In this thread I'll be addressing several myths about hunter-gatherers and the agricultural "revolution."


The first myth is that farming means more calories and more calories mean each individual is fed better. This is related to the myth that early humans evolved into farmers to stave off starvation. In reality more calories means a greater carrying capacity. The population increases to the maximum this new limit can sustain, and the average number of calories each person takes in reaches the same equilibrium as the hunter-gatherers, simply on a larger scale. Furthermore, to assume hunter-gatherers began farming to stave off starvation is like saying someone will build themselves a life-boat while they're drowning. Farming requires more labor and time invested before an outcome can be reached and could not evolve out of necessity.

The second myth is that farming societies have a lot more free time and hunter-gatherers spent nearly all their time looking for food. This led to art and more advanced cultures, the Parthenon, etc. The reality is that the segregation of labor leads to more work. In fact in some cases the average work week for a hunter-gatherer is less than 14 hours. The reason hunter-gatherer populations remained low was not because they were starving to death but because they simply didn't take more from their environment than it could replenish, and didn't breed more mouths than the environment could sustainably feed. While an elite class emerged and fared better than the common man, the average amount of leisure time dramatically decreased. Things like the Parthenon came to be because this new elite class could demand it and because the increased production of calories led to the division of labor, enabling a new class of laborer to engage in these endeavors, supported by the overworked, under-nourished farming class. Art existed long before farming, as scarification and face-painting reveals.

A third myth is that disease and illness were more prevalent in hunter-gatherer societies and in general agricultural societies succumbed to illness and starvation less often. This has been assumed by paleontologists for years without any evidence, but paleopathologists (one who studies ancient diseases) have discovered that directly after the advent of agriculturalism enamel defects indicative of malnutrition increased 50% and degenerative spinal conditions increased, probably a result of hard physical labor. The transformation to agriculture had the immediate effect of dropping human life-expectancy from 26 to 19. Furthermore while hunter-gatherers had a varied diet, agriculturalists most prevalently depended on three starch-based crops and had a greater chance of suffering from nutritional deficiencies as well as greater risk of mass starvation due to crop failure. Finally, because of population density, diseases such as tuberculosis did not exist until farming. Hunter-gatherers lived too far spread.

Another myth is that Hunter Gatherers had greater infant mortality rates. In fact infant mortality increased with the advent of farming, as did the number of pregnancies. This was because women were no longer nomadic and didn't have to wait until their child could walk before having another, also because diseases were more prevalent due to population density, and population fluctuations were more severe due to crop failure.

The final myth I'll mention in the OP is that agriculture was an inevitable way of life. The reality is that agriculture leads to three advantages: increased calorie production, increased child birth because women no longer have to wait until their child can walk before bearing another and division of labor leading to a soldier class living off the food supply produced by the farming class. These combined to enable farming societies to support large war-machines, conquering and forcibly conforming all societies that had not developed the same system.

Source: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race