Yes, according to historian Yuval Noah Harari's provocative theory: far from having mastered wheat, humanity let itself be enslaved by a handful of domesticated plants, at the cost of longer working days and a more precarious life than that of gatherers. A reading that challenges our story of progress, one that historian Rutger Bregman has since come to nuance.
What if agriculture was history’s greatest con?
what if, for some ten thousand years, it wasn’t us who domesticated grain, but grain that has quietly kept us on a leash?
What if what we call progress was, seen from elsewhere, nothing but one giant misunderstanding? That's the question historian Yuval Noah Harari asks: he considers the agricultural revolution history's greatest con. According to him, after millions of years spent hunting and gathering, humans turned to farming some ten thousand years ago, a shift he refuses to read as a straightforward step forward.
This reading remains a theory (acknowledged as such by its own author), not an established fact: it invites us to look at the story of agricultural progress differently, without settling it for us. What matters most is the question it puts to our history: which one, grain or human, truly domesticated the other?
Did farmers really live worse than gatherers?
According to Yuval Noah Harari, cereals played only a modest role in the human diet before the rise of agriculture. The historian argues that the farming turn did not improve our ancestors' daily lives: he contends that the farmer's existence was more precarious than the gatherer's, at the mercy of a handful of domesticated plants rather than benefiting from the diversity of foraging.
Harari also points out that agriculture likely wasn't born from a single act in a single place, but emerged separately, as if several human societies had each, independently, fallen for the same mirage.
Did hunter-gatherers really work that little?
Against Harari’s theory, historian Rutger Bregman, in his book Humankind, draws on anthropologists who have tried to measure how much hunter-gatherers actually worked. Their verdict: twenty to thirty hours a week at most, a far cry from the gruelling struggle for survival these societies are so often imagined to have endured.
Bregman uses this figure to challenge a bigger narrative: the idea that agriculture, and later property, automatically delivered progress. If just a few hours sufficed to secure subsistence, then the shift to the fields may not have been an inevitable march towards something better, but a choice whose benefits were far less certain than the story suggests.
Did Africa follow the same path?
The Sahara hasn’t always been this endless desert. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch notes that it began drying out from the fifth millennium BCE onwards, scattering its inhabitants towards other lands. Summer-rain Africa, meanwhile, followed its own agricultural path.
On the edge of the Sahel, where rain falls for only four months a year, Felwine Sarr notes that millet and sorghum are grown there: cereals built for that scarcity. Maize and cassava, brought over from the Americas, arrived later and now feed more people still. Wheat never held a monopoly over the fields.
You may never look at a wheat field quite the same way again. Harari himself is the first to say his reading remains a theory, not a verdict, and Bregman doesn’t settle the matter the other way either. What remains is this cheeky, stubborn question that tickles us every morning over our bread: what if, for some ten thousand years, it wasn’t us who domesticated grain, but grain that has quietly kept us on a leash?
Also worth reading on La Sultane
The Tunisian Sea in July: Freedom, Celebration and Mourning
Jalapeño: Discover This Mexican Pepper of a Thousand Virtues
Strawberries: A Small Fruit With Great Benefits for Your Health
