No single thing besides exogenous extinction events or rapid climactic shifts have caused as much as death, human & non human, as the invention of agriculture, & that’s a fact even if you think it’s a good & irreversible thing.

I mean, right now we’re talking 1 trillion aquatic non human animals a year, and 100 billion terrestrial ones. This has been going on in its current form for almost a century, but mass non human death goes back at least 5000 years, and anthropogenic mass extinctions go back 50kya

Around 50 million human beings die a year—this has also been semi constant for a century or so, due to mutually offsetting effects of medicine, nutrition via falling death rates & rising human population.

But 40% of humans who ever lived died in the first 5 years of life, and this is *after* the rise of agriculture. Now let’s add in the zoonoses, war, states, slavery, brutality, patriarchy, extraction, pollution, land destruction, violence, famines, droughts etc it enabled.

This means that its contributions have been an indisputable rise in the absolute rates of human & non-human rates of suffering & death, an indisputable rise in the relative rate of human & non-human death, & it basically strikes even for the relative rate of human suffering/death

Not to mention settled humans work vastly longer hours per calorie & nutrition produced, health, well being, etc, than do nomadic foragers. Only in the last century did settled societies outpace nomadic foragers on things like life expectancy, infant mortality, safety etc.

We can also add in the degrees of inequity & division of labor (there’s as much variation in the history & presents of nomadic foragers as anywhere else—here I am talking modal & median patterns, not their variance) & other such things.

Except modern humans have not one but dozens of anthropogenic mass extinction & other existential threats hanging over us—climate change, land over use, nuclear apocalypse, (even just conventional war for that matter), overcentralization, anthropogenic pandemic.