Agriculture was mankind's biggest mistake.

Both sides share the burden of proof. In the agricultural lifestyle more people have poorer quality of life than people who lived in the pre-agricultural lifestyle, the hunters' and gathers' era. There are a lot of misconceptions about both ways of life and to open my argument I will address the misconceptions of pre-agricultural lifestyle. When most people think of hunters and gathers, they think of caveman, barbaric savages with a small brain and little knowledge. This is obviously untrue, both genetically and historically. Cavemen where modern-men, homo sapiens-sapiens, who had the same genetic makeup as twenty-first century man. Despite what most people think, hunters and gathers where smart. In order to hunt successfully, which they did because they all didn't die out, you need to be able to coordinate a plan to take down a larger animal and have the knowledge to find it by tracking which way it went. It also takes a considerable amount of knowledge to know how to gather. You can't just pick anything and think it was safe to eat, you needed to know what you could and could not eat, and where to find these different foods. If you put a murderer in the wild they might survive a few months, if even the first week, but these hunter and gathers where able to survive well over a few thousand years. Most people often believe that all these nomadic people did was, go around getting enough food for day to day meals and had no free time to invent and innovate. This is also false. Early man is much like other apes and mammals, the first and main priority is to feed themselves so that they would not starve and die, but they also had lots of free time. If mammals spent all of their time either getting food or sleeping, they would have died out in the first generation. After food is obtained, obviously they have to take the time to eat it, and they also use their free time to reproduce, which is how new generations come along. Shelter is also a basic need, which takes time to obtain, weather it is a tepee or natural protection from the elements. When not either hunting or gathering, tools and weapons where made so that they could continue to hunt or gather. Now knowing that pre-agriculture life is more complex and advanced than most people would have originally thought, it shows that in both ways of life basic needs are taken care of, the only difference is how food was obtained, which leads me to my next three points. The development of agriculture lead to issues and problems that did not exist in the world of hunters and gathers, post nomadic lifestyle problems consisted of; ownership of possessions , which lead to conflicts and wars, inequality between genders, races, and cultures, health related issues such as diseases, and dramatic impact on the world. For my first point, I will discuss how agriculture led to ownership of possessions, which had a negative impact on the human race. In the world of hunter and gathers, the only thing anyone ever owned was his or her own personal tools that they used, and the food the they obtained, which was shortly eaten, because they never kept more food that they could eat or carry, they did not get surplus amounts of food and store it, they got what they needed day to day. When people started to farm they yielded a harvest and obtained a surplus that they ate when their farm did not yield anything. The surplus that they didn't need became wealth and they could focus on other things such as crafts and trades, thus speculation of labor occurred and eventually turned in to complex societies, you know how the rest goes. We can agree that today there are people, who work hard to make enough money to feed themselves and their family, and there are people who don't work because they have enough money that they could buy anything that they could possibly want, these two distinctions are called classes. Obviously they are not the same, with the distinction of classes the focus did not revolve around the group, but rather on the individual and their own family. Because some people have more and some people have less, the people with less want the same as everyone else, which leads to conflict and war over possessions, territory, etc. So in conclusion, having possessions was beneficial to some, but for most, as is evident through history, the majority is lower class. Low class eventually revolt and fight, causing conflict, war, and death; whereas, before anyone owned a substantial amount of possessions, killing of another human over material items was never done, not to say that it didn't happen, but there where never full blown wars and battles in pre-agriculture times.