re: Why is everybody so fat?

quote:

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I've often said we need to revert back to the "caveman" days. Hunter-gatherers

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Quoted from a book I am reading
The book posits if “civilization” mainly through a grain based farming model was a good long term strategy

ARTIFICIAL HORIZONS

You may not know it, but your understanding of ancient history probably owes almost everything to one man, V. Gordon Childe. He is the man who, in the mid-twentieth century, gave us the three distinct phases of preindustrial society we all carry: savagery
barbarism, then civilisation. Entirely artificial horizons were drawn based on what Childe considered to be the hallmarks of advancement from one stage to the next and then every single culture that is or ever was got dropped into them. V. Gordon Childe gave us the magnet. Savages have very unpleasant and dangerous lives, foraging and killing exclusively wild foods. Today we use the more polite term, hunter-gatherer, but the subtextual unpleasantness –the sense that these are lesser cultures leading largely miserable lives –remains. Savages progressed to the higher state of barbarism during a period Childe named the Neolithic Revolution. Barbarians domesticate animals and begin agriculture. This surplus of food allows for barbarian cultures to become more complex and diversify. Priests emerge; villages are created; megalithic sites are constructed; people own things. As for civilisation? That only happens with the birth of the city. Because it can get difficult to demarcate when a large town becomes a city, it is best if urbanisation occurs in conjunction with writing. Without writing, a culture is probably ‘high barbarian’ at best. Sorry Incas.

Subsequent to the invention of Childe’s artificial horizons, it emerged that the development of grain-based agriculture was an unmitigated disaster for human health and longevity. What Childe saw as an evolution is a devolution . Measuring the march of civilisation from this point, we see a succession of politico-economic systems that purported to improve human existence –culminating in today’s modern, materialist age –that have most often had the complete opposite effect. Rather than getting ever closer, we have moved further away from genuine sources of meaning and purpose.


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For those that follow these things, the finding of Gobekli Tepe is supporting the idea that the savages were a lot more intelligent/clever than we have given them credit for in the past