Essay on Negative Side of Agriculture
Instructions
The Agricultural Revolution of 12,000 years ago, which transformed the majority of humanity from foragers to farmers, is usually treated by historians as a splendid leap forward: “Out of agriculture, cities and civilizations grew, and because crops and animals could now be farmed to meet demand, the global population rocketed—from some five million people 10,000 years ago, to more than seven billion today.”
The author of Sapiens, however, takes a more skeptical view, calling it “History’s Biggest Fraud.” Write a standard five-paragraph essay explaining his reasons for considering the Agricultural Revolution a very mixed blessing.
Excerpt
In the book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari considers agriculture as history’s biggest fraud. It is true that agriculture has enabled humans to settle permanently in certain places to produce more food per area of land than foragers, it has also exposed them to various forms of vulnerability such as exposure to impairment of physical health caused by undernutrition, malnutrition, and food insecurity; violence; and population explosion under worse conditions.
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