On 4/08/2014 06:52, shadow@shadowgard.com wrote:
> There's are reasons why almost all hunter/gather cultures switched to
> agriculture.
>
> Yeah, it involves a lot more work. But it also gives you a food
> supply that's far more reliable.
>
> Droughts and the like will be bad for you either way. But barring
> things like that you get to control your food supply instead of
> having the food supply control you.

There's an even stronger reason - even primitive farming allows a /much/
higher population density than hunting/gathering does. It's much harder,
you tend to live for a shorter time and less healthily - more epidemics,
less varied diet, and much more work will do that. The trade off is the
higher density, and being able to own stuff. Oh, and then there's that
other effect - immobile people tied down by possessions and crops they
can't up and leave can be forced to pay taxes, to provide labour, and
this allows specialisation, and once you've started down that road you
can't really go back.

It takes a very long time before farmers are, on an individual level,
better off than hunter-gatherers, though a small segment of the
population has it pretty good from even the earliest days.