Why do anthropologists believe that hunting and gathering people first turned to agriculture.?
It’s easy to understand why people domesticated animals, but agriculture is a lot of work and the answer to your question at this point is anybody’s guess. It’s generally conceded that women invented agriculture. People probably noticed that squash seeds thrown away in a pile grew into new squash plants next spring, and experimented with other seeds. Squashes were domesticated early and the reason is probably because they’re easy to grow: given enough water and sunlight the vines will take over everything. But raising grains is much more work. First you have to prepare the soil, which is work enough in itself – if you want to have enough wheat to feed 20 people throughout an entire winter, you need 5 acres or more devoted to nothing but wheat. Once it sprouts, crows love it. ( There’s an old planting song that goes “One for the taxman, one for the crow, one to die and one to grow.”) A lot of weeding must be done. Rain has to come at critical times, or you have to irrigate, another big
Several factors may cause the rise of agriculture: 1) Extinction of the megafauna (less yield from hunting) 2) Development of neolithic tools including pottery which allows for massive amounts of plant food to be gathered. 3) Appearance of seasons due to glacial retreat after the end of the last Ice Age. 4) Increasing population pressure. There are only so many good hunting sites, while farmland could be developed anywhere there is water 5) Domestication of animals. While people in the Near East region developed domestication after agriculture, people in the Far East (i.e. Asia) developed domestication first, which may have led to a sedentary lifestyle, which in turn led to the development of agriculture.
The answer isn’t that easy. You cant generalize and say that all populations turned to agriculture for the same reasons. But, generally it is assumed that population size and density is an important factor in the rise of agriculture production. Hunting and gathering is not less productive than agriculture. Actually, it has been shown that H/G expend less time and energy hunting and gathering than agriculturalists. They thus have more time to lay around telling stories around the fire 🙂 However, the higher the population density, the more the people tend to over use the resources that can be had in the natural environment. Thus, people may have turned towards purposeful planting to supplement hunting and gathering. Eventually, this gave rise to maize agriculture (in north america) which likely spread from mesoamerica. Thus you must take note of migrations of people, culture, diffusion of technology, independent invention etc as all possibilities for the origin of agriculture. Also, yo
That’s easy, it’s easy. Sorry, but think about it. The amount of energy expended trying to hunt (with relatively minor weapons) and locating foods is great compared to the energy expended planting a plot of earth, tending it occasionally and letting the rain provide all of the needed water. And it is fairly predictable and dependable as a supplement to hunting, occasionally crops fail, but the majority of the time the do not, especially the wild varieties of plants that would have been the first things grown for food. There is a formula for calculating cost of energy used/energy gained. Also, agriculture allowed small populations to settle more permanently and grow into civilizations as they didn’t have to follow animals or weather for available foods.
Population pressure. Hunter gatherers expend less energy gaining food, and they have a lot of leisure time. The quality of their diet is also a lot better, the first farmers were a small and sickly lot. About four inches shorter than hunter gatherers, with bad teeth and a lot of health problems like arthritis, and smaller brains. But, agriculture can raise a LOT more people on the same piece of land. You only need a climate change to force too many people onto the same piece of land for agriculture to become necessary, or there will be starvation and war. Once you’ve started farming, your tribe can number six or more times more than the next tribe over that don’t farm. Even if they are bigger individually, you’ll still be able to overrun them and take their land for your new field of barley. And because you don’t move, you can build fortifications to defend yourself against raids from others. And then, because you are no longer nomadic, you can collect status items and wealth, as you d
