February 20, 2018 Tuesday
Bedtime Story
The Harm of Agrarian Life
Moreover, agriculture demands a way of life
from human apes for which it was never evolved to carry out.
You would very often have seen our close
cousin chimpanzees very swiftly and with ease climbing trees or running in
bands after some animal or away from them.
But I can bet almost any money that you
would never have seen them carrying buckets of water or hunched over clearing
rocks in a vast arid field day in and day out unless of course, one miserable
and unlucky fella happened to have got himself entrapped in a circus and cursed
to have become a slave of the human ape.
Same is the case with us humans as in most
respects we are very similar to chimpanzees born to run long distances in
African savannas and climb trees in forests.
Standing up was bad enough for our spines
and the new stance was further compounded with our new way of life that
agriculture demanded of us.
Human spines, neck and knees paid a heavy
price for this transformed life that promised us great abundance of food and
whose evidence is all around you.
Worse, agriculture greatly curtailed the
variety in the diet that the earlier hunter-gatherers enjoyed.
The fact remains, even though many
religions wish to convert us to herbivores, that evolutionary we are omnivores
with an appetite for varied and mixed diet.
Harari writes:
“A diet based on cereals is poor in
minerals and vitamins, hard to digest, and really bad for your teeth and gums.”
And as we saw in the case of Indian farmers
even today, agriculture does not come with any extra economic security.
Harari, in fact, makes a case for the contrary.
“The life of a peasant is less secure than
that of a hunter-gatherer.
Foragers relied on dozens of species to
survive, and could therefore weather difficult years even without stocks of
preserved food.
If the availability of one species was reduced,
they could gather and hunt more of other species.
Farming societies have, until recently,
relied for the great bulk of their calorie intake on a small variety of
domesticated plants.
In many areas, they relied on just a single
staple, such as wheat, potatoes or rice.
If the rains failed or clouds of locusts
arrived or if a fungus learnt how to infect that staple species, peasants died
by the thousands and millions.”
Uncertainty in crop yield is bad enough in
agriculture but there is even more dark side to farmer’s way of life – Violence!
Agriculture came with settlements and land
ownership, and land fueled with uncertainties and stressful times is a perfect
recipe for violence, both among individuals within a tribe and between clans.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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