From hunting and gathering to agararian

A few questions or discussion points that came to my mind while I was watching some of the lecture videos were, 1). What causes a people group to move from being a hunting and gathering society to being an agrarian society? 2). Why did they start out as a hunting and gathering society? As far as the first question goes, my theory is, the people groups eventually realized that planting and harvesting food was a more reliable way to sustain themselves than hunting for their food. Plus, harvesting crops is a lot safer than say, trying to kill a wild boar with a bow and arrow or spear. I’d also bet that population size has something to do with the switch.

When there were less people around, there wasn’t as strong a need for a reliable food source, but as the population grew, there was a greater need for food. Still, this is all speculation on my part, since I don’t know if the population of predynastic people ever went through a “baby boom”, resulting in a much greater need for food. I also wonder if, back when they were a hunting/gathering people, predynastic people’s brains weren’t evolved yet enough to understand the intricacies of planting/harvesting, and if that was something that came with time, and an evolving brain. Moving on to my second question, I really don’t know why ancient people would have hunted and gathered for their food long before they tried planting and harvesting. Maybe when the first primitive man was searching for sustenance, he just pulled some nuts, berries or plants out of the ground, and found that, by consuming them, he could sustain himself. But as to how he first learned to hunt….well, I guess we’d have to understand the mind of an ancient, predynastic man, how he thought and reasoned, and what first made him realize that if he tracked down and killed other living creatures (animals), he could survive off of their meat (again, this is pure speculation on my part).

3 thoughts on “From hunting and gathering to agararian

  1. Most early populations were nomadic and followed the herds of animals that they hunted, but most of their calories or diet came from gathering berries, fruits, etc. I also do not know the exact reason for why populations started using agriculture or realized that they could, but I do know that having agricultural techniques allowed for groups to become and/or create permanent settlements, allowed for population growth, and was a guaranteed food source. Hunting was and still is dangerous and most likely contributed to a majority of premature deaths in early populations, but with the safety of agriculture and all of its advantages it also brought the potential for disease (short term, long term, and infectious).

    I do agree that the invention of hunting came with hominid brain evolution, but the brains of the predynastic people of Egypt, to my knowledge, were very similar to our brains today and still almost all early civilizations began as hunter-gathers. I do not think that there would have been a “baby boom” in any of the populations of Ancient Egypt because before agriculture not many people lived past their 30s or early 40s and after agriculture people would have lived longer, but probably not more than their 50s maybe early 60s (ages ranges are estimations and are assumptions based on other classes about different civilizations).

    I think you have brought up some interesting questions and hopefully, at some point, they can be answered if they haven’t been already. Good job on your post!

  2. Before, I also wondered what made a society change their methods for obtaining food. Through several courses I have learned that it can be through independent invention, or through diffusion. Independent invention being that a method was not best fitting, for instance how you said the population grew and the need for food changed, so other methods were sought out that would meet the need. Diffusion would be the process in which they were introduced to another method by another society. I’m pretty sure there was traveling going on in the Predynastic, and I know that for other societies this was a way to develop. For your question regarding why they hunted and gathered before they tried planting and harvesting may be because of their lack of tools or animals suitable for farming. Certain locations depending on their geographical space are not suitable temperature wise or socially to maintain the developed lifestyle, an example of not being socially capable would be your statement about their brains not being as advanced. A lot of times you go with the first method that meets your needs and until that method no longer does the job, you look to changing your method, and that is what I think happened in this society.

  3. I think you have some interesting ideas about how the change from hunter-gatherer societies to agrarian societies occurred. One of the things we learned in Biocultural Evolution was that the scale of evolution is much longer than you are assuming. Plant domestication began sometime around 10,000 BP with the Holocene. Humans have been at the same relative evolutionary development for the past 200,000+ years. With that in mind, I think that the reasons hunting and gathering developed when it did ~10,000 years ago has more to do with changes in culture and technology than with evolution.
    Hunting and gathering began, for some of our oldest ancestors i.e. homo habilis, as scavenging. It’s not a far stretch of the imagination to see scavenging develop, along with tool development, into outright hunting. This happened within the time frame of 2 million years BP though. The transition to agriculture is much more recent. The way I understand it, population expansion didn’t occur until after agriculture was taken up as a subsistence strategy. The reasons you suggest for agriculture though, increased reliability, and increased safety seem to be pretty good reason to switch over to a more sedentary subsistence. In addition though, I think the increased production of food available through agriculture, especially in relation to energy expenditure also made a difference, and this surplus led to the population expansion you mention. From what I understand though, the population expansion only occurred after the change from hunting and gathering to agriculture.

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