Nasty, brutish and short. That is the phrase everyone reaches for to describe life before civilisation, and it may be one of the most successful pieces of propaganda ever written, because it is very nearly backwards.
The line is Thomas Hobbes, 1651, on life without a strong state. It got promoted into a verdict on the Stone Age hunter: that our ancestors wallowed in filth and starvation until farming and government rode in to save them.
Flattering. Also flatly contradicted by the one witness that cannot lie, which is the skeletons.
Lay a pre-agricultural hunter in the ground beside the farmer who replaced him on the same soil, and the bones are embarrassing.
In the eastern Mediterranean the hunters stood around five foot nine. After the turn to farming, average height dropped close to five inches, and in places the descendants have still not won it back.
At Dickson Mounds in Illinois, where you can read the change burial by burial, the farmers carried fifty per cent more rotten teeth, four times the anaemia, spines worn down by labour, and lives that got shorter rather than longer.
Tall, sound-toothed hunter on top. Stunted, aching farmer beneath. The same patch of earth.
So where did the famine and the plague and the misery come from? They arrived with the granary.
Chain a whole people to two or three crops and a bad summer turns from a lean month into starvation, the kind that emptied medieval villages while no hunter with the whole wild to draw on ever knew it.
Herd people and their animals into permanent settlements and you brew the crowd diseases, measles and smallpox and tuberculosis, that need a crowd to spread.
Heap up a grain surplus and a few men can suddenly own it, guard it and rule everyone who needs it, and there is your landlord, your tax collector, your standing army.
The inequality is in the graves too. At Mycenae the royals lie inches taller with a full set of teeth while the commoners rotted beside them, a gap in the bone that did not exist before there was grain to hoard.
A fair word, because the romance oversells it. The hunting life was no meadow of gentle equals. Men fought, raids came, a hard winter could still finish you.
The point is narrower and harder than the fantasy: the organised, industrial scale of human misery, the famines and plagues and slavery and despots, is overwhelmingly the work of what came after the first field was ploughed.
Which leaves the famous phrase stranded. Coined for life without the state, borrowed to sneer at the hunter, it fits neither half so well as it fits the hungry, stooped, plague-worn peasant who came after the plough.
Hobbes was describing a cage, and mistaking it for the wild.