# Efficiency of hunting and gathering versus agriculture **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 3, 2011, 3:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/efficiency-of-hunting-and-gathering-versus-agriculture/580543 "2011-05-03T03:11:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![mac\_bolan00](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b3f665/32.png) [@mac\_bolan00](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mac_bolan00)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2011, 12:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/efficiency-of-hunting-and-gathering-versus-agriculture/580543/81 "2011-05-04T00:26:45Z")
> [@Captain\_Amazing](#): > > Well, “rice” and “wild rice” are two different plants. Two different genuses entirely. So that’s different than domestic coconuts and wild coconuts, which are the same plant. And while it’s possible that some wild coconut could have been taken by the waves to Hawaii, there were other plants (like taro and breadfruit) and animals (like dogs and pigs) that couldn’t have gotten to Hawaii naturally and that we know were brought there by people. So, we know that by the time the Polynesians had gotten to Hawaii, they had domesticated plants and animals and were farmers. good points. trouble is, someone here is insisting mainly by quoting literature which by themselves are dubious and without scientific proof. declaring which species of plant or animal arrived through dispersion or were introduced is iffy at best when there are limited fossil records, not just of one representative species but of an entire floral or faunal succession. but there’s some use to being quick at googling and posting links as my friend has shown. you win arguments purely on insistence. ---
**Author:** ![random6x7](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8baadc/32.png) [@random6x7](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/random6x7)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2011, 2:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/efficiency-of-hunting-and-gathering-versus-agriculture/580543/82 "2011-05-04T02:20:59Z")
Wow, I haven’t seen people get this worked up over Plains prehistory since the last time my cohort had a pre-Clovis debate at a bar. **Danimal** , hunting and gathering is a hell of a lot easier than farming. It’s also less dangerous. You have a drought on your farm, you’re screwed. You have a drought where you usually gather, you move somewhere else. Hunter-gatherers can get quite territorial, especially when their population gets up there, but it’s hardly the nasty, brutish, and short life that some are making it out to be. I mean, you have to mate with someone, and it’s generally best to go outside of your band of 30 or your tribe of a couple hundred, to keep the gene pool diverse. You might be at war with people around you, but you’re just as likely to have connections with them through marriage or something. However, land is far more productive when you farm. You can support a lot more people. That’s why you don’t generally see the complex societies unless they farm, or if they happen to live in a super-productive area, like the Kwakiutl who live near the salmon runs. Undoubtedly, it took a long time to truly switch over when agriculture was invented in an area. Likely, it started with something like realizing that if you throw some seeds down, you’ll probably end up with that plant there next year. By the time they were full agriculturalists, it was probably too late to go back, since their population could very well have risen above what would have been sustainable for hunter-gatherers. This is pure speculation, but no one really thinks that someone woke up one day and decided to farm. And farming is definitely not without its downsides, since it opens us up to a lot more diseases, plus farming societies generally don’t eat the variety of foods that hunter-gatherers do. Nutritional deficiencies simply aren’t the biggest problem for hunter-gatherers, who may have over a hundred plants that they regularly gather, while agriculturalists usually rely on just a handful. Also, buffalo hunting was definitely a thing in Plains prehistory. The famous buffalo jumps and runs mostly date back to the Archaic, which was well before the Europeans got here. I’m guessing they didn’t follow the herds exactly, because why would they bother? There were tons of bison, and the Indians knew full well where they’d be. The big kill sites were also likely a place where numerous bands came together for their big yearly (or biyearly, or decadely) celebration. **Blake** , I’m not sure why it’s so important that there aren’t “pure” hunter-gatherers today. I don’t even know what that would mean. Prehistoric Plains people traded with farmers in surrounding areas. Does that make them not hunter-gatherers? And what about the tribespeople in Africa and South America who still live in small bands in their traditional areas. The lack of modern hunter-gatherers has more to do with colonialism and western encroachment than it does with the problems with hunting and gathering as a way of life. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2011, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/efficiency-of-hunting-and-gathering-versus-agriculture/580543/83 "2011-05-04T18:53:53Z")
I think there’s a piece that’s been missed - herdsmen are an intermediate step (or sidestep) between pure hunt-gather and agriculture as in mainly raising plants, or keeping flocks in defined fields. Blake seems to be lost in space (Danger Wll Robinson!!) > [@](#): > > Let’s assume that we have two identical populations of HGs on identical territory, each in direct competition with the other. 100 people on 100 square kilometres of territory. Each group is at carrying capacity at the density. The density has been 1 person/km^2 for the past 4, 000 years. > > So we have avoided the question of land and competition because both have identical land and they only compete with each other. > > One group decides one day to adopt farming. The HG group can obtain 2, 500 calories each day in that manner at that density. The farming group is agricultural and can obtain 2, 500 calories each day in that manner at that density. > > Yet you would have us believe that the agricultural group can somehow support a higher population density? Correct? > > But I can’t see any way that it can ever support a higher density. If there are already 100 people in the farming group, and a woman gives birth, then one person is going to starve to death. The group is already at maximal efficiency, you can’t produce any more food to feed the child. And of course the same applied to the HG group. In each case every person over 100 is going to see one person starve to death > > In each case the people are unable to produce more than 2, 500 calories each day. That is the productivity limit of the land. 2.500 calories/day/km is the maximum production potential of either system So how can the farming group somehow come to outnumber the HG group? You are confusing efficient as in labour effort with efficient as in making use of the land, and density as in people per square mile. Pristine high-quality land (before agriculture) would be very rich and support enough deer and wild berries or whatever to support a given level of population. Once someone figures out how to grow food, and corral the animals rather than go looking for them, the same person with the same effort can feed themselves on much LESS land. With the 101st person born, and a little bit more effort, they clear enough land to support 110 people; then 200, then 2,000. As they use up this land - the neighbour hunter-gatherers are pushed out. Population density is determined by the productivity of the land and also by method of food rpoduction. If a hunter needs 640 acres/person and a famer needs 20 acres - one type will have a larger population density, I think. Both populations will expand until they hit their Malthusian limit and a lean year reinforces the learning experience. Not sure what you are saying about plains Indians.. Their entire highly nomadic lifestyle sprang up full-blown after 1550 when the horse arrived on the plains? Including using dogs and women to pull travois before they had horses, an entire culture built around full use of buffalo products, and highly mobile tent dwellings? Before that what - they were long-house dwelling field agriculturists? Transofrmed to a completely different tradition in 100 years??? That sounds suspiciously like apologist “blame the white man” tripe that is common nowadays. ---
**Author:** ![random6x7](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8baadc/32.png) [@random6x7](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/random6x7)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2011, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/efficiency-of-hunting-and-gathering-versus-agriculture/580543/84 "2011-05-04T19:24:54Z")
There’s also technological innovation. There is simply a limit to how productive you can make an acre of land that you hunt and gather without resorting to farming-like practices, which put you on that road towards agriculture. Yeah, you can figure out how to process the poisonous stuff so it will feed rather than kill you, but, in the end, there are only so many species that are edible. With farming, however, you have a lot more room to innovate. Look at modern farming techniques versus what was going on even a couple hundred years ago. We have much higher crop yields now (not to get into a debate about industrial agriculture, but we can grow a lot more on the same amount of land now). As the earliest agriculturalists figured out about weeding, pest control, irrigation, and fertilization, their yields would have gotten higher without needing to clear more land. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2011, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/efficiency-of-hunting-and-gathering-versus-agriculture/580543/85 "2011-05-04T22:00:26Z")
> [@](#): > > [www.pygmies.org](http://www.pygmies.org) - [Pygmies.org](http://Pygmies.org) is a website dedicated to the\*\*\* hunter-gatherer peoples \*\*\*living in Central African rainforests, commonly called Pygmies. > > This website has been created by the Italian anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Luis Devin. It presents hundreds of photos and other material collected during his fieldwork among the Baka of Cameroon and Gabon and among other pygmy groups in Central Africa. Along with the images (concerning the life and traditional activities of these peoples, the Central African rainforest biodiversity, and the increasingly rapid disappearance of this world), you can find some brief ethnographic descriptions serving as introduction to pygmy cultures or commentary on the photos. Each internal page also includes sound or music recordings relative to the soundscape of the rainforest and pygmy camps. > The main aim of these pages is, therefore, to provide an introduction to the cultures of pygmy peoples and to promote their protection, documenting their richness and showing some of the factors that increasingly threaten their survival (for more information, visit the About section of the site). Odd, Blake - your point of view seems to be contradicted by the actual experts. Of course, this information is hard to find, seeing as how it is number 2 and 3 entries when we google “pygmies”. IIRC, during the Congo civil war, the guerillas forced the pygmies to use their expertise to hunt bush meat for them (typical occupation associated with farmers, I’m sure) and the rumour only half in jest was that the ones that failed to produce meat ended up in the pot themselves. The Australian aboriginals may have been numerous, even before the colonists arrived, but they never did muchmore in 40,000 years than a bunch of spray art graffitti. They did have hunting-gathering down to a science, frequently using herding and fire to corral a large number of animals at once. However, as demonstrated througout history, they effort required to do real permanent works requires the population density and surplus food that only agriculture can provide. I am not aware they practiced any significant agriculture, even though they were a short canoe ride from Papua New Guinea, where agriculture was common; and one would think the area along the east coast was rich enough to support the development of agrculture, and the polynesian expansion spread agriculture all over the islands off the east coast including New Zealand an New Caledonia. Perhaps they lacked the necessary “starter plants” to begin [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/efficiency-of-hunting-and-gathering-versus-agriculture/580543.md?page=4)