderly

Hunter-gatherers age “healthier” (e.g., Hadza grip strength rivals young U.S. adults); U.S. gains years but with more disability

Mental Health & Stress

Low depression/anxiety; egalitarian (no wealth gaps); popularity tied to low cortisol, not status

20%+ with anxiety/depression; high stress from inequality/work

Hadza report high satisfaction; U.S. has therapy but epidemic isolation/suicide

Quality of Life (Subjective)

High: 70–80% rate life “good/very good”; joys in community/nature; but risks (hunger, violence ~19% deaths)

Moderate: Gallup ~6.9/10 satisfaction; conveniences (tech, travel) but inequality, overwork

Hunter-gatherers happier per surveys (e.g., Hadza > U.S. in some metrics); uncontacted tribes avoid modern ills but face extinction threats; U.S. QoL uneven (higher for wealthy)

Workload & Leisure

15–20 hrs/week foraging; seasonal abundance

40+ hrs/week; chronic stress

More “leisure” in hunter-gatherers, but physically demanding; U.S. has automation but burnout

Overall Health Burden

Infectious/parasitic diseases dominant; excellent oral health, anemia low

Non-communicable diseases (70% deaths); opioid crisis, mental health epidemic

U.S. healthier in youth/old age survival; hunter-gatherers win on vitality/prevention

For the Butthurt Idiots who Stan Pre-Agricultural Life

First off, NOBODY IS FORCING YOU TO LIVE WITH AGRICULTURE

You, too, can go out like John Plant and make wattle and daub huts

Plenty even of this podcast’s listeners live to varying degrees off the grid, without water, etc.

More broadly, Harari argues that:

* There is no clear evidence that humans today are happier than hunter-gatherers or medieval peasants.

* But define happier; we also aren’t living with bone infections that are eating away at us slowly and excruciatingly…..

* Evolution shaped us to seek survival and reproduction, not lasting happiness. Biochemical happiness (serotonin, dopamine) has narrow limits.

* FOR A REASON

* Most ideologies and religions throughout history have failed to deliver on their promises of happiness or meaning.

* We would argue they do not make these promises

Noah misses what I would see as “the point” of being human and what distinguishes humans from animals in that, in the end of Sapiens, he argues:

* We are on the verge of breaking out of natural selection and becoming something new.

* 21st-century technologies (genetic engineering, AI, cyborg tech) will allow us to redesign life itself and create inorganic life forms.

* This will be the ultimate disruption: Homo sapiens as we have known ourselves for 70,000 years is about to be replaced by something different—possibly gods, possibly irrelevant.

Episode Transcript

Simone Collins: Hello Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you today because there’s been this thing that’s bothering me and I just need to get it off my chest.

We need to talk about it. And I, I just, first, I wanna set the scene ‘cause people need to understand how profound and widespread this scourge of a problem is. Or scourge, scourge. So let me, let me just set the scene. Okay. It’s 2015. And you know what? People can’t stop watching. It’s like what the hot video is.

Do you, can you guess like, what, what, what is a hot 20? I dunno. No idea. It’s not, it’s not some stupid viral dance or like a, a, a celebrity scandal. No, it, it’s, it’s a dude. A pale dude in the woods, silently creating. Oh, I watched a lot of those. A hut. Yes. I yes, you, you, you were one of them. Malcolm, you, you watched and, and this was the primitive technology, wattle and DOB hut.

This was the first video published by the YouTube channel, primitive Technology. [00:01:00] Technology. The video now has over 32 million views. So one of those was yours. That’s a lot of views. I mean, and it’s obviously not like dumb viral video views like Charlie, but my finger has 888 million views. The bed intruder song has 158 million views, but 32 million for an 11 minute video with no music, no words, no historical explanation.

It’s pretty cool.

Malcolm Collins: It

Simone Collins: was

Malcolm Collins: a pretty cool video.

Simone Collins: Yeah. You, you may say that, but. Yeah, I don’t, I, I, I don’t, it’s, I, freedom of Technology has 11 million subscribers. Asman Gold has 4.21. Okay? I don’t, I don’t know. Like for me, I think it’s a little bit [00:02:00] suspicious. And here’s the thing. I’m going to argue that it was the Admiral Act Bar of Agriculture himself.

Yuval Noah Harri, the author of Sapiens, a brief history of humankind who’s responsible. For the little subconscious obsession that made primitive technology big, and that has ever since led people in comments on our videos and randomly online to be like, oh, if only we could go back to when we made mud huts in the woods, because that was so much better.

Okay, so

Malcolm Collins: Simone, you’ve, you’ve introduced us in a rather convoluted way. The point that she’s making is she once read, because what she often does for our family is she’ll read whatever books are popular at the time or whatever. Yes. And then she summarizes them and she basically gives me a summary.

She was like GPT before GPT, and when she did that for Sapiens, she was fuming. The entire few days she was reading this, she was like, this is just like, the science [00:03:00] in it is so bad. It’s such a misrepresentation of history and w. We did a video not too long ago about Thanksgiving where we were going over all of the ways that modern civilization and modern life is better than life historically.

And one of the types of comments we saw in that, which is based on this common myth that she is outlining, is that things were better in the pre agricultural world. Like life on average was better. Mm-hmm. You had more free time and less diseases and was less likely to be able to be killed and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Yep. The reality is this is not remotely the case. Before we go into the details, basically the gist of the story is in the first cities, in many ways, things were worse than the agricultural period.

Simone Collins: Absolutely.

Malcolm Collins: In the first cities, by the time you enter the [00:04:00] classical era or the Bronze Age not, not even modern times, that trend had been easily reversed along almost every single important metric.

But when you get to the Roman period absolutely reversed by every meaningful metric. And when you get to modern times, and this is the thing, it gets you, because there are a lot of people who live under this myth that their life, and I mean, if you are living in poverty in the United States and you are an incel and you were born ugly, and you were born, you know, like every bad trade possible for our society.

Simone Collins: Yes. Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Literally a hundred to one. You would prefer this life if you knew what your life would actually be like in the pre agricultural period.

Simone Collins: Except you’ve been lied to. You’ve been lied to because this book Sapiens became so freaking big. I mean, just anecdotally I, I was reading it because your, your dad and Michael, if you’re watching, thank [00:05:00] you so much, would not stop talking about it.

Even your mom read it and she always read things for cultural literacy, so I knew everyone else was reading it, but just objectively, this is one of the top performing narrative nonfiction books in, in the past decade, tens of millions of copies have been published in its total worldwide sales are around 40 to 45 million copies in an age when nobody reads anymore.

The book has been translated to about 65 different languages, and it repeatedly appeared at the New York Times Top 10. This, this, this book was so pervasive also, it wasn’t originally published in English. Do you know whether it was originally published in 2011?

Malcolm Collins: No. Fringe Hebrew. Hebrew Hebrew. Oh, interesting.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Also, so for our audience, just you guys know this is, this is Hebrew propaganda here. Yeah. Just in

Simone Collins: case you know, all the It was the Jews.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So when you, when you go out there and, and, and you say, life was better in a pre agricultural period, that is Jewish prophets nature.

Simone Collins: It’s Jewish [00:06:00] propaganda.

Yeah. Guys, you’re gonna think that’s the only thing I had to say. The rest of the rest of it doesn’t matter anymore because honestly, there’s a huge overlap between the commenters who are like. They use the juice box emoji and they hate Jews, but also they’re like, ugh, agriculture. And

Malcolm Collins: they don’t realize it.

The whole like, like the, the pre agricultural period was great thing. This is, this is no, it is funny that that group that actually buys that is actually really heavily overlapped. It’s a group that actually thinks that like Jews are out to get them.

Simone Collins: No, but, but actually actually, but anyway, lemme, lemme give you some choice quotes from the book to get to, here’s the propaganda that they’re, you know, that’s being drummed into people.

We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us and the agricultural revolution was history’s biggest fraud and who was responsible. Neither kings nor priests nor merchants, the culprits were a handful of plant species. These plants [00:07:00] domesticated homosapiens rather than vice versa. Oh, whipping me, Mr.

Corn. Oh my gosh. He is coming to get me this ears. Oh my God. No, no, but it’s,

Malcolm Collins: it’s the, the what’s funny is, is the way that it has been co-opted by parts of boast, the far left and the far right to bolster their narratives. Yeah. I remember when I was younger, this was an ideology that was only had on the far left, where you’d have these like anti GMO type people to be like, if we could go back to living off of the land.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And any sane person would immediately be like, you know, like the carrying capacity. Like even if that was possible, even if everything you said was true, we could support like 1% of Earth’s existing population if we went back to living off the land. But out outside of that, now there’s this new thing like liver king and, and it sort of aesthetically like Bronze Age pervert ist an idiot.

He obviously doesn’t believe this stuff, but

Simone Collins: also Bronze Age. Per [00:08:00] Okay. He leaves a civilized man.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But there’s this element of the right that’s like there is a miss and they recognize correctly this miss of a progression through history in which things always get better. Well wait, is

Simone Collins: this like, is this the rights version of a oppression Olympics, but it’s just nostalgia Olympics or we’ll say conservatives version of it.

So like you, your very surface level conservatives is like, oh, everything was better in the fifties. And then you’ve got like the Edge Lords who are like, nah, man, bronze Age. And then you’ve got like the intellectuals who think that they’re like the hyper geniuses who are like pre agriculture. Well,

Malcolm Collins: so here’s why it works.

Yeah. And I think you’re absolutely right. Is because they. They, one, they recognize a lie of constant progression. And, and, and, and then two, they sort of are, while, while competing on, you know, nostalgia points, they’re also competing on masculinity points. And there’s this perception of the further back in Timeing you go, the more [00:09:00] masculine man was,

Simone Collins: nothing says masculine like bacteria eating away at your face while you live years of your life out in the exposure.

So fungus

Malcolm Collins: by the way, is the famous case of that, that we’ll go over. I can,

Simone Collins: Yeah, but yeah. Yeah. I’m gonna, I I’m gonna, I’m gonna go through some examples. I, I do wanna give Sapiens credit. There are some really interesting thesis in it that we might even wanna do an episode at, at some point, because the larger argument he’s, he’s making is that what per his view, differentiated homo sapiens from say Neanderthals, is that not only did they develop languages, but they developed the ability.

To create basically shared fictions or imagined realities, you know, like myths and religions and origin stories. But then he also talks about sort of the fictions of like capitalism and, and cities and stuff. No, but hold on,

Malcolm Collins: hold on. I, I, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll explain his, like core analogy of the book in dumber terms.

So if you have a broad understanding of American history and American’s economic history, yeah. You would be very [00:10:00] well aware that the south due to slavery did not economically develop like the north, the slavery made the south. Poorer. The slaves didn’t build America. They economically trapped the south in a cycle of, of poverty basically.

And, and it’s actually somewhat humorous to me when people come out and they try to make the counter argument, they’re like, slavery was actually economically good and useful. And I’m like, that’s a, that’s nots not the argument you think it is, but, but the reality is, and this is very, very easy to see in the data, is that is why this house never industrialized.

Now it would be like somebody seeing that data and then saying, so what that really means is the slaves enslaved their masters. Oh God, the masters were the core victims of slavery. It was the southern plantation owners anyway, continues to vote.

Simone Collins: He more, more than that. I mean, it’s, it, this is like the American God’s version of, of Midwood historians where it’s like, well, no, [00:11:00] what, what makes, and I, I still think this is interesting though that.

Basically, almost everything we value from nations to money, to human rights is in our collective imagination. This sort of shared fantasy, and that these fictions have been really useful, but they’ve also caused immense suffering per his view, and now they threaten our future. And I mean, he also sort of argues at the end of the book that like, we’re gonna not become human anymore anyway.

So kind of like, what does it matter per his view? It, it, it gets all really crazy. Yeah. So like, there are some interesting things about the book. Like I really like those ideas, but I just couldn’t get over. His arguments about agriculture, they made me so angry. But, and is it

Malcolm Collins: something that would make you a, this is the thing, if you’re like reading this book or you hear somebody explain this to you, it all sounds very plausible.

Yeah. Like, yeah,

Simone Collins: actually, let me do this ‘cause I, we need to give a good faith. Like, here’s what he argues. And when you actually hear it laid out, you’re like, oh man. Like [00:12:00] I can understand why someone who’s not putting a lot of thought into this is told these things or they read this book or they hear someone talking about this and they’re like, oh yeah man, like agriculture did make everything worse.

‘cause there are lots of factual and true things that when well, and it’s not, you could say taken outta context or, or interpreted from a certain perspective, like a purely present focused to don perspective. Are compelling, shall we go forward?

Malcolm Collins: No. Before you go into this, I’d say the core reason why his argument works so well is because the early agricultural period and pre classical civilization is a giant hole in the American education system.

That, that’s

Simone Collins: a great point. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Education typically starts with Egypt or Greece. And so a lot of, if you’re

Simone Collins: lucky, Mr. Private School, if

Malcolm Collins: you’re lucky. So somebody can just come in and say a bunch of things about this transition. And if you are not an anthropology or you [00:13:00] know, histor, you know, historical anthropology Yeah.

You’re like, oh dude, that

Simone Collins: sucks. Also, even if you are taught about pre agricultural societies, which I was through all of our Native American education in California. When you go to like the local tribe sites and like you do all this stuff to like learn about local historical Native American tribes, you’re only hearing about the cool stuff.

You don’t hear about, like, it’s like, oh, they grand, they ground down acorns to make, you know, like acorn meal and, and it’s like, oh, this is so cool. That sounds tasty. You don’t hear anything that’s like, here are the practicalities of life.

Malcolm Collins: Continue. So make the argument. Make the argument. So yeah,

Simone Collins: here’s, here is his argument as to why things got worse with agriculture.

So working hours got worse. Hunter gatherers, he says, works 20 to 35 hours per week, and, and they spent that time just getting their basic needs in order. Said like he, he’s citing modern studies of the Kang and the haah. I’m, I’m mispronouncing that, but we don’t [00:14:00] actually know that. I just wanna point out No,

Malcolm Collins: no, I actually, if, if you’re gonna make the, what he does not address here and is something that you’re likely not thinking about as like a modern human uhhuh is leisure time in a hunter-gatherer tribe is not as valuable as a leisure time.

Today?

Simone Collins: Yeah, maybe they were just trying to keep warm in a cave and you’re like scrolling YouTube.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they’re, they’re literally like staring at a wall in a cave. And

Simone Collins: their cave paintings,

Malcolm Collins: you’re, you’re imagining them like I, I don’t know, like going on their daily jog or something. I’m confused.

They don’t even think about like what leisure time means, what are doing,

Simone Collins: what

Malcolm Collins: they doing. They, they imagine a lot of these tribes, and I kid you not, they do not even have games. No. They may have stories, but it’s the same stories their ancestors told for x many generations. It’s just about telling something you memorized once.

Yeah. It, it [00:15:00] is the, the level of existential boredom you would be facing, I think would horrify a modern person. Well, no, I

Simone Collins: think more than that, and this is one of the arguments that I, I make, I wanna make is that they weren’t as online as. They weren’t as human as we are today. You know, they’re prefrontal cortices.

I, I don’t

Malcolm Collins: think were, so the studies that he’s referencing were done on an anatomically modern human groups. Anatomically modern groups.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But

Malcolm Collins: like, maybe don’t, maybe don’t mention this too much. I think a part of our audience knows what you’re talking about, but I think maybe not the

Simone Collins: okay. I’m, well, okay.

Even, even, okay. I’m not saying anatomically they, they weren’t that different. I’m just saying like, if you do not cultivate your prefrontal cortex throughout your life, the way our entire bodies work, including our minds, is use it or lose it. Okay. Yeah. So I, if you spend your life supercharging and stimulating various parts of your prefrontal cortex in your imagination and your language centers and all this, you’re gonna have hyperactive language and you’re gonna experience boredom.

But like. A dog [00:16:00] that can’t talk. This

Malcolm Collins: is like a more existential issue than I think people realize when they talk about the leisure time people used to have, they’re like, oh, come on, I could make that time more interesting. I’d talk with like my friends and it’s like, no, you don’t understand like what conversations are like in these societies.

And, and you can listen to like recordings of them and stuff like that. They are either talking about stuff that’s just objectively not true, like about like spirits and nonsense. Well, that’s

Simone Collins: fine. And a again, like, I don’t, like you can, you can watch a cat or a monkey like chilling and you’re like, man, that looks good.

Like, they’re lying in the sun. They’re happy. Like, I’m what? I’m looking as a professor, like chilling. And she’s happy. And I think people are like, I wanna do that. So I don’t think your argument that like, oh, they must be so bored is their argument. No, no. Hold on, hold on. Chilling. All

Malcolm Collins: our audience gets this.

If you have ever been unemployed for X amount of time or something like that, you know, this idea of like, oh, life would be so much better. I just didn’t know work at all. Is BS like your life becomes existentially like. Horrifying. When you literally do like that [00:17:00] little work, right? But it’s not just that, the point I’m making is you don’t have many games.

When you’re talking to people, their view of the world is incredibly myopic. So you don’t have much in terms of conversation. You do, you can’t even really gossip that much because it’s a danger to the tribe and will just get you killed. Like not really. I mean,

Simone Collins: gossip is, I mean there, there’s this, all these arguments of developmentally that women make about gossip.

About how important it is and stuff like that.

Malcolm Collins: I, again, I, I don’t know. Like I basically living often in a somewhat authoritarian regime, many of these tribes are set up not dissimilarly to like, chimpanzee tribes. Right. Where you have Yeah, no, and that’s

Simone Collins: the thing, yeah. Is like, don’t, don’t compare it to human life.

Compare compared to animal life, because that’s what it was. And like, you have to choose a team. Like if you wanna be an animal, I respect that. If you wanna be a human, what makes us human?

But

continue your argument. Continue anyway. Yeah. So like early farmers went from the 20 to 35 hours of work. [00:18:00] To 50 to 60 plus hours of work that that, that he categorizes as back breaking.

You know, you’re plowing and you’re weeding and your harvest things. Highly seasonal work and grinding grain. Yes. Highly seasonal, but he doesn’t like to talk about that because that’s not as convenient for his argument. So shut up. Right. And then diet and nutrition. Hunter gatherers had an extremely varied diet.

Right. Dozens of plants and nuts and fruits and game and fish and honey. Of course, he doesn’t point out necessarily that it might be like three days where you eat nothing but honey. Like, yeah, no, it’s, it’s not a, it’s

Malcolm Collins: not a, it’s a diverse diet, but

Simone Collins: not by choice. Yeah. It reminds me of some friends that I had in college where like, they would just eat like a bag of peas and that was it for the day.

You know, like,

Malcolm Collins: well, I, I pointed out here that the, the labor was very different. Yeah. So he hits you with comparisons that make sense to a modern person, Uhhuh, where he says. Oh. You know, no, he makes it sound like

Simone Collins: they, like have Whole Foods food deliveries, like every day. No, no, no, no, no.

Malcolm Collins: But, but he, [00:19:00] that’s not the argument I’m making here.

So he’ll say something like, oh, you know, they’re working four times as much, but it wasn’t even four times as much. I think it was like twice as much in his book when they’re doing agricultural labor, right? Mm-hmm. And it is backbreaking and it’s very physically demanding compared to the hunter-gatherers.

And it’s like, that is true. Yeah. But what is the negatives to the hunter gatherer work that he’s leaving out? Oh, it’s often incredibly dangerous. Yeah. You

Simone Collins: gord by the moose, you get, you know. Yeah. It’s like you get killed. You, you break your neck running and falling off a cliff. And

Malcolm Collins: I know that people can say now when they don’t actually have to deal with charging a mammoth or something like that.

Right. Or a herd of buffalo Right on foot. Because keep in mind, these people work on foot, not on like horses or something. And, and they can hear. Oh yeah. I would rather charge a mammoth.

Simone Collins: Well, come on. We, we clearly enjoyed it because we hunted them to extinction, so. Right, right.

Malcolm Collins: No, but then, then spend four x that time [00:20:00] cultivating a field and it’s like.

You, you actually probably wouldn’t. Because you haven’t actually dealt with the injuries regularly of charging mammoths and large game, which we know a lot of males in these societies had. Mm-hmm. Like the horrifying injuries. So no, you, you wouldn’t have loved it. The, the labor was not actually better.

Mm-hmm. Anyone who had actually done both of these tasks would prefer the the, the agricultural task to the charging the mammoth at one fourth a time. Well, yeah,

Simone Collins: and this is the second big argument I wanna make, which is like, if you just let look at, look at the market choices being made, right? At any point, unless you’re a slave or like, you’re literally forced to not leave, you have always had the option to leave.

Okay. No one is keeping you, so

Malcolm Collins: you’re actually wrong on this point. Okay. So there were two lifestyles that were strictly better than the, than the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Okay. Are you familiar with the two lifestyles? Did they jump to your head off [00:21:00] the top of your head?

Simone Collins: You mean agricultural lifestyle?

‘cause my argument is you can always leave an a post agricultural world and go live in the wilderness if you want to.

Malcolm Collins: No, there were two core types of societies that developed. Okay. And they hated each other. Okay. And most of history is about these two societies wanting to kill each other. Okay. So like

Simone Collins: Mongols, like the roving bands of sea people was Agriculturalist,

Malcolm Collins: one was agriculturalist.

Mm-hmm. What was the other? They were our ancestors. Simone. Other than the alcohol, like the

Simone Collins: Vikings and see people’s Simon. No, no.

Malcolm Collins: What do you eat? What do our kids eat? What is literally dairy? 80% of our calories. Dairy. Dairy and meat. Okay. They were. Herding Society. Society.

Simone Collins: Oh, okay. I th They’re all grouped together, aren’t they?

Hurting societies? No. Hurting

Malcolm Collins: societies and agriculturalist societies generally hated each other. He

Simone Collins: doesn’t differentiate between the two in this. He just assumes they’re the same of life

Malcolm Collins: herding societies can’t stay in the same place. Herding societies, basically? Well, sort

Simone Collins: of. I [00:22:00] mean, you obviously need a lot of acreage, but, well, not

Malcolm Collins: really.

And their lifestyles are actually directly in opposition to each other. Mm-hmm. The herding lifestyle needs to move from place to place. Often eating the food of agricultural societies. Also because they don’t stay in locations, they often develop. Side hobby of raiding agriculturalist societies. So most Raider societies came from herding societies.

Hmm. And even in modern times, and I know this because I lived for a period in the Panal region in Brazil, and my brother lived down there and he actually had this more in his thing. And so that’s still a, a more primitive society to get this until fairly recently. And he remembers that the groups would at bars one instance in which they all pulled guns on each other, the, the herders versus the agriculturalist at the bar.

Simone Collins: Oh, wow. And

Malcolm Collins: the panton out region, if you’re not familiar, it’s deep in the Amazon. You know, so we, we, well off any, like on the other side of the Amazon is basically where it was not like deep in, it’s sort of like on the other side of where the mouth water that the [00:23:00] Amazon River are. Anyway, the point is, is this still happens around the world, is these two groups conflicting each other.

And so painting it as an agricultural revolution is disingenuous. There were multiple revolutions happening simultaneously. Mm. And they led to very different lifestyles. But continue, Simone,

Simone Collins: the point I wanted to make about diet and nutrition is that it makes it seem as a diet is very varied.

And it was for pre agricultural, but it was also like, you get what you can get. Like, and, and there were many pre agricultural societies that only ate like whale love and seal meat and stuff.

Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah. That’s, so I wanna get to that in a second. But the other thing I wanted to mention about the the two society types is you’re like, you could choose not to join them.

You really couldn’t. If you didn’t join one of them, they’d just kill you and take your women. Th th this is okay. They, they were, that’s fair enough.

They were more powerful. They had structures that other groups didn’t have. And so you can’t opt out like inside. It reminds me of the, the, the welcome to bronze period.

Like, well what if we don’t [00:24:00] adopt bronze? And it’s like, well then the people who do will kill you and take your women and things.

Speaker: , I just say as a tribe, why don’t we leave the bronze to the smart Alex and the Wiz kids and we’ll just carry on using stone axes like we always do, because if you do, the tribes with the bronze axes will kill you. And then take your stone axes and then throw them away because they’re rubbish.

,

Malcolm Collins: And I sometimes feel when people are like, well, what if I don’t engage with genetic augmentation technology or ai? I mean, it’s like,