Why Did Humans Stop Hunting and Start Farming?

Here's a story you probably heard in school. Early humans used to roam around, hunting animals and collecting wild fruit. Life was hard and uncertain. Then someone figured out how to grow food. Farming was born, food became steady, and civilization slowly began. Progress!

The problem? Most of this story is wrong.

ExpandSan Bushmen hunters tracking game in the Kalahari desert, Botswana

The more we dig up from the past, the more we realize that switching to farming was actually a really bad idea, at least at first. So why did we do it?

Farming Was Actually Worse

When scientists dig up old skeletons, they find something surprising. Hunter-gatherers were taller and healthier than early farmers. Why? Because hunters ate a wide variety of food: meat, fruits, nuts, vegetables. Farmers mostly ate just wheat and a few vegetables. Not very nutritious.

Farming also created other problems:

Farmers had to live near animals like pigs and cows. Animals carry diseases. So people got sick more often.
Everyone lived close together in dirty conditions, which made diseases spread fast.
Farmers worked six or seven hours a day just to grow food. A hunter-gatherer? Maybe one or two hours a day to find it.

There's a famous book called Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. In it, he writes: "We did not domesticate wheat. Wheat domesticated us."

What does that mean? Wild wheat had to work hard to survive in nature. It needed to be tasty and easy to find so animals would eat it and spread its seeds. But once wheat was on a farm? It just sat there while humans did all the hard work of growing, watering, and protecting it. Wheat got a great deal. We got a terrible one.

And the more you farm, the more children you need to help with the work. More children means more land. More land farmed means the soil eventually wears out. It's a trap.

So the big question is: if farming was harder, less healthy, and more work, why did we ever switch?

How We Try to Answer That Question

We cannot go back in time and watch what happened. But we can study four things to come up with good guesses:

Archaeology: digging up old houses, tools, bones, and buildings to understand how people lived
Anthropology: studying people today who still live as hunter-gatherers, like some tribes in the Amazon or Africa
Psychology: understanding what motivates humans and how our brains work
Primatology: studying monkeys and apes, because we share 99% of our DNA with them. Gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos can all teach us about our own behaviour

Using these four fields, researchers have come up with four main theories.

Theory 1: Someone Forced Us to Farm

Maybe a powerful group of people didn't want to do hard work themselves, so they made everyone else farm for them. You see this with gorillas. The biggest male sits around while everyone else brings him food.

But this doesn't really work for humans. We're smart. If a big strong person showed up and said "you all work for me now," humans would team up, make weapons, trick him, poison his food, or simply walk away. We're too smart to be bossed around that easily.

Verdict: Doesn't explain it.

Theory 2: We Farmed Because of War

Chimpanzees fight constantly. They attack other groups, they kill. Maybe early humans were the same, and farming let them build walls and protect themselves.

ExpandA bonobo — our closest relative in DNA, and one of the most peaceful great apes

But bonobos are actually closer to us in DNA than chimps, and bonobos are peaceful. They almost never fight. So we cannot say humans are naturally violent just because chimps are.

Also, when scientists dig up early human settlements, they don't find many weapons. There's some evidence of violence within groups, but not large wars between different groups.

Verdict: Doesn't fit the evidence.

Theory 3: We Settled Down to Take Care of Old People

Hunter-gatherer life is tough on old people. When a group keeps moving, the elderly get left behind. Maybe humans settled down to look after their elders.

It's a kind idea, but it probably doesn't hold up. Back then, people believed life moved in cycles like the seasons: you die, you are reborn, you die again. Old people were not particularly afraid of dying. So building whole villages just to keep old people comfortable was probably not the reason.

Verdict: Possible, but weak.

Theory 4: Religion

This is what most historians believe today. Humans have always wanted to understand the world. Why does the sun rise? Why do people die? Why does rain fall? Religion gives answers to these big questions. And religion gives people a reason to gather together, a reason to build things, and eventually a reason to stay in one place.

Three ancient places that were dug up in recent decades give us real evidence for this. We look at those in the next post.