The worst mistake in the history of the human race?

The name itself already seems like a commercial fraud, and from it we can reasonably guess that the arguments are going to be absolute and extreme, which is exactly the case in this article. Diamond may be right on his claims about the defects in a society rooted in the agricultural revolution, but those defects are simply not strong enough to render the agricultural revolution a huge mistake, or rather, as Diamond puts it, "the worst mistake in the history of the human race."

Two points I'd like to disagree with:

1. Agriculture led to dense communities. Dense communities led to trouble. Apparently he is tricking us into believing that without agriculture a lot of problems would not exist. But the truth is they do. War and political manoeuvres stem from greed, a quality inherent in humans, instead of from agriculture. Agriculture amplified the scale of these problems, but did not give rise to them. Disease would not spread as fast, but hunter-gathers must have faced much more dangers than most of our species do today, a point clearly demonstrated by the population growth in the agricultural societies.

2. Diamond completely switched the idea of owing leisure time and owing the time and intelligence for arts and sciences. He used the existing hunter-gatherers to illustrate the point that they are as free leisure-time-wise, and even claimed that they own the ability to build a Parthenon if they have tried. Of course he can assume so, but the harsh truth is that no hunter-gatherers have built anything close in grandeur to the Parthenon. For this point I have a contrary argument. I think humans' inherent urge to create more advanced tools and utilise them have helped sharpen the human mind throughout the history. Curiosity and invention go hand in hand, because they are both, after all, part of intelligence, which is the stem of our civilization. If humans have been able to stay hunter-gatherers happily, they would probably also, until this day, eat, run, and die with the same type of content, without thinking too much. 

It is hard to deny that agriculture has done harm to our environment in a much more efficient manner than hunter-gathering. But to say it is the worst mistake in human race is definitely an overly extreme claim. Diamond can be a good entertainer, but not an objective historian.