the domestication of the primate

[sophiaserpentia]

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.

Comments

this is an issue i have spent a lot of time on

[delascabezas.livejournal.com]

ultimately, i think agrarian society flourished was dependability.

if you are a nomadic/hunter-gatherer tribe, you face more daily hardship and danger than you do if you are a clan of farmers. that is not to say that domestic farm life is without it's dangers or setbacks, but you are less likely to be mauled to death plowing your corn field, than you would be competing with other predators for prey.

all societal organization does go back to farming. in a hunter/gatherer setting, everyone has to pitch in to survive - everyone also must be a generalist of sorts. specialists need large food quotas supplemented. in a farming situation, you have room for specialists to develop, eve nto the point where they do not now the basic "survival" skills.

this allows the beurocrat class to emerge. all they do is organize, arbitrate and govern.

as you say, farming became prevelant due to the reproductive model. hunter gatherers were not living much past 30, with a higher attrition rate due to famine and accidents - but they were not having 9 kids back-to-back to do the field work. they usually spaced the kids out so one was toddling before the next was born.

[azaz-al.livejournal.com]

(This will be one of my unpopular and weird, wacky, out-there kind of theories)

Isn't it interesting that many of these early cultures (I can't say all because I don't know all nine that you speak of) have a legend built around this agriculturalism? Stating that there is some heavenly interference/encouragement of becoming farmers?
Sumeria - Inanna steals knowledge from her father and brings it to earth in defiance of his wishes - agriculture (among many other skills) is taught to the people
Judaism - besides the Torah, where God punishes Adam by throwing him and Eve out of the garden and saying he must till the land, there is the Book of Enoch, which says the Nephilim came down to teach skills to men, and seems to hint at teaching agriculture, although it could be herbalism ("made them acquainted with plants")
Egypt - Osiris and his wife Isis taught the people agriculture, specifically of grains

When faced with a common myth, one can take it in one of several ways. One can decide it is literal - I do not. One can decide it is metaphorical, which seems to leave some questions unanswered - fwhy then would this have appeared simultaneously around the world in an age where communication between contintents was practiacally non-existent? Or one can decide it is a mix - that something happened which a very primitive people were not able to explain in terms other than that which they could use. The typical fall back is God did it, or Demons did it.
Did something happen which somehow came in such a way as to be interpreted to come from the sky? And did this something teach agriculture and other skills to people? Or is there a sort of human telepathy that exists by virtue of synchronistic evolution, so that all groups of humans arrive at a similar stage at a similar time?

[liminalia.livejournal.com]

I highly encourage you to read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, which discusses the rise of agriculture in great detail, among other things. His theories have been criticized for being simplistic at times, but I found the book riveting, and I haven't seen another argument as convincing as his for explaining the same phenomena.

[sable-twilight.livejournal.com]

Beer, plain and simple. We settled to consume alcoholic beverages. And I'm not being cheeky here. I heard that every early civilization had some form of beer like product. I am thinking that early nomadic and tribes cached food in places, much the aboriginal tribes of Australia. I speculate that enough of these caches, which likely contained grain products, may have gotten wet and fermented. People being the way they are still consumed the mix and found it to be good.. This happened frequently enough the people began to figure out how to do it themselves, and we ended up settling so we could produce it on a larger scale. I don't think agricultural civilization would have survived with out the ability to get drunk.

That's my thoughts anyway. I got no sources.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

A historian friend of mine, erudito has looked at this question many times and actually occassionally teaches about it at high school. Don't let his conservatism fool you - he actually does have a clue...

As you've mentioned farming doesn't improve lifespan, resistance to disease or general health. The capacity of it, particularly in the early stages of development, to provide a store of food is questionable.

And herein lies the problem. We liberal minded souls, with an intrinsic distate for it, forget about war.

Farming provides a numerically superior and more concentration population. Gatherer-Hunter societies didn't stand a chance.