WHY DOES DAVID BROOKS HAVE A COLUMN IN THE NY TIMES?

Here's his latest howler:

Most people who lived in the year 1800 were scarcely richer than people who lived in the year 100,000 B.C. Their diets were no better. They were no taller, and they did not live longer.

This ignores the greatest change in our history: the development of agriculture starting around 12,000 B.C. From the Encyclopedia Britannica:

The domestication of plants and animals caused changes in their form; the presence or absence of such changes indicates whether a given organism was wild or a domesticate. On the basis of such evidence, one of the oldest transitions from hunting and gathering to agriculture has been identified as dating to between 14,500 and 12,000 BP in Southwest Asia. It was experienced by groups known as Epipaleolithic peoples, who survived from the end of the Paleolithic Period into early postglacial times and used smaller stone tools (microblades) than their predecessors. The Natufians, an Epipaleolithic culture located in the Levant, possessed stone sickles and intensively collected many plants, such as wild barley (Hordeum spontaneum). In the eastern Fertile Crescent, Epipaleolithic people who had been dependent on hunting gazelles (Gazella species) and wild goats and sheep began to raise goats and sheep, but not gazelles, as livestock. By 12,000–11,000 BP, and possibly earlier, domesticated forms of some plants had been developed in the region, and by 10,000 BP domesticated animals were appearing. Elsewhere in the Old World the archaeological record for the earliest agriculture is not as well known at this time, but by 8500–8000 BP millet (Setaria italica and Panicum miliaceum) and rice (Oryza sativa) were being domesticated in East Asia.