Agriculture: For Fun, or Fear of Famine?

It’s been less than 15,000 years since we humans slowly began the conversion from only hunting and gathering to the relatively new procedure known as farming. In this time, humans have not only invented writing, which is important for everything from taxes to novels to this very essay, but we have also created the house, the cellphone, the television, the computer which I am typing this on and which you might be reading this on, the paper which it may be printed on, the cat which is sitting beside me at this very moment, and the clothes which, for the most part, we all wear. How did we as a species come so far? Where did this entire process start? Let’s take a look.

Before jumping into the complex world of agriculture, the scene must be set. The year is 13,000 BCE. The average human being is living off of whatever they could kill or find in the wild that would not kill them in some horrific manner. This involved gathering various fruits, nuts, grains, and berries as well as hunting and fishing for any animal with meat on its bones. This was, as one might expect, rather tedious and took quite a toll on the net caloric intake of most people. This is especially true for people who hunted land animals, as there is generally something much bigger and likely also searching for food to contend with. The majority of people, when given the choice, ran for the shore and began fishing. This is because if one caught something from the ocean, the odds of them getting eaten by some ocean predator were much lower than if they were hunting rabbit and a sabre-tooth tiger was also doing so.

In most cases, despite what you may believe, foragers may have had slightly better lives than agriculturalists. They certainly, from what fossil records show,...

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