RE: Agriculture was mankind's biggest mistake.

Rebuttal; I think you may not understand the concept of overpopulation. If someone has three kids, and they all have three kids, that's twelve people, but if someone only can support one child then they only have one child then that's only two people. The other ten people would have never existed; therefore they could not have died. You also say that it's not very easy to just get up and leave when you need to migrate to a new location, which is true in today's standards, but not in 10,000 BCE. In the time of hunting and gathering did people live in big fancy houses, or live in makeshift houses that did the job in protecting them from the elements. When you look at any type of history, everyone at one point has been guilty of this; we have the tendency to judge people in the past by our modern and cultural decisions, even though even in the last 100, things where very different. When looking at history, especially of cultures we do not yet fully understand, we have to be very open-minded. With this being said, you claim everything I have said about racism is cultural, which is true, but what determines culture. Cultures are different all around the world; most have "laws" and "guidelines". Laws are what we can and cannot do, but guidelines are what really determine culture. What contributes to culture? We all have free will do what we want. During the witch hunt, we had freedom to do what we want, but people didn't go around doing anything that would make anyone else in their village suspect them of being a witch. Philosophy is individual ideas, like yours and mine, but culture is when people come together and form a complex society, therefore, the creation culture, negative or positive, has a direct link to agriculture. My final point; overall health and well being Today we have all sorts of doctors and people that help fix problems with our bodies, weather it is physical or internal damage. In the pre-agriculture lifestyle most of these occupations would not be needed and they only one that may have any value is first responders to help with physical damage done to someone's body. It is likely that people did something like fall off a cliff and break their leg or lose their arm to the animal they were hunting, but the fact of the matter is that they were stronger (bones) and could take the abuse the elements did to their bodies. If they had not already, it is likely that they did figure out how to help broken bones, such as using a splint to make it strong again and physical rehabilitation. This is just a minor part of general health. Other health issues that did not exist where diseases that are directly related to the development of domestic food and animals. One example of diseases not existing is when most of the Native Americans died due to exposure of small poxes, which the colonist where immune to. Big outbreaks of diseases did not happen because there are diseases and viruses that developed only because of domesticated foods. After the development of agriculture, specialization of labor happened, and people eventually started to live together in clumps of cities where there was a higher possibility of epidemic outbreaks and the spread of germs and diesis. Agriculture allowed for the explosion of human population which also coincides with people starting to live in cities and confined areas, which lead to radical health changes It is a basic biological fact that population is limited by the ability of the habitat to maintain it. Because there are now more people in the world then the habitat in which we live in can handle, there is mass starvation and conflicts. My last point about health in pre-agriculture times is diet. Our natural habitat was able to maintain human inhabitance until the population explosion. It is fact that hunter and gathers and a more varied and nutritious diet than farmers did. "Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5′ 9″ for men, 5′ 5″ for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B.C. had reached a low of only 5′ 3″ for men, 5′ for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors." This quote clearly demonstrates that the overall health of hunter and gathers was better than that of the farmers and the complex societies. This these points being made; would a world that we were healthier and had less conflict be better than life today with all of its complex issues? Sources: http://michaelgreenwell.wordpress.com...