In this episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into one of the most pervasive myths of our time — the idea popularized by Yuval Noah Harari’s bestselling book Sapiens that the Agricultural Revolution was “history’s biggest fraud” and that life was better for pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers.

From the viral Primitive Technology videos to nostalgic comments romanticizing mud huts and “living off the land,” this meme just won’t die. But was life really better before farming? Shorter work hours? Healthier diets? No diseases or violence?

We break down Harari’s claims with historical evidence, anthropology, and skeletal data — showing why early agriculture had growing pains, but civilization quickly made life vastly better in nearly every metric: health, lifespan, safety, leisure quality, and human flourishing.

We also explore why this myth appeals to both far-left anti-GMO types and far-right “Bronze Age” nostalgists, and why romanticizing pre-agricultural life ignores the brutal reality of violence, disease, boredom, and early death.

Episode Outline with Links

Let me set the scene:

• It’s 2015 and you know what people can’t stop watching? You know what the hot video is???

  • Not some viral dance

  • Not some celebrity scandal

  • No, it was a pale dude in the woods silently banging on sticks with a sharpened rock to make a mud hut

  • “Primitive Technology: Wattle and Daub Hut”, the first video published on the YouTube channel Primitive Technology, now has over 32 million views.

    • For scale:

      • Charlie bit my finger has 888 million views

      • Bed Intruder song has 158M views

      • So obviously it didn’t take over the world, but it’s still HUGE for an eleven-minute, no words, no music video of a man building a mud hut

  • The channel has 11 million subscribers (note that Asmongold has 4.21M subscribers)

• What’s going on here? Who might we have to blame for this?

  • I’m going to argue it was the Admiral Akbar of agriculture himself, Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

• In 2014, the book Sapiens was published in English (had first been published in Hebrew) and it took the world by storm.

  • It quickly became one of the top‑performing narrative nonfiction titles of the past decade, with tens of millions of copies sold worldwide and a very long run on major bestseller lists.

  • Estimates from publishers and industry analyses put Sapiens’ total worldwide sales at around 40–45 million copies across all formats and languages.​

  • The book has been translated into roughly 60–65 languages, indicating very broad international penetration for a serious nonfiction title.

  • It repeatedly appeared in the NYT top 10 and has been described as a New York Times “top 10 bestseller” over a multi‑year period

• And importantly, what did that book do?

  • More than others in the past (such as Guns, Germs, and Steel), it radicalized people against modernity and the agricultural revolution

Some choice quotes:

• “We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.”

• “The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.”

• “Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species… These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.”

• “This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.”

• “Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with more difficult lives and a less nutritious diet than hunter-gatherers… The Agricultural Revolution was a trap.”

But are we really worse off because of agriculture?

Let’s take a good faith look at the issue.

Sapiens

Overarching Thesis: Human history is fundamentally the history of imagined realities (fictions) that enable massive cooperation. Almost everything we value—nations, money, human rights, corporations, gods—exists only in our collective imagination. These fictions have been extraordinarily useful, but they have also caused immense suffering and now threaten our future. The next stage of history will likely see us abandon the last remnants of biological humanity altogether.

Harari argues:

• The Agricultural Revolution (c. 10,000 BCE) is widely considered humanity’s “biggest mistake.”

  • Harari characterizes the Agricultural Revolution as “history’s biggest fraud,” arguing that it trapped humans in more difficult, labor-intensive, and less healthy lives than those of hunter-gatherers. He suggests that the extra food from farming led to population growth and class divisions, not a better quality of life for most people

  • Harari’s analysis is related to, but distinct from, the idea popularized by others—such as Jared Diamond, who called agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”

• Farming allowed population explosion but dramatically worsened the quality of life for individual humans: harder work, poorer nutrition, crowded conditions, new diseases, social hierarchy, and inequality.

• It was a trap: once populations grew, there was no way back to hunter-gatherer life. From the perspective of the human species it was a success; from the perspective of individual happiness it was a disaster.

Specific ways Harari argues pre-agricultural life was better and post-agricultural life was worse:

1. Working Hours

• Hunter-gatherers: ~20–35 hours per week spent obtaining food and basic needs (citing modern studies of the !Kung, Hadza, etc.).

• Early farmers: 50–60+ hours of back-breaking labor (plowing, weeding, harvesting, grinding grain, carrying water, tending animals).

2. Diet and Nutrition

• Hunter-gatherers: Extremely varied diet (dozens of plant species, nuts, fruits, game, fish, honey). High in protein, vitamins, minerals; low in starch.

• Farmers: Became heavily dependent on one or two staple crops (wheat, rice, maize, potatoes). Led to nutritional deficiencies (iron-deficiency anemia, protein shortages, dental caries from high-starch diets). Archaeological evidence shows shorter stature, worse teeth, and more signs of malnutrition in early farming populations.

3. Health and Disease

• Hunter-gatherers: Few epidemic diseases because of small, mobile bands and diverse diets. Parasites existed, but not on the scale of settled communities.

• Farmers: Lived in crowded, permanent settlements surrounded by human and animal waste → explosion of infectious diseases (smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, plague). Close contact with domesticated animals introduced zoonotic diseases. Skeletons from the Neolithic show dramatically higher rates of disease markers.

4. Physical Toll and Injuries

• Hunter-gatherers: More accidents (falls, animal attacks), but generally robust, well-exercised bodies.

• Farmers: Repetitive stress injuries (arthritis in spine and knees from grinding grain and hoeing), higher rates of osteoporosis, herniated discs, and skeletal deformities from constant heavy labor.

5. Child Mortality vs. Overall Population

• Farmers had higher fertility (women could wean earlier because of soft porridge), but much higher child mortality from disease and malnutrition. Net result: population exploded, but most individuals still died young.

• Hunter-gatherers had lower birth rates but higher survival rates for those born → fewer starving or sick children per family.

6. Social Equality

• Hunter-gatherers: Relatively egalitarian (food sharing norms, no way to store surplus for long, little private property).

• Farmers: Surplus → private property → inherited wealth → sharp class divisions, patriarchy, slavery, and warfare over land.

  • First off, it is bizarre to bemoan better resources on average just because some outliers have far more resources

  • Excuse me, pre-agricultural societies absolutely had slaves (e.g. captives from war)—and let’s be clear, you are LUCKY to become a captive slave in pre-agricultural society, because most men were just killed

  • Complex, delayed-return hunter-gatherers of the Pacific Northwest (e.g., Kwakiutl, Haida, Tlingit) and a few other resource-rich coastal or riverine groups even practiced what anthropologists consider to be “true slavery”—raiding neighbors specifically to capture slaves for labor and prestige.

7. Psychological and Existential Quality of Life

• Hunter-gatherers: More leisure time, more varied and stimulating daily activities (tracking animals, storytelling, dancing), stronger community bonds in small bands.

• Farmers: Monotonous, exhausting labor from dawn to dusk; lives dominated by the crop cycle and fear of drought, flood, or locusts.

8. Life Expectancy (at birth vs. if you survived childhood)

Harari repeatedly stresses that average life expectancy at birth dropped after agriculture because of skyrocketing i