Farming started with simply harvesting of naturally occurring plants and then planting more of them around same areas. One theory is that when climate changed the plants stopped naturally occurring near good settlements (for example near a river) and people started purposefully cultivating and selectively breeding them. The weird part is that after settling and literally shitting where they ate life expectancy of people dropped by around 10 years. The theory is that food availability was less stable for hunter-gatherers. During good years everything was fine but when game became scarce they starved. Farming offered more stable access to food at the cost of more diseases and shorter life expectancy. It was also able to support larger populations. And everything went downhill from there.
Yeah, there’s definitely an upper limit to the growth of hunter-gatherers á la the classic ‘wolf overpopulation’ example. That being said… Agriculture…
Farming started with simply harvesting of naturally occurring plants and then planting more of them around same areas. One theory is that when climate changed the plants stopped naturally occurring near good settlements (for example near a river) and people started purposefully cultivating and selectively breeding them. The weird part is that after settling and literally shitting where they ate life expectancy of people dropped by around 10 years. The theory is that food availability was less stable for hunter-gatherers. During good years everything was fine but when game became scarce they starved. Farming offered more stable access to food at the cost of more diseases and shorter life expectancy. It was also able to support larger populations. And everything went downhill from there.
Yeah, there’s definitely an upper limit to the growth of hunter-gatherers á la the classic ‘wolf overpopulation’ example. That being said… Agriculture…