Almost without exception, all people on earth today are sustained by agriculture. With a minute number of exceptions, no other species is a farmer. Essentially all of the arable land in the world is under cultivation. Yet agriculture began just a few thousand years ago, long after the appearance of anatomically modern humans.
Given the rate and the scope of this revolution in human biology, it is quite extraordinary that there is no generally accepted model accounting for the origin of agriculture. Indeed, an increasing array of arguments over recent years has suggested that agriculture, far from being a natural and upward step, in fact led commonly to a lower quality of life. Hunter-gatherers typically do less work for the same amount of food, are healthier, and are less prone to famine than primitive farmers (Lee & DeVore 1968, Cohen 1977, 1989). A biological assessment of what has been called the puzzle of agriculture might phrase it in simple ethological terms: why was this behaviour (agriculture) reinforced (and hence selected for) if it was not offering adaptive rewards surpassing those accruing to hunter-gathering or foraging economies?
This paradox is responsible for a profusion of models of the origin of agriculture. 'Few topics in prehistory', noted Hayden (1990) 'have engendered as much discussion and resulted in so few satisfying answers as the attempt to explain why hunter/gatherers began to cultivate plants and raise animals. Climatic change, population pressure, sedentism, resource concentration from desertification, girls' hormones, land ownership, geniuses, rituals, scheduling conflicts, random genetic kicks, natural selection, broad spectrum adaptation and multicausal retreats from explanation have all been proffered to explain domestication. All have major flaws ... the data do not accord well with any one of these models.'
Recent discoveries of potentially psychoactive substances in certain agricultural products -- cereals and milk -- suggest an additional perspective on the adoption of agriculture and the behavioural changes ('civilisation') that followed it. In this paper we review the evidence for the drug-like properties of these foods, and then show how they can help to solve the biological puzzle just described.
http://disweb.dis.unimelb.edu.au/staff/gwadley/msc/WadleyMartinAgriculture.html
Really interesting points, and it seems like that they are correct that the addictive properties of grains played a significant role in their adoption - but I also think Diamond's answer is correct: agriculture resulted in the "Guns, Germs and Steel" that allowed smaller, weaker, sicker agriculturalists to out breed hunter gatherers, and to out specialize and thus over power them. Blacksmiths, politicians, religious leaders, wheel makers, etc. By the time we agriculturalists began to study the hunter gathers with the idea of learning what made them so much healthier, they had already been pushed out of the most desirable areas, and the image we sustained of them, for the most part, was that "they are savages." OK, but they also would easily outlive, outwork and outplay us - if they wanted to - and lived free of the fear of cancer, heart disease, and the other diseases of civilization. There's no going back, and I wouldn't if I could, but it is foolish to try to understand human health without considering the fact that we are built to hunt and gather, eat with the seasons, get vitamin D from the sun, eat the essential fatty acids and micronutrients we need from the animals we kill, and sleep when it is dark. Picking seeds and grinding them for bread or paste is not the yellow brick road for human health.
Given the rate and the scope of this revolution in human biology, it is quite extraordinary that there is no generally accepted model accounting for the origin of agriculture. Indeed, an increasing array of arguments over recent years has suggested that agriculture, far from being a natural and upward step, in fact led commonly to a lower quality of life. Hunter-gatherers typically do less work for the same amount of food, are healthier, and are less prone to famine than primitive farmers (Lee & DeVore 1968, Cohen 1977, 1989). A biological assessment of what has been called the puzzle of agriculture might phrase it in simple ethological terms: why was this behaviour (agriculture) reinforced (and hence selected for) if it was not offering adaptive rewards surpassing those accruing to hunter-gathering or foraging economies?
This paradox is responsible for a profusion of models of the origin of agriculture. 'Few topics in prehistory', noted Hayden (1990) 'have engendered as much discussion and resulted in so few satisfying answers as the attempt to explain why hunter/gatherers began to cultivate plants and raise animals. Climatic change, population pressure, sedentism, resource concentration from desertification, girls' hormones, land ownership, geniuses, rituals, scheduling conflicts, random genetic kicks, natural selection, broad spectrum adaptation and multicausal retreats from explanation have all been proffered to explain domestication. All have major flaws ... the data do not accord well with any one of these models.'
Recent discoveries of potentially psychoactive substances in certain agricultural products -- cereals and milk -- suggest an additional perspective on the adoption of agriculture and the behavioural changes ('civilisation') that followed it. In this paper we review the evidence for the drug-like properties of these foods, and then show how they can help to solve the biological puzzle just described.
http://disweb.dis.unimelb.edu.au/staff/gwadley/msc/WadleyMartinAgriculture.html
Really interesting points, and it seems like that they are correct that the addictive properties of grains played a significant role in their adoption - but I also think Diamond's answer is correct: agriculture resulted in the "Guns, Germs and Steel" that allowed smaller, weaker, sicker agriculturalists to out breed hunter gatherers, and to out specialize and thus over power them. Blacksmiths, politicians, religious leaders, wheel makers, etc. By the time we agriculturalists began to study the hunter gathers with the idea of learning what made them so much healthier, they had already been pushed out of the most desirable areas, and the image we sustained of them, for the most part, was that "they are savages." OK, but they also would easily outlive, outwork and outplay us - if they wanted to - and lived free of the fear of cancer, heart disease, and the other diseases of civilization. There's no going back, and I wouldn't if I could, but it is foolish to try to understand human health without considering the fact that we are built to hunt and gather, eat with the seasons, get vitamin D from the sun, eat the essential fatty acids and micronutrients we need from the animals we kill, and sleep when it is dark. Picking seeds and grinding them for bread or paste is not the yellow brick road for human health.
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