A Fall from Grace?

"About 12,000 years ago people embarked on an experiment called agriculture and some say that they, and their planet, have never recovered. Farming brought a population explosion, protein and vitamin deficiency, new diseases and deforestation. Human height actually shrank by nearly six inches after the first adoption of crops in the Near East. So was agriculture 'the worst mistake in the history of the human race', as Jared Diamond, evolutionary biologist and professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, once called it?"

The Economist doubts the idea that the development of agriculture marked a decline for humanity.