I enjoyed his Guns, Germs and Steel book, it had some interesting points. This is just neo-malthusian crap though (look at all the whining crybabies through recorded history who've been completely sure the entire planet would implode if only a few more thousand people were born). If the goal was to have a stagnant, ecologically stable population with no technological progress (because of very little or no food surplus), then yeah hunter-gathering forevah would've been totally cool. He even aknowledges it's a pipe dream since farming societies pushed out and replaced hunter gatherers the world over in a completely natural mechanism.
And his comparison of early farming vs hunter-gatherer health is cute, but it kind of overlooks how farming societies also had better transmission of knowledge, not least because of writing which never evolved in a hunter-gatherer society, and obviously couldn't. Literally everything we can think of even tangientially related to "civilization" has it's origins in the division of labour possible because of food surpluses, including the scientists that are able to test out old desicated skeletons and mummies to see which were more healthy, or even how to determine what healthy is in the first place.
"Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history." "24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture."
Successful how? How the **** does he measure success? How can anyone objectively say the stagnant, both population and technology-wise, 90+ thousand years of the begining of our existence were more "successfull" than since the apparition of civilization? Especially since we have no records beyond legends and myths created by the subsequent civs, or the incomplete and partial guesses that can be made by archeologists? When our understanding and manipulation of the world around us has been growing crazily, exponentially, only the last few thousand years, not to mention the explosion since the industrial revolution?
It's the longest lasting? According to all his points the initial amoeba-like ancestors was the most "successfull" form humanity's genetic path has ever taken.
