Humans Did Not Eagerly Transition From Hunter Gatherers to Farmers
Conventional wisdom, especially during the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, saw the agricultural revolution as a tale of human progress fueled by a growth in human intellect. As evolution made our ancestors steadily smarter, some of them, so the theory went, had a “EUREKA!” moment, discovered how to cultivate wheat, then cheerfully abandoned the hunter gather life and settled down as happy farmers.
However, hunter gatherers actually had an easier lifestyle than farmers, and it took them less time and effort to feed themselves. And not just feed themselves, but feed themselves a richer, more varied, and more nutritionally balanced diet than farmers. As a result, most of the hunter gatherers’ waking hours were spent not at work, but on leisure activities. By contrast, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with more difficult lives that required them to work harder in order to lead a less satisfying life than hunter gatherers, and eat a worse diet as well. And when they got good enough at farming to produce steady surpluses, the surpluses led to the emergence of elites – kings, priests, and nobles – who lived well off the farmers’ toil, while deriding them as peasants and frequently reducing them to serfs.
Still, the long term consequences of the Agricultural Revolution were beneficial to mankind. From a global human population of only a few million at the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years ago, we now number over 7 billion, have filled every habitable niche on the planet, and are poised to venture into the stars. By evolutionary standards, our species has been extremely successful, and the foundation of that evolutionary success was the Agricultural Revolution.
However, those distant forebears who traded hunter gathering for farming did not do so as a noble sacrifice for future generations, because they knew it would benefit their distant descendants thousands of years in the future. They did not voluntarily give up the easy hunter gatherer life and take up back breaking farm work because it meant distant offspring would someday land on the moon or surf the internet on smart phones.