Huh? Are you saying prehistoric humans didn’t practice nomadism and migration to relieve population pressures? That’s news to me.
Sure, some early humans starved due to population pressures, but some simply picked up and moved elsewhere when the home turf got too crowded. In fact, AIUI, this phenomenon is how humans became a global species in the first place.
That article is WAAAAY out of date. It was published in 1952! Stonehenge is a continuously changing complex of monuments. The dating sequence has been reassessed continually, with the most recent being published in Antiquity, March 2009. And they’ve added a new stone circle and some hedges since then. The original bluestone circle in what are known as the Aubrey Holes, now considered Stage 1, is dated at about 3000 cal BC.
That was my first reaction, except that “lived” can mean “lived as nomads until the the available area filled up beyond the carrying capacity”. Of course, humans have an ability to adapt quickly to differing climates that few, if any, large mammals do.
The most thorougly accessible tome that sheds good light on the OP’s question is Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond.
It has a surprising amount of congruence with the theories of agrarian patriarchy I was taught in feminist theory, but be that as it may, Diamond has no axe to grind, or at least none discernable to anyone who didn’t come in believing that different races of people were intrinsically superior or inferior to others.
He’s extremely readable (you don’t need to be an anthropologist or archeologist to follow, and frankly I found it to be one of those “can’t put it down” books, which is a wee bit rare among anthro theory tomes)
If you haven’t read GG & S, do so.
True, but AFAIK such conditions in prehistoric societies also seem to have sparked reappraisals of what qualified as “available area”.
When the population pressure really starts to bear down, all of a sudden crossing that deadly desert or that inaccessible mountain pass or that interminable ocean starts to look like not such a crazy idea after all.
And that, kiddos, is how prehistoric humans ended up all over the freaking world from Madagascar to the Bering Sea to Tierra del Fuego. Have you ever watched the “Journey of Mankind” applet? I don’t know quite how chronologically accurate it is but it sure is cool to see.
Incidentally, Guns, Germs, and Steel is practically part of the SDMB required reading list since it’s mentioned so often on the board.
Hunter-fisher’s life sure is easier than farmer’s. When the farmer goes to shovel shit to his fields, the hunter takes his bow and goes to the woods for a walk. And if he gets a moose he doesn’t need to walk for days unless he wants to. But cereals are easy to store, so if after 10 years of happy meat eating, the year with absolutely no game comes around, he’ll have to go begging to the farm. This could be the reason for either spread of agriculture or how it got started
Considering the traditional big caveman stereotype with a huge club, big stupid Conan-type men probably came useful with agriculture. There’s quite a lot of grainsack logistics going on and a farmer doesn’t need to run necessarily anywhere. On the other hand, to be big you need to have sufficiently food every single year of your life, so maybe everybody was just thin.
In contrast, it’s hard to see any benefit for a big clumsy idiot when you’re trying to catch game, except maybe mammoth. Anyway the stupid caveman came originally from popular culture and had never traction among scientists anyway. And the club is just equilly useless to everybody, even comic characters trying to hit Flash Gordon.
Sure, some humans would migrate to relieve populations pressures - those humans who happened to live at the fringes of human settlement. But what about a tribe of humans whose hunting grounds were surrounded by other inhabited areas? It’s not as if they would decide to pack everything up and wander a thousand miles or two until they found a suitable wilderness. No, they either displaced their neighbors, or they starved.
How can you grow food unless you live nearby? Unless I’m misunderstanding the definition of “agriculture” to mean “deliberately growing some stuff so you can eat it later”.
Well, herding is also a form of agriculture. I’m not sure that’s what he meant, though.
Not exactly a good cite, but on TV a month or so back, there was a program about archaeology in Russia or Georgia. They showed that the residents of 30K years ago had artefacts that had come from many hundreds of miles away, thus showing an extensive trade system.
Heh, any stealth pot-grower these days can tell you that one: you can easily prepare a patch of plants (or “encourage” some that are growing naturally, by pulling out weeds etc.), leave 'em alone and hope for the best, comming back later to see if anything useful has grown.
(My dad owns some tree-lot land north of Toronto, and every few years he finds a plot of pot teens try to grow on his land in a hidden nook in this manner).
Naturally this method loses a lot to herbavores, other humans (and in some cases annoyed dads 
), but it does not require full-time supervision of the crops.
I’m willing to bet that the origins of agriculture were a natural progression - nomads “preparing” or helping plots of useful plants, doing their nomad thing, and returning to check on them when they were ready to harvest. Though as pointed out upthread, there are lots of theories, this makes intuitive sense to me - agriculture could not have originated “full blown” and there must have been an inbetween stage when people did a bit of both.
Yeah, that’s my understanding too. It’s thought to have been a continuous (though not necessarily always gradual) transition from
gathering anything useful you happen to come across
noticing that some particular useful stuff reappears every year at some particular time/place in your annual migration
helping the useful stuff grow by clearing or pruning, and deliberately sowing seeds elsewhere to get more useful stuff
saying, during some particularly warm and abundant gathering season of the useful stuff, “Holy Og, look at all this food! We don’t even need to move south to the lake this winter, we would be fine just staying here!”
to—ta-daaa!—sedentary agriculture.
There had to be a few more steps along the way, though, like figuring out how to store grain, or how to bake it into bread.
The first beneficiaries of proto-agriculture were probably stuff eaten more or less on the spot, or preserved by simple methods like drying that don’t require heavy fixed infrastructure that can’t be taken along by nomads (like storage pottery or grainaries).
A modern-day example of this sort of thing I’ve seen up north, where a local Algonquin band deliberately burned over a small island to prepare it for blueberries (the bushes grow best a few years after a fire). Fires of course occur naturally, but it isn’t a huge step to set then deliberately in places you know blueberries would likely grow.
Blueberries can of course also be dried and used in preserved foods like pemmican.
There are granaries and grain grinding implements found in Jordan that predate agriculture/large settlements in that area by about 1k years. The remains of the grains found on the implements are from wild species found in that area, not domesticated versions.
Actually, it’s more likely that after ten years of happy grain-eating, the wheat blight arrives, and the farmer goes begging to the hunter-gatherer (because even if the blueberry blight comes along, the hunter-gatherer is also eating acorns, rasberries, rabbits, etc.). Except there aren’t any hunter-gatherers because the farmers have so many more kids that they’ve chased all the hunter-gatherers away.
Why did they have more kids? Because more survived and/or they were more fertile, both of which would be tied to higher caloric intake, even their diet was lower in protein. It is easier to raise a calorie than to find one or hunt one.
On top of that, it is not an either/or proposition: every farmer I know, hunts. I’d be pretty sure early agriculturalists hunted, and only stopped in areas where game was eliminated or someone had to political power to enforce a ban hunting.
I always figured domestic farming was forced on losers. As populations grew, some groups kept or took the best hunting gathering lands, and others were trapped or pushed onto lands that did not provide for their population, so with necessity being the mother of invention, they slowly developed true farming from earlier practices of encouraging favored species. As the calories per acre exceeded that of their neighbors, their populations grew and urbanized.
There are two ways of life here, one which leads to larger poulation than the other. My hypothesis is that that the first one lets people thru bad times better. I remember having heard that this is because stores but I have no site. Does anybody know how long grain can be kept?
Also, in traditional non-industrial farming, in good times you grow more than you can eat and your animals eat that. In bad times, you have too little food for all your animals so you eat some of them. In addition, the farmers many boys are standing by the blueberry fields with spears in their hands. How is the hunter and his son going to deal with it?
Anyway, agriculture has been so much mixed with hunting-fishing-gathering that my too simplistic example of putting the ways of life in direct contact is not very good. The Wikipedia in Finnish says Sumerians were the first culture of agriculture only diet but provides no site. That would mean that agriculture only way of life covers barely half of the history of agriculture. And hasn’t really reached Finland yet. Every farmer here hunts and fishes and berry-picking isn’t rare either.