Right, one of the things stressed a lot in more modern scholarship is there wasn’t one day when Ur-Hakk the Hunter-Gatherer noticed he could plant seeds and growing crops, so now his entire society were settled agriculturalists. There were long stretches of time in which these societies engaged in proto-agricultural behaviors but didn’t become fully settled farmers. I think the importance of how HGs could modify the plant environment in their region even before deliberate planting is sometimes underestimated, they could destroy plants they didn’t like and essentially “garden” the ones they did, to reshape their environment in ways more beneficial to them. I think it is often underestimated the degree to which pre-modern Hunter-Gatherers sometimes modify their environment to improve their situation, they were not passive participants in the process.
Also interesting about agriculture–it didn’t actually eliminate the possibility of boom and bust. It did generally increase the “carrying capacity” of a region, so what you sometimes had in settled agricultural societies is a population spike, but then something bad happens. War, drought etc and a few years of bad harvests stack. Suddenly that big population is hungry, and the agricultural system can’t produce enough yield to keep people alive. Mass die offs occur. Such mass die offs have been regular parts of agricultural societies. The last major one in the West not directly related to large scale wars were in the early 19th century–“the year without summer”, likely linked to a large volcanic eruption that caused a brief year of global cooling.
It’s also interesting to note that there are multiple points throughout history in which agriculturalism found itself at a distinct disadvantage to other cultural forms.
In the early Bronze age, around 2400 to 2100 BC, the Neo-Sumerian Empire was essentially overrun by peoples we know as the “Amorites”, who as best we can tell were semi-nomadic pastoralists, who instead of planting appeared to mostly travel around to exploit good grazing lands for their herds. Considered barbarians by the Sumerians (some Sumerian records indicate walls were constructed to keep the Amorites out), it is believed a period of prolonged drought that weakened the Sumerians eventually gave the Amorites a tactical advantage and they swooped in.
One advantage of nomadic pastoralism is if things get rough in a specific area, you can move or attempt to move to better land. Settled agriculturalists lack that option. Several of the new states that formed after the ensuing collapse of the Neo-Sumerians were led by Amorite dynasties–including Babylon’s Hammurabi.
History of course contains many tales of settled agriculturalists falling to non-agriculturalist outsiders–the Sea Peoples of the Early Bronze Age collapse, various waves of nomadic Steppe peoples who ravaged and conquered Europe and Asia (Huns, Magyars, Khazars, Tatars, Mongols et al.)