{"id":82,"date":"2007-10-30T23:26:01","date_gmt":"2007-10-31T03:26:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=82"},"modified":"2007-10-30T23:28:37","modified_gmt":"2007-10-31T03:28:37","slug":"the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race-by-jared-diamond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=82","title":{"rendered":"The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race by Jared Diamond"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The author of the best-selling and prize-winning <em>Guns, Germs, and Steel<\/em> and <em>Collapse<\/em> wrote <a href=\"http:\/\/www.awok.org\/worst-mistake\/\">this piece<\/a> earlier in his career about the worst mistake human beings have made: settling down into societies and pursuing agriculture.  As Diamond&#8217;s works tend to do, this piece makes you think.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunter-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5\u2032 9\u2033 for men, 5\u2032 5\u2033 for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B.C. had reached a low of only 5\u2032 3\u2033 for men, 5\u2032 for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The author of the best-selling and prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse wrote this piece earlier in his career about the worst mistake human beings have made: settling down into societies and pursuing agriculture. As Diamond&#8217;s works tend to do, this piece makes you think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8qcx-1k","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=82"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}