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The Pre-Agricultural Period Was NOT Better
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 tha
Published on 3 days, 10 hours ago