The Initial Surplus and Abundance From Farming Was Soon Exhausted in Feeding the Growing Number of Farmers
Farming – particularly the early cultivation of grains such as wheat, barley, and rice, resulted in a caloric bonanza, and a period of abundance for the early farmers. Once the early farmers had figured out how to go about the tasks of seeding and planting and tending their fields, they often ended up with more grain than they could consume. Especially during the transition period when farming was only done part time, and harvested grains were only a supplement to the diets of those splitting their time between farming and hunter gathering. Because harvested grains did not spoil easily, and could thus be stored for long periods of time, early farmers – even after settling down to farm full time – enjoyed a period of unprecedented caloric surpluses.
Grain cultivation allowed farmers to extract more calories per acre from cultivable land than hunter gatherers could from a similarly sized territory. That spelled abundance at first – at least in calories, if not in dietary variety. However, more calories, combined with the now sedentary lifestyle of the farmers, meant that they could raise and feed bigger families – which they promptly went ahead and did. So the additional calories from farming eventually went to feed the new hungry mouths.
The mobile lifestyle of hunter gatherers means that their women cannot care for or carry more than a single child that is too young to walk on its own and keep up with the rest of the group. As a result, hunter gatherer women have a low birth rate, as they must wait until their latest child is strong enough to walk on its own, before giving birth to another that the mother must carry. Farmers in settled communities have no such restrictions, as new children can be cared for by elderly relatives while their mothers are out toiling in the fields.
Indeed, because farming is so labor intensive, farmers have an incentive to birth many children as quickly as possible – both to keep ahead of the high child mortality, and to put the surviving offspring to work. Eventually, much of the surplus went to feed the growing settled farmer populations, and what had started off as abundance for the early farmers, reached an equilibrium that left many of the early farmers’ descendants barely eking a living from the land.