Why do you think humans switched from hunter-gatherer societies to farming communities?

Answer 1

Cultivation/agriculture allowed for larger populations, and also allowed for specializations in skills, leading to this horrid punch-clock world we all suffer through each day now.

Answer 2

Hunter-gathering and farming may well represent diverging societies, rather than one (farming) evolving from another, although the argument that hunter-gathering preceded farming is quite strong.

The stock answer is that some bright person(s) deduced that herding animals is a lot less uncertain than hunting them. Some other bright person(s) noticed that planting a few seeds rather than eating them all resulted in more plants being available for harvest the next year. Eventually a location so husbanded would produce enough food that the family or tribe need not migrate to find new sources.

Answer 3

Hunter-gatherer societies required large amounts of time of each person. Food is harder to come by and is very inconsistent. While farming still takes a lot of work, it consolidates the work and frees others to pursue other things. The society could then advance in technologies and provide a more stable and larger food source than hunter gatherer societies.

Answer 4

Farming communities is just easier. Plus you're almost garanteed to grow and get bigger. It's a fact that human's can double their population in only 25 years. We know today that doesn't happen but back then, 7000-8000 years ago, w/ farming communities that could happen.

Everything sort of happened at once. It all organized into communities quite quickly.

Answer 5

The general theory was that although farming was harder work, in certain geographies (like the Nile River valley and the Fertile Crescent) agriculture provided a more predictable and on average higher-calorie food supply. That enabled the agricultural society to grow faster. Agricultural societies were also stable in one location, so they could accumulate possessions which hunter-gatherers, who often migrated to follow herds, could not.

Answer 6

The change is associated with a climate change, when the Earth became much drier. This would have affected prey animals living on grasslans, and forced people to follow herds to river valleys (like the Nile, tigris and Euphrates) where they were much less sucessful as nomads. By establishing permanent homes, farming made for a much more secure food source.

Answer 7

they moved from hunter gatherer to herding cows - location the Sahara BEFORE it became a dessert herding cows is a kind of agriculture the Sahara became a dessert and these people left and moved north until they found the fertile Nile delta. There they developed seed strains (wheat) that could be grown on the fertile flood plains. Rice cultivation was discovered / developed independently in China.

Answer 8

I think because it's just more convenient to keep your life organized around one place. I think the nature of most animals, inlcuding humans, stay in one place if they can, when there are enough resources to stay alive withouth having to look around for food. But if you learned how to grow enough of the plants you eat in one place for the year around, and domesticate cattle so you don't get hurt hunting wildlife and always have milk and meat, you can stay in one place at a river or lake so you don't have to look for water or carry a lot of water and food while you're traveling around. It's also easier to keep a fire lit in one place than if you need to carry burning coils around all the time. It's better to have your children growing up in a stable environment, than if you travel into the unknown all the time. If you know your surroundings, you can better defend yourself, don't get hurt or killed when moving through hazardous mountains and forests, and don't run into other groups of tracking people all the time, so you get less problems over the same resources if everybody has his "own" convenient place. Maybe it is also that you don't get delayed by elderly and disabled when you stay in one place. Also as communities grew, it became harder to move around with this growing number of people.
I think it went something like this: C'mon John, I'm not going back into that swamp again. My mom is too old and still sick from last year to even walk one foot, we've got 3 young kids, a cow, fertile land, water all year around and a dog!! I'm staying here!!

Answer 9

Because they were coerced. Read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, it opens up all kinds of avenues of thought, not only hunter-gatherer / agriculture, but all kinds of stuff.

But anyway, because it's easier to take control of your life if you grow your own food and store it for hard times. But an increase in food production equals an increase in population, and the more people you have who need to eat, the more land you have to put under the plow. Really, read Ishmael. Good stuff.

Answer 10

Because without farming the Hunter-gatherer method would have wiped out nearly all existing animals. Our population is nearly at its peak science and modern domestic processes are just keeping us going alittle longer.

Answer 11

to become fatter and richer and more settled in their way of living ,this was the birth of civilizations ,when people stopped moving and settled in one place because they produced food on the spot.
trade followed and presto a civilization was born.
with it came strength ,power and subsequently wars
when the wealth could support armies

exceptions were Ghengis Kahn and Atilla the hun .who went straight from being Nomads into wild uncontrolleble savage conquest,and kept going untill they had most of Asia and Europe
but what destroyed them was the destruction of the cause of civilization,they burned all the crops ,filled the wells with water ,and burned the forrest .
on the way back many perished in the deserts of their own making,no food ,water or shade