Introduction

Have you heard of the “Paleo” diet? Paleo dieters only eat foods that Paleolithic hunters and foragers ate. They do this based on the belief that our ancestors were healthier before the spread of agriculture.

While health experts debate the merits of the Paleo diet, historians are asking an even bigger question. Why did humans begin farming? If the foods produced and consumed during the Stone Age were so great, then why did humans everywhere adopt farming and begin eating new foods?

Well…they didn’t. Farming actually spread slowly and unevenly. Researchers are still trying to understand the when, where, how, and why of the so-called agricultural revolution, and they’re debating its costs and benefits.

When, where, and how did farming happen?

There’s no rule that said farming had to happen. It was one of many different possibilities. Yet, at some point, in many different areas, humans started collecting plants and domesticating animals. We aren’t sure how intentional these processes were at first. Many scholars think that farming was an accident, as people dropped pieces of wild grains near their homes while preparing food. When these grains produced more grains, people got the idea to keep it going. It is likely that it was a slow process that happened in stages.

It’s commonly thought that southwest Asia was the first place where farming developed. However, some scholars think it developed independently in a few different places. Either way, it began about 10,000 to 6,000 years ago.

Agriculture then spread when farmers migrated and colonized territories and traded across networks. Tools, plant and animal species, and agricultural knowledge were exchanged along these networks.

So what did farming change?

The adoption of farming revolutionized the way humans organized their communities, networks, health, and population.

Farming meant people could settle into fixed communities. People could live in one place with members of their families, as opposed to moving frequently with a much larger band or group. Family homes became the center of daily life, where the things people needed were made, traded, and used.

These farming communities became more firmly organized. Eventually, farmers could produce enough food to feed their families and to feed others in their community. When people could buy or trade for their food, they no longer had to work to produce their own. Instead, they could become soldiers, merchants, craftspeople, priests, or kings. Dividing up work based on what a person did for a living led to the creation of a social hierarchy. In a hierarchy, different groups of people are ranked above or below one another based on what they do. This system sparked conflict and inequality. Women increasingly worked raising children and in the home.

The shift to settled farming communities also caused diseases to spread more easily. Diseases moved from animals to humans more often because they lived so close together.

People moved into villages, some of which joined networks or grew into large cities. This made networks both shrink and expand. For instance, the network of a farmer in a small village might grow in number of people that he met, like neighbors and people at the markets, but it would shrink as he stayed only within a small area. Traders, by contrast, would have more connections from different places like the next farming community, village, or empire. So a trader’s network would grow.

Why farm?

Farming seems to have been both good and bad, so it’s worth asking again why it was adopted so far and wide. Why work more and have worse health? Why live in a crowded community where people are unequal?

Well, it’s not as though early farmers sat down and made a pro and con list. It’s easy for us to look back at history and give reasons why the switch to farming was good or bad. In almost all cases, though, farming wasn’t a choice people made on purpose.

Historians think there are many possible reasons why farming was adopted. The main one is that people started farming in response to things that happened in their environment. For example, naturally-occurring climate change dried up many previously fertile areas. People stopped going to those areas. Instead, they settled in less dry river valleys where farming made sense. Another possible reason is population growth. But we’re not sure if people started farming because they needed more food for a growing population or if people started farming and that helped the population to grow. It could have gone either way.

Was it better?

We now have a better sense of the when, where, how, why, and so what of farming. Now, let’s get back to our initial question and think about whether farming was better than foraging. What were some good outcomes and bad outcomes from the transition?

Before the mid-twentieth century, historians thought of the shift to agriculture as purely positive. Farming, for them, was the way out of the miserable life of hunting and gathering. They were no longer at the mercy of unpredictable nature, because they could now maintain a stable food supply. However, recent research from a wide variety of fields including anthropology, genetics, and environmental science have contributed new evidence to challenge that story.

Some research suggests that foragers actually had an easy life. They worked less and ate a varied diet. And despite lacking all the things we associate with complex societies, they were relatively healthy and treated one another as equals. They had lower rates of disease and more leisure. Meanwhile, settled farmers worked more and had less healthy diets. They lived in dirty, polluted cities, competing for resources and space.

These are conflicting points of view. It’s just not a simple question. Some scholars point out that even with things like inequality and disease, farming was a good thing overall, because it allowed for cultural exchange and shared learning among groups. Without it, we wouldn’t have things like writing, for example. We also wouldn’t have stable, predictable lives. And we wouldn’t enjoy the achievements of complex societies such as architecture, literature, laws, or religions.

Others point out that life really wasn’t that happy or healthy for foragers. They may have had lower rates of disease, they argue, but they had higher rates of mortality, or early death.

While we don’t have a clear answer, we have a more complete picture. It’s not that foragers were entirely miserable, but they weren’t totally happy, healthy and carefree, either. While farmers may have had monuments and cities, they also had diseases, hierarchy, and vermin. The transition to farming completely transformed communities, networks, and how things were made, but it had its good and bad sides. What people thought of as work and what people considered needs and wants totally changed. It was a very complex transition, and a very important one.