Why did humanity switch from hunter gatherers to farming?

[The_Mysterious_Stranger]

How do you know this? This seems like a baseless claim, but I could be wrong. I'm assuming you're talking about prehistory (13,000 BC and older)?

IIRC, relics from that era sometimes point towards warfare, personal adornments (probably to indicate status or increase odds in sexual competition), money, weapons and so forth. Cave paintings from 30k+ years ago show humans battling each other.




Maybe, but depression and suicide existed long before the industrial age and fluctuate a lot during it which tells me the correlation is loose. It's certainly a contributing factor, but it's not the sole reason.

You seem like a philosophical type. Read up Emile Durkheim and 'Anomie'; I think that's a greater cause of depression and alienation than industry.

But we know for sure that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance. A chemical imbalance is more likely to be caused by artificial means, by human constructs. As far as depression, there's a lot of other variables that come into play like genetics, life events (like a death in the family), etc. I know for sure that the Industrial Age has affected the air and nutrition.

 

[The_Mysterious_Stranger]

Whether we like it or not, technology keeps progressing. It is the nature of humanity to continue to build upon existing ideas.

 

[dragulagu]

Let me refer you to: https://www.infjs.com/threads/how-did-language-originate.37002/

Going to quote myself here (yey) to update my (albeit a bit dry) post:

The evolution of Language, Social structures, Technology, Tooling are all correlated with the transition from hunter-gatherer to farming (at least, in my opinion).

There is a Basic Hypothesis that describes this evolution; I've put a couple papers here below which explain this hypothesis a bit, especially the first paper (2nd and 3rd are more useful as supportive papers for the first; the last link is more a general description on the hunter-gatherer). I've also taken some cherry picked snippets from it for the sake of explanation.
As usual with these kind of topics, though, it's never that easy. But I'd say the Basic Hypothesis could be seen as solid base to your question. Environment also plays a major role.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/acd0/736224543e10fdfc55d10f6d8e64755f8bdd.pdf

Because food production conferred enormous advantages to farmers compared with huntergatherers living outside those homelands, it triggered outward dispersals of farming populations, bearing their languages and lifestyles (12–14). Those dispersals constitute collectively the most important process in Holocene human history. The agricultural expansions ultimately resulted from three advantages that farmers gained over hunter-gatherers. First, because of far higher food yields per area of productive land, food production can support far higher population densities than can the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Second, whereas most hunter-gatherer societies are mobile, most food-producing societies are sedentary and can thus accumulate stored food surpluses, which were a prerequisite for the development of complex technology, social stratification, centralized states, and professional armies. Third, epidemic infectious diseases of social domestic animals evolved into epidemic infectious diseases of crowded farming populations, such as smallpox and measles—diseases to which the farmers evolved or acquired some resistance, but to which unexposed hunter-gatherers had none. These advantages enabled early farmers to replace languages and societies of hunter-gatherers living in their main paths of expansion

The Basic Hypothesis and Six Complications The simplest form of the basic hypothesis—that prehistoric agriculture dispersed hand-in-hand with human genes and languages—is that farmers and their culture replace neighboring hunter-gatherers and the latter’s culture. This hypothesis would be supported if all five independent types of evidence coincided in attesting the replacement of local hunter-gatherers by expanding farmers bearing their own archaeologically visible culture, domesticates, skeletal types, genes, and languages, and if all those indicators were traceable back to the farmers’ homeland of origin.

But the basic hypothesis is more often controversial, because in most other cases the five types of evidence are less concordant. Some critics believe that these discordances refute the hypothesis and that farming and language families spread mainly by diffusion amongst existing populations of hunter-gatherers (15). We conclude that reality is much richer and more complex than the simple version of the hypothesis, for many obvious reasons.

Reversion of expanding farmers to the hunter-gatherer life-style. When expanding farmers reach areas unsuitable for farming with the domesticates available to them, they may survive by reverting to the hunter-gatherer life-style. Undoubted examples are the derivation of Polynesian hunter-gatherers on the Chatham Islands and New Zealand’s South Island from ancestral Polynesian farmers (23–25), and of Punan hunter-gatherers in Borneo rainforests from other Austronesian farmers (26, 27). Language shift by indigenous populations. Discordance between languages and genes may arise when an expanding language is imposed on or adopted by a peripheral population, with only a minor contribution of expanding genes. This situation differs from the situation of clinal gene dilution, in which invaders constitute a majority at every step. A clear modern example is the increasing adoption of English as the language of government in Papua New Guinea, whose inhabitants nevertheless remain indigenous New Guineans with negligible admixture of European genes.

Replacement of the expanding farmers’ language in the original homeland, after the expansion began. If this happened, modern language distributions might conflict with the combined evidence from genes, archaeology, skeletons, and domesticates. The original homeland might now either lack the original farmers’ language family altogether, or else might support only one branch of the family compared with many branches in the periphery. Suggested examples of this tend to be controversial because they involve eradication of the original languages that can now, at best, only be reconstructed. Nevertheless, this seems to us the most plausible interpretation in some cases. For instance, one can suggest that languages closely related to Austronesian, Indo-European, and Japanese are no longer spoken in their putative ultimate homelands in South China, Anatolia, and Korea, respectively, because of the historical expansions of the Sinitic languages, Turkish, and Korean. The discovery of written documents attesting to the former existence of Hittite and other now-extinct Indo-European languages in Anatolia as well as the resulting big changes in our understanding of that language family confirm the reality of language loss in the potential homeland for that family (31, 32). Hunter-gatherer expansions. Not only farmers, but also sometimes hunter-gatherers, can expand at the expense of other huntergatherers, producing concordance of genes and languages without crops. Examples include the Inuit expansion eastwards across the Canadian Arctic and the Athabaskan expansion southward into the southwestern United States within the last millenium (33–35).

This suggests that homelands will be areas where several major language families intersect geographically and where the methods of comparative linguistics suggest that those families originated. In contrast, most regions that lack independent agricultural origins should have a lesser diversity of language families

https://www.pnas.org/content/107/15/6759

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170202122800.htm

https://www.history.com/topics/pre-history/hunter-gatherers

By the time of the Neanderthals, hunter-gatherers were displaying such “human” characteristics as burying their dead and creating ornamental objects. Homo sapiens continued fostering more complex societies. By 130,000 years ago, they were interacting with other groups based nearly 200 miles away.

Along with cooking, controlled use of fire fostered societal growth through communal time around the hearth. Physiological evolution also led to changes, with the bigger brains of more recent ancestors leading to longer periods of childhood and adolescence.

The full-time transition from hunting and gathering wasn’t immediate, as humans needed time to develop proper agricultural methods and the means for combating diseases encountered through close proximity to livestock. Success in that area fueled the growth of early civilizations in Mesopotamia, China and India, and by 1500 A.D., most populations were relying on domesticated food sources.

It seems to an active research topic, especially with our ability to profile through gen sequencing. It's an interesting subject.

 

[Krypton]

Agriculture allowed for surpluses in food production. We don't want enough, we want more.

Spoiler

This, but also before technological development "enough" would often stop being enough with too many babies. Most of nature oscillates more than we do, population-wise (though we did too).

I don't see a lot of evidence for that. There were food shortages during farming and wars because of it.

Largely a result of not knowing how to do it right and short-sightedness. I remember learning in a college course that Sumerians would often deplete their farmland, and obviously if you have enough good land/water/whatever only for a certain number of people, if you let your population go beyond that there are problems. Plus stuff like the Irish Potato famine, which was caused by disease.

Not the best source for the Sumerian fact, but here ya go: https://delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=1647​

 

[Pin]

This, but also before technological development "enough" would often stop being enough with too many babies.

We have to feed the babies!

 

[mintoots]

This is one mystery of history / anthropology I'm trying to figure out. There were literally no conflicts or food shortages when humanity were hunter gatherers. Everyone was equal. There were no hierarchies like monarchies. So why would humans switch to farming? Was humanity better off hunter-gatherers?

Other than survival, humanity is hell bent on inventing and re inventing convenience. We want to live conveniently. It's the same fundamental motive that gave birth to the smart phone and delivery apps etc.

Tldr: humans are power hungry lazy fucks

 

[mintoots]

Are you sure hunter gatherers had no food shortages? Maybe the ice age and the extinction of once ubiquitous probosceans that were hunted out had something to do with it. Incidentally domestication of cattle and the advent of agriculture began in Holocene, which started after the last ice age.

Right? It's hard work catching chickens, let alone wild ones.

As to which one is better... to me, agriculture is obviously the better way to do things.
Anarcho-primitivists, those who want to reject the agricultural civilization, have some valid arguments, but I think they romanticize primitivism a lot and take for granted the power and opportunities secured by civilization, which solves so many problems for us, problems we don't even think about. Or they want the best of both worlds, the equalitarian politics of primitivism (which probably isn't as guaranteed as we think) with the knowledge and intellectual wealth of civilization.

In the first world, we're living in better conditions than medieval kings did. When you're that high on the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, new problems like depression and existential crisis start to appear. If the source of your next meal is a daily concern, you simply don't have time to worry about the meaning of life as much as we do.

I also believe many people ascribe too many of their problems to their culture, their civilization or some phenomenon bigger than themselves.

Well-put.

In the same sense, plastic is actually useful except people are using and selling it wrongly. Agriculture has its benefits but people are just lazy power hungry fuck pricks!

@Ren life may have been nasty, short and brute then but look at the ageing Japanese now, they are physically relatively sustained and more sustainable but their lives are just lonely. They die alone. Really, what are we all doing this living for? Pffft.

 

[Pin]

@Ren life may have been nasty, short and brute then but look at the ageing Japanese now, they are physically relatively sustained and more sustainable but their lives are just lonely. They die alone. Really, what are we all doing this living for? Pffft.

What do you mean they're lonely?

 

[java]

What do you mean they're lonely?

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry...hnology_n_5b72873ae4b0530743cd04aa?ri18n=true

 

[Pin]

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry...hnology_n_5b72873ae4b0530743cd04aa?ri18n=true

Oh.

Honestly, there's no fixing that unless people decide to get married and start having children.

 

[mintoots]

What do you mean they're lonely?

Oh.

Honestly, there's no fixing that unless people decide to get married and start having children.

Java is correct and that's not really true, Pin. Most of these elderlies have kids and grand children but they don't live with them. Some of these elderlies already live with their kids and grandchildren who have already become elderly as well.

I used to teach English to Japanese students through an online tutorial contract. My students were either kids, aspiring students and young professionals, and elderlies who are only looking to have good conversation. Many of them have gotten close to me over time. I hear their stories, I sense the loneliness.

 

[Pin]

Java is correct and that's not really true, Pin. Most of these elderlies have kids and grand children but they don't live with them. Some of these elderlies already live with their kids and grandchildren who have already become elderly as well.

I used to teach English to Japanese students through an online tutorial contract. My students were either kids, aspiring students and young professionals, and elderlies who are only looking to have good conversation. Many of them have gotten close to me over time. I hear their stories, I sense the loneliness.

That's unfortunate.

I feel like old age isn't supposed to be lonely. Family is supposed to stick together, have conversations, eat dinner.

I mean, how fucked is that?

 

[mintoots]

That's unfortunate.

I feel like old age isn't supposed to be lonely. Family is supposed to stick together, have conversations, eat dinner.

I mean, how fucked is that?

Yes I know. It is fucked.
Believe it or not, offspring are not and can not be the insurance to a lonely ageing.

 

[Pin]

Yes I know. It is fucked.
Believe it or not, offspring are not and can not be the insurance to a lonely ageing.

I still disagree. It's not that hard to give Grandma a call is it?

 

[slant]

Wouldn't it be funny if we actually figured it out on this thread? What sociologists and historians and scientists have debated forever, solved on a casual psychology forum thread

I believe in all of you

 

[mintoots]

I still disagree. It's not that hard to give Grandma a call is it?

For some people, it is. Especially if the parenting and grand parenting wasn't so loving.

 

[mintoots]

Wouldn't it be funny if we actually figured it out on this thread? What sociologists and historians and scientists have debated forever, solved on a casual psychology forum thread

I believe in all of you

Lmao. For all we know, one of us could be the Nikola Tesla of our time. Or maybe the Donald Trump.

 

[Reason]

Yep, and the cause was probably greed. Unfortunately some humans like to "compete"

Almost all living organisms compete with each other from bacteria to plants to humans. The idea that this started with agriculture seems extremely unlikely.

 

[Pin]

Almost all living organisms compete with each other from bacteria to plants to humans. The idea that this started with agriculture seems extremely unlikely.

Greed is good.

 

[Reason]

Greed is good.

All animals are equal but pigs are slightly more equal and so deserve an extra apple