A model of the history of human misery →
For most of the human history we’ve been hunter-gatherers. But over the past 10,000 years there was a switch in lifestyle, farming has emerged independently in several locations, and filled in all the territory in between. One truism of modern cultural anthropology is that this was a big mistake, that hunter-gatherer lifestyles were superior to those of peasant farmers, less miserable with much more free time. I think this is somewhat unsubtle, which is ironic since cultural anthropologists really love to deconstruct the errors of others which they themselves are guilty of (i.e., in this case, the normative aspect immediately jumps out in the scholarship. There’s little doubt as to who they’re “rooting” for).
