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I doubt people would transition to agriculture if it was harder than living off the land.

saalweachter 8y ago
With all things evolutionary, you have to keep in mind the environment. Agriculture in 5000 BCE in places developing it may very well have been harder than hunter-gathering in 8000 BCE... but easier than hunter-gathering in 5000 BCE in the places developing agricultural. Environmental changes, increased population density, and loss of key plant and animal species could make what was once an idyllic lifestyle nearly impossible, and what was formerly a back-breaking waste of time “better than slowly starving to death”.
abyssin 8y ago
It could be harder for most, except for those gaining a new power from being at the top of a new, larger society.
ransom1538 8y ago
"I doubt people would transition to agriculture if it was harder than living off the land. " As Darwin characterized evolution: The hunters and gathers just died off, and the tribes in agriculture survived. It wasn't a 'choice'.
mkl 8y ago
Agriculture can support higher population density. If you've got mouths to feed, you do the hard work. There is a hypothesis that the cold Younger Dryas period around 12,000 years ago pushed people in the fertile crescent into cereal cultivation, since the colder temperatures meant less available food for hunter-gatherer populations that had grown during the warmer period preceding it. The first farmers were significantly less healthy than the hunter-gatherers they followed [1]. [1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/06/17/early-farmers-were-sicker-and-shorter-than-their-forager-ancestors/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/06/17/early-f...
nindalf 8y ago
I strongly recommend you check out the book Sapiens. This is one of his core arguments - that the life of an agriculturist was much worse than that of a hunter gatherer because the agriculturist would have a less varied diet, would be vulnerable to famines, would have weaker immune systems (due to weaning sooner) etc. And yet some people chose to become agriculturists anyway because it appeared to promise a better, more stable life. Each change they'd make would be small. They'd start out collecting wild wheat, say. They'd eat it and move on. They'd figure out that coming back to that area at a certain time of the year made sense, so they would. Then they'd figure, let's scatter these seeds so they'd spend a little time before moving on. Then one person might have realised, planting it deeper yielded better results. So they would plough the land a bit and move on. But as they invested more effort into the land, the more food they'd get from it. They'd start to spend more time living in that area, protecting their work. But then two things would happen 1. Their 100 person hunter gatherer band would expand, to a larger group, say 150. That area could support a hundred hunter gatherers easily, but not 150. If no one in the group wanted to starve, they had to continue farming. 2. Gradually over a few generations, the number of people in the settlement would grow let's say 10 fold. These people would set up other settlements and practice agriculture there. It's not like they could be hunter gatherers because by then the knowledge would have been lost. The density of these settlements also meant that in any conflict with hunter gatherers over territory, the agriculturists would win. So gradually, there would be way more agriculturists. Each farmer might be less happy than the average hunter gatherer, but the farmers' advantages meant that there would be way more farmers anyway. If we started out in an area with 500 farmers and 500 hunter-gatherers, in a 1000 years, we'd end up with 5000 farmers and 500 hunter-gatherers (assuming they were allowed to stay). A 50-50 split becomes 90-10. I've paraphrased Yuval Noah Harari here. I think it's worth reading the whole book because he presents this really well. What's more, you start to evaluate ideas (is farming a good idea?) not just in terms of their merits, but also in terms of how well the idea will survive. Survival of the fittest applied to ideas. Agriculture, in that sense is a _better_ idea, not because it makes people happy, but because with time it has more adherents.
- lsc 8y ago
  >Each farmer might be less happy than the average hunter gatherer, but the farmers' advantages meant that there would be way more farmers anyway. If we started out in an area with 500 farmers and 500 hunter-gatherers, in a 1000 years, we'd end up with 5000 farmers and 500 hunter-gatherers (assuming they were allowed to stay). A 50-50 split becomes 90-10. Ok, so you are in a society without birth control. How do you think the hunter-gatherer population is limited? My guess is starvation.
lsc 8y ago
> I doubt people would transition to agriculture if it was harder than living off the land. I'm mostly with you, so I'm not good at summarizing the other side's point. But I think there are several reasonable assumptions they talk about where they might be right: 1: these people usually assume that very low population densities are desirable (I mean, obviously, that's a prerequisite for hunter gatherer society) This is their strongest point, really, that no matter how fertile the area you live in, once you get more than a certain population density, you need to go agricultural or you need to starve. 2: before agriculture, perhaps people only lived in the areas where food was super plentiful naturally. It's totally possible, maybe even likely that there used to be more areas like that than there were after history started being recorded. - this argument is reasonable, but it's mostly a callback to 1. An active human eats a lot, and it doesn't take a whole lot of humans to deplete just about any eden. I mean, the obvious counterpoint within this context is that density really helps encourage specialization, so even if the life of a low-density hunter-gatherer is easier, it's not going to involve a whole lot of specialization.
- marci 8y ago
  Regarding 2', many groups of humans found ways to live in the most remote and barren places on earth (the Arctic regions, the Australian desert...) for up to 18000 years.

With all things evolutionary, you have to keep in mind the environment. Agriculture in 5000 BCE in places developing it may very well have been harder than hunter-gathering in 8000 BCE... but easier than hunter-gathering in 5000 BCE in the places developing agricultural. Environmental changes, increased population density, and loss of key plant and animal species could make what was once an idyllic lifestyle nearly impossible, and what was formerly a back-breaking waste of time “better than slowly starving to death”.

abyssin 8y ago

It could be harder for most, except for those gaining a new power from being at the top of a new, larger society.

ransom1538 8y ago

"I doubt people would transition to agriculture if it was harder than living off the land. " As Darwin characterized evolution: The hunters and gathers just died off, and the tribes in agriculture survived. It wasn't a 'choice'.

mkl 8y ago

Agriculture can support higher population density. If you've got mouths to feed, you do the hard work. There is a hypothesis that the cold Younger Dryas period around 12,000 years ago pushed people in the fertile crescent into cereal cultivation, since the colder temperatures meant less available food for hunter-gatherer populations that had grown during the warmer period preceding it. The first farmers were significantly less healthy than the hunter-gatherers they followed [1]. [1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/06/17/early-farmers-were-sicker-and-shorter-than-their-forager-ancestors/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/06/17/early-f...

nindalf 8y ago

I strongly recommend you check out the book Sapiens. This is one of his core arguments - that the life of an agriculturist was much worse than that of a hunter gatherer because the agriculturist would have a less varied diet, would be vulnerable to famines, would have weaker immune systems (due to weaning sooner) etc. And yet some people chose to become agriculturists anyway because it appeared to promise a better, more stable life. Each change they'd make would be small. They'd start out collecting wild wheat, say. They'd eat it and move on. They'd figure out that coming back to that area at a certain time of the year made sense, so they would. Then they'd figure, let's scatter these seeds so they'd spend a little time before moving on. Then one person might have realised, planting it deeper yielded better results. So they would plough the land a bit and move on. But as they invested more effort into the land, the more food they'd get from it. They'd start to spend more time living in that area, protecting their work. But then two things would happen 1. Their 100 person hunter gatherer band would expand, to a larger group, say 150. That area could support a hundred hunter gatherers easily, but not 150. If no one in the group wanted to starve, they had to continue farming. 2. Gradually over a few generations, the number of people in the settlement would grow let's say 10 fold. These people would set up other settlements and practice agriculture there. It's not like they could be hunter gatherers because by then the knowledge would have been lost. The density of these settlements also meant that in any conflict with hunter gatherers over territory, the agriculturists would win. So gradually, there would be way more agriculturists. Each farmer might be less happy than the average hunter gatherer, but the farmers' advantages meant that there would be way more farmers anyway. If we started out in an area with 500 farmers and 500 hunter-gatherers, in a 1000 years, we'd end up with 5000 farmers and 500 hunter-gatherers (assuming they were allowed to stay). A 50-50 split becomes 90-10. I've paraphrased Yuval Noah Harari here. I think it's worth reading the whole book because he presents this really well. What's more, you start to evaluate ideas (is farming a good idea?) not just in terms of their merits, but also in terms of how well the idea will survive. Survival of the fittest applied to ideas. Agriculture, in that sense is a _better_ idea, not because it makes people happy, but because with time it has more adherents.

lsc 8y ago
>Each farmer might be less happy than the average hunter gatherer, but the farmers' advantages meant that there would be way more farmers anyway. If we started out in an area with 500 farmers and 500 hunter-gatherers, in a 1000 years, we'd end up with 5000 farmers and 500 hunter-gatherers (assuming they were allowed to stay). A 50-50 split becomes 90-10. Ok, so you are in a society without birth control. How do you think the hunter-gatherer population is limited? My guess is starvation.

lsc 8y ago

> I doubt people would transition to agriculture if it was harder than living off the land. I'm mostly with you, so I'm not good at summarizing the other side's point. But I think there are several reasonable assumptions they talk about where they might be right: 1: these people usually assume that very low population densities are desirable (I mean, obviously, that's a prerequisite for hunter gatherer society) This is their strongest point, really, that no matter how fertile the area you live in, once you get more than a certain population density, you need to go agricultural or you need to starve. 2: before agriculture, perhaps people only lived in the areas where food was super plentiful naturally. It's totally possible, maybe even likely that there used to be more areas like that than there were after history started being recorded. - this argument is reasonable, but it's mostly a callback to 1. An active human eats a lot, and it doesn't take a whole lot of humans to deplete just about any eden. I mean, the obvious counterpoint within this context is that density really helps encourage specialization, so even if the life of a low-density hunter-gatherer is easier, it's not going to involve a whole lot of specialization.

marci 8y ago
Regarding 2', many groups of humans found ways to live in the most remote and barren places on earth (the Arctic regions, the Australian desert...) for up to 18000 years.