One sure sign that farming is not congenial is that people throughout history have been determined to get other people to do it. Slavery does not exist among hunter-gatherers and apparently never did; it comes in with gardens and farms.
Indeed, it is now conventional wisdom among scholars that, as the physiologist Jared Diamond wrote some years ago in Discover magazine, “the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.”
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