Have We Been Conned Into Civilization?

And is our defense of civilization still faith-based?

Image by Ted McDonnell, from Pexels

Here are two well-established facts about the origin of civilization that call for an explanation:

• First, the Stone Age in which protohumans lived as small bands of nomadic, egalitarian hunter-gatherers dwarfs the age of civilization. The Stone Age of prehistory, when primates in the genus Homo used stone to make tools lasted for roughly 3.4 million years. By contrast, civilizations, in which special social functions developed in large, sedentary, hierarchical societies have been around for 12 thousand years.
• Second and contrary to our modern myths of inevitable progress, the transition to agriculture and to large societies by the domestication of plants and animals wasn’t overwhelmingly beneficial to the early revolutionaries. There were some advantages, especially over the long term, such as protection from predators, increases in birth rate and life span, and technological advances. But in the early millennia of the agricultural revolution, there were severe drawbacks, as Jared Diamond explained in “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.”

Judging from the state of ancient skeletons and from other indicators, archeologists have discovered that the early civilized, sedentary people suffered from…