sophiaserpentia | the domestication of the primate (Reply)

Why did farming spread at all? The answer might seem to be obvious -- for example, that farming makes life easier or happier, or that it provides a genetic advantage to the people who practice it.

In fact, it seems that farming did not make life easier, nor did it improve nutrition, or reduce disease. The British science writer Colin Tudge (1995) describes farming as 'the end of Eden'. Rather than being easier, the life of early farmers was utter misery. Early Egyptian skeletons tell a story of a terrible life. Their toes and backs are deformed by the way people had to grind corn to make bread; they show signs of rickets and of terrible abscesses in their jaws. Probably few lived beyond the age of thirty. Stories in the Old Testament describe the arduous work of farmers and, after all, Adam was thrown out of Eden and told, 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.' By contrast modern hunter-gatherers have been estimated to spend only about fifteen hours a week hunting and have plenty of time for leisure. This is despite the fact that they have been pushed into marginal environments far poorer than those in which our ancient ancestors probably lived. Why would people the world over have given up an easier life in favor of a life of toil and drudgery?

Tudge assumes 'that agriculture arose because it was favored by natural selection' (1995, p. 274) and therefore looks for a genetic advantage. He suggests that because farming produces more food from a given area of land, farmers will produce more children who will encroach on neighboring hunter-gatherer's lands and so destroy their way of life. For this reason, once farming arrives no one has the luxury of saying 'I want to keep the old way of life.' However, we know from the skeletons of early farmers that they were malnourished and sickly. So was there really a genetic advantage?

(Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine p. 26-27)

This is a mystery to which there is no widely-accepted answer. It seems to me though that there must have been both opportunity and necessity.

Some theorists suggest that atmospheric CO2 levels shifted in a way that opened a window of opportunity for agriculture to develop. I haven't investigated this enough to form an opinion about its likelihood. But something special happened that led to the simultaneous development of agriculture in nine different places about 10,000 years ago.

I'm leaning towards a combination of population/resource pressure and climactic favorability, as the likely cause. Housing and clothing played a role, too; people in cultures with permanent housing and adequate clothing require 40% less food.

A couple of pages with notes about the origin of agriculture:

http://www.indyrad.iupui.edu/public/ebraunst/Agriculture.htm
http://courses.washington.edu/anth457/agorigin.htm

I recall being taught in sociology and anthropology class that the current theory about the origins of government, social stratification, and the division of labor is traceable to the development of irrigation systems. See for example this link. This thought might be worth exploring and examining further.