This is the story of the Homo Sapiens..✍️

In roughly 8,000 BC, humankind made a mistake that it wouldn’t fully digest for almost 10,000 years. It was a mistake that, both then and now, felt like the genesis of our species’ intellect, but may turn out to be a most unfortunate Faustian Bargain.

When a period of heavy global warming turned Middle Eastern soil into a bed of nutritious minerals, we, the self proclaimed “wise men,” could not resist temptation. We walked on two feet, swung our enormous brains about with reckless abandon, and slapped our hands together with bellies full of joy. We had done the impossible. We had mastered mother nature. Right?

“Not so fast!” Mother nature said, in her cryptic and indiscernible way.

“As hunter gatherers, you are happy, you are healthy, and you value your tribes! You are free men in the truest sense of the word.”

Of course, we did not listen. Instead, we switched on the three mysteriously brilliant pounds of meat and began farming.

“Such a pity,” she said, shaking her head. “Laziness today is the poison of tomorrow. And antidotes take many thousands of years to find…”

In a sense, the Agricultural Revolution was our first misstep and we have been building upon a cracked foundation ever since. It’s not realistic to expect mankind to uproot itself and become intergalactic hunter-gatherers, just like we expect New York City to gut and renovate it’s ailing subway system. However, incremental changes can be made. In the next section, I’ll try to reconcile what those changes are and how they could possibly be be made

Sorry I forgot how to color for a sec

🤝 THE WHEAT BARGAIN 🤝

beware the walnuts and pears planted for heirs

Around 8,500 BC, the wild, enigmatic, foraging men of the Middle East recognized a sobering truth: it was possible to harness Earth’s ability to cultivate food rather than trekking hundreds of miles in search of food. “Brilliant!” “Harmless!” “Necessary!” we thought. But, as we would soon find out, all this thinking and clumsy head swinging had paralyzing and unforeseeable consequences.

The domestication of the food supply bubbled into an unnatural population explosion and provoked a need for tremendously more abundant food sources and laborers. While the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution allowed men to become stationary beings for the first time in Homo Sapiens history, this decision was made without the understanding of why it had never settled down in its previous 190,000 years of existence.

According to Yuval Noah Harari, the beings who set the agricultural pendulum in motion were “neither kings nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plants. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.” When wheat wanted water, humans nourished it. When wheat suffered from disease, humans nursed it. When wheat was hungry, humans nurtured it. And thus, as the number of wheat stalks increased, so too did the newest species of ape.

The domestication of humanity by wheat is just one of many examples where one organism came to rely upon the fiercely upon another. The microbes in the human gut rely just as heavily on us as we rely on it. Amoeba floating in the sea both need eating as well as need to be eaten by minnows. Tuna need cleaner fish just as much as cleaner fish need tuna for waste. Planet Earth has a suspicious history of leaning two species against one another in order to facilitate evolutionary growth. So to speak, mankind’s unrelenting reliance on wheat and other staple crops pitted it in a Faustian bargain. Except this bargain didn’t last a few years. It lasted 10,000 (and counting)

The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain but rather copies of DNA helixes. If no more DNA copies remain, the species is extinct, just as a company with-out money is bankrupt. If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success, and the species flourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

~Yuval Noah Harari

Interestingly, this vicious cycle did not occur in isolation. The crops which became, and have remained to be, our most important dilatants — wheat, rice, barley, and potatoes — seemed to colonize humans across the globe. Of course, it’s easy to criticize through the looking glass of revisionist history, pointing out negative residue as it was inflicted by the new. However, in our more self-conscious era of humanity, we can take refuge in the fact that most of documented history is now available. We can follow the trends and question with guarded skepticism everything that has not withstood the test of time. For the first men in Asia, North America, Australia, and basically all of planet Earth, Agriculture was a way to make life easier.



What are we doing now that makes life easier?