Sapiens 5 - The Agricultural Revolution was "History's Biggest Fraud"

See also these transcripts, posted by someone else who took Dr. Yuval Noah Harari's Coursera course.

Lesson 05 - part 1 -- Agricultural Revolution, 9000 to 9500 BC:  We became domesticated. (Domus = house)

• Note:  Today scholars agree that agriculture sprang up in several different parts of the world independently: Middle East, Central America, China, New Guinea
• Why these places and not others?  Because most species are not good candidates for domestication, and the ones that are tended to live in these areas (See Guns, Germs and Steel)
• It's *not* true that people became more intelligent and discovered things about animals and plants that they didn’t know before. and thus were able to transition to the good-life of agriculture!
• It's *not* true that people's lives improved with agriculture!  (See Lesson 3.)  
• "The agricultural revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of human kind but this did not translate into a better diet or a better life. Rather it translated into a demographic explosion and into pampered elites. Kings, nobleman, priests and so-forth ate all the extra food."
• From the viewpoint of wheat:  "These plants domesticated homo-sapiens for their advantage, rather than vice versa." !!!

Lesson 05 - part 2 -- How did wheat domesticate us?  What were the benefits of agriculture for Sapiens?

• NOT a better diet or economic security
• NOT security vs. violence:  "In an ancient agricultural village say 8,000 years ago, the chance of the men to die at the hands of another man was 25%."
• Wheat did not offer anything for people as individuals but gave something to Homo sapiens as a specie. Cultivating wheat provided much more food per unit of territory.  
• So, there were more people, but "these people were hungrier and less healthy and probably less happy than their ancestors." !!!  (Evolutionary success = > # of DNA copies in existence, without regard to happiness)
• Why did people agree to this, to sacrifice individual health/happiness for the good of evolution?  They didn't!  It was not a conscious decision, but rather a "fateful miscalculation," an accumulation of small steps.  Population could grow faster among settled people, even though they were less healthy.
• "People are simply unable to foresee the full consequences of their decisions."

Lesson 05 - part 3 -- History is full of a train of trivial decisions that lead to big and unforeseen results

• "[I]t took generations to realize that things were not working as they had hoped." And by then, it was too late, they didn't remember the previous way.  Besides, they couldn't go back now that the population had grown.
• There were HG's who refused to join the "rat-race" and become farmers.  But as soon as one band in an area transitioned to agriculture, their population was able to grow to the point that they could win any conflict by sheer force of numbers.
• Alternative explanation for why the AR happened:  the attempt to fulfill some religious/cultural aspiration or ideal?  
• ^^ Gobekli Tepe, dated to about 9500 BC:  Excavated beginning around 1995, amazing structures built for religious/cultural purpose, which required the huge investment of time/energy of HGs 
• Coincidentally, this is also the site where one of the first strains of wheat was domesticated!  
• "It may have been that foragers there in about 9,500 BC switched from gathering wild wheat to intense cultivation not in order to make their lives easier nor to increase the normal supply of food, but, to support the building and maintaining of this cultural centre of this temple perhaps."

Lesson 05 - part 4 -- The role of animals in the Agricultural Revolution

• Theories about how animals were domesticated
• Evolutionarily, a great success for pigs, chickens, cattle, etc.  But at the same time these are "the most miserable creatures who have ever lived on earth."
• All the terrible ways humans control the aggressive, social, sexual natures of animals
• "The agricultural revolution was a huge success for cows, chickens and pigs as a collective species, but it was a catastrophe for the animals as individuals. The gap between evolutionary success on the one hand and individual suffering on the other hand, is perhaps the most important lesson that we can draw from the agricultural revolution."