Thanks greeneyes for posting the link over in the weekly gardening thread, it's about time I got off my duff and post the topic though. :^) Sounds like some academics have a bigoted opinion about farming and farmers.
No football to watch.
Reason? Farming leads to beer and wine.
How else are you going to make beer?
Simple. Beer.
Questions not asked: How did early people know what to plant? Where did they get the seeds? How many times did they fail?
“Bear and fear”... the basis of civilization.
Why not?
I’m going with the “obvious” hypothesis ... people have always been lazy
Gathering plants means walking big distances, which uses a lot of time & energy, yet with no guarantee of finding anything; with agriculture, people knew what they had, had it close-by, and could use that freed-up walking time for other things
Plus, there’s also dangers from wild animals involved in plant searches, which agriculture helped reduce
Beer!
CC
The hunter-gatherer meme is pure humanism garbage.
It’s funny. All those who claim to be so environmentally conscious manifest their lack of experience of ever having to only consume what they have had to labor to grow or raise, but instead rely on other sources to remain alive.
Why did we start farming?
Try the Genesis account.
(Gen 3:17) And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
(Gen 3:18) Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
(Gen 3:19) In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
Still another theory is that the farms were in the lowlands near the oceans and were covered by glacial melt, then revived later on lands of higher elevation which is what we find today. Not a mystery.
Farming originally started out as a purely religious ritual.
Only later did it develop into the large-scale cultivation of "cash crops."
Regards,
“leading to the conclusion that forests composed of those species began to dominate the region as the climate warmed,“
SUVs and cow farts most likely.
L
Genesis 3:17 “Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’;
Cursed is the ground because of you;
In toil you will eat of it
All the days of your life.”
I have to wonder just how well we really understood things back then. The implication that hunting a mastodon or a even deer was easy back then was easy given that they basically had to get close enough to them to reach by throwing stones. Or that farming was very work-intensive - maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the first crops actually did grow like weeds and all it took was planting the seeds in some treeless area and then coming back in 6 months. Things were a lot different then...what the grew, and what the enemies of those crops were.
Because they liked fresh vegetables. NO mystery there.
I saw one show the other day that suggested that farming was terrible but people stuck with it because they couldn't carry their couch easily from place to place.
Truth is that you work just as hard at H&G as you do at farming and the results are less sure.
Agriculture is more labor-intensive than hunting?? I would think that the return on effort expended is much higher for farming.
Hunter-gatherer only really works for a nomadic people. If you put down roots scarcity will spread.
A tribe had multiple locations in an area that it would rotate through.
They would set up camp at a suitable location_A and begin hunting and fishing until the area became depleted at which point they would relocate to a fresh location_B and repeat the process. Eventually they would move back to location_A.
This movement from one camp location to another often followed a seasonal pattern.
My guess is agriculture began not long after the people learned how to use fire as a grassland management tool. They would set fire to a grassland and after the fire scatter whatever seeds they had available around to await the rains.