For 95% of our species ' history, we lived as hunter-gatherers in small, nomadic communities. And something changed...
In 95% of the history of our species, we have not farmed, created large settlements or complex political hierarchies. We lived as hunter-gatherers in small, nomadic communities. And something changed.
Early humans had enough intelligence to be able to farm. All modern groups of people had similar levels of intelligence. So our cognitive skills developed before these populations separated about 300,000 years ago, and then showed little change. Just because our ancestors didn't grow plants doesn't mean they weren't smart enough, but rather that there was something in the environment they were in that prevented it, or that they simply didn't need it.
Just Climate Change?
Global warming at the end of the ice age 11,700 years ago probably made agriculture easier. Higher temperatures, longer seasons, higher rainfall, and long-term non-variable climates also made more areas suitable for planting. But unfortunately, not all places were suitable for agriculture, and the Earth experienced such global warming events many times, 11,700 years ago, 125,000 years ago, 200,000 years ago, and 325,000 years ago. But earlier warming events did not encourage farming experimentation. So climate change alone cannot be a cause.
It is likely that the migration of people also contributed to this initiative. As our species spread from South Africa to the African continent, Asia, Europe and then America, we discovered new environments and new food plants. But humans invaded these parts of the world long before agriculture began. Domestication of plants delayed human migration by tens of thousands of years. If opportunities to invent agriculture already exist, then the belated invention of Agriculture shows that our ancestors did not need or did not want farming.
Agriculture has significant disadvantages compared to foraging. It requires more energy, more time, and obliges you to a poorer diet. If hunters are hungry in the morning, they may have food to cook over fire in the evening. Farming requires hard work to produce food months later today. However, it requires temporary food surpluses to be stored and managed to feed people year-round.
A hunter who has had a bad day may hunt again tomorrow or look for richer hunting grounds elsewhere, but farmers who depend on the soil are at the mercy of nature's unpredictability. Unexpected adverse conditions such as rains, droughts, frosts, burns or Grasshopper infestation that arrive too early or too late can lead to crop degradation and famine.
Agriculture also has military disadvantages. Hunter-gatherers are mobile and can travel long distances to attack or retreat. Constant practice with spears and bows made them deadly warriors. Farmers, on the other hand, depend on their fields, their programs are determined by the seasons. Food stocks make them easily predictable, fixed targets for hungry foreigners.
And people who have evolved into lifestyles may have liked to be nomadic hunters. Comanche Indians, for example, fought to the death to preserve their hunter lifestyle. South Africa's Kalahari Bushmen continue to resist being turned into farmers and shepherds. Strikingly, when Polynesian farmers encountered flightless birds abundant in New Zealand, they largely abandoned agriculture, creating the Māori Moa bird hunter culture.
Abandoning Hunting
Despite everything, something has changed, and since 10,000 years ago, people have repeatedly abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for agriculture. After the extinction of mammoths and other megafaunas during the Pleistocene and overfishing of surviving animals, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle became less adaptable and pushed people to harvest, then grow crops. Perhaps settled civilizations were not born of an impulse to progress, but rather of a catastrophe, as ecological catastrophe forced people to abandon their traditional way of life.
As humans left Africa and established colonies in New Territories, large animals on the land that had set foot also began to disappear. In Europe and Asia, megafauna, such as feathered rhinos, mammoths and Irish Elks, disappeared about 40,000 to 10,000 years ago.in Australia, giant kangaroos and koalas disappeared 46,000 years ago. In North America, horses, camels, giant armadillos, mammoths, and giant sloths dwindled and disappeared between 15,000 and 11,500 years ago; similar extinctions were followed by 14,000 to 8,000 years ago in South America. After humans spread to the Caribbean islands, Madagascar, New Zealand and Oceania, the megafauna of those regions also disappeared. Megafaunal extinctions inevitably followed the spread of humans.
Hunting large game animals such as horses, camels and elephants provides a better return than hunting small game animals such as rabbits. But large animals such as elephants breed slowly and have fewer offspring compared to small animals such as rabbits, making them vulnerable to overfishing. And so wherever we went, our human creativity, such as hunting with spear shooters, scaring animals with fire and throwing them on cliffs, meant we hunted large animals faster than they could replenish their numbers. This was probably the first sustainability crisis.
We Destroyed Our Own Food Supply
With the old lifestyle no longer viable, people were increasingly forced to innovate, focusing on collecting and then growing crops to survive. This in turn led to the expansion of human populations. Consumption of plants instead of meat means more efficient use of soil, and therefore farming can feed more people compared to hunting in the same area. People could settle permanently, build settlements and then civilizations.
Archaeological and fossil records show us that our ancestors could have farmed, but did so only after they had few alternatives. We were probably going to keep hunting horses and mammoths forever, and we were very good at that, too. But by hunting these animals, we have probably destroyed our own food source.
Agriculture and civilization may have been invented, probably not because they had an improvement over the lifestyle of our ancestors, but because they had no choice. Agriculture was a desperate attempt to fix things when we took more than the ecosystem could sustain. If so, because of the ecological disaster we created thousands of years ago, we abandoned the life of Ice Age hunting to create the modern world by chance, not with foresight and intent.