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Sapiens - Part 3

Do you like to make plans? Plans for the weekend, for the night or something more specific like plans for your career. It's a good habit to analyze the worst and the best case in your plans. If you don't do that, you should start doing. Our ancestors weren't tidy and they fell into a trap.


We always try to improve a task to be easier to do. But, if you don't plan it you probably will face unexpected difficulties. This is what happened with our ancestors when they abandoned the hunter-gatherers style of life, to start an agricultural life. 

The wheat's domestication allowed our ancestors to have a static life. They didn't have to walk kilometers to collect corn, fruits or hunt animals to eat, they just needed to manage their plantations.  However, this changed dramatically their diet and concerns. First of all, their feed consisted only in corn and an animal from time to time. Our ancestors could lose all the food by a nature disaster like drought or grasshopper infestation. Therefore, they started working harder to protected their food and the life become more stationary. 


Second, the homo sapiens weren't capable to comprehend all the consequences of their decisions. The thought "work more to eat more" wasn't really sincere, because a stationary style of life means that is easier to build a family. When they were hunter-gatherers was harder to have a baby and take care of it, because they were nomads and walking along the forests among wild animals was dangerous to children. The production of food increased as they thought, but they didn't predicted that the number of children will increase as well. Result: their extra food was shared with more children; the corn diet wasn't enough for the little ones and this disabled their immune system. Our ancestors built an incubator for infectious diseases. 


The agricultural lifestyle allowed us to replicated our DNA even more. However, our quality of  life decreased. This search for an easier life resulted in a lot of difficulties, but our specie survived. Nowadays, it's pretty common this happen. How many young people, recently formed, accepted jobs in huge enterprises, promising to work hard to earn money which will allow to retire at 35 years old?  But, when they reach this age, they have debits to pay, children to take care, more than one car, etc..

So, make your plans wisely.

R3D26-100

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