Production and Depletion

Abstract

According to Marvin Harris, a Columbia University Anthropologist . . . we have been going downhill since the Stone Age. Paleolithic man (and woman) got along fine on a combination of animal protein and infanticide, working just three or four hours a day. When at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, the "megafauna" disappeared, not even an infanticide rate as high as 50 per cent could maintain an adequate diet for all the available people. And so we turned from animal to plant protein; from a "mode of production" that was primarily hunting to one primarily agricultural; from roving bands to settled villages, then cities and states. Agriculture is more "labor efficient" than hunting. But the trouble with efficiency we're told is that as it intensifies production it also speeds up depletion of resources. Producing and reproducing we overpopulate our space and use up its capacity to sustain us. Then we go off to war with neighboring villages, and back to infanticide at home, while waiting for a new mode of production to suggest itself, which mode will in its turn, intensify and deplete.