America is an excellent example of populations expanding rapidly into new lands. You can see it on several scales.
The first Americans arrived from Asia. Considerable debate exists today whether they came over the Bering Land Bridge or arrived in boats farther south. Both might have happened. A few anthropologists also contend that island-hopping made migration from Europe independently possible.
Whatever and wherever the first point of entry was, evidence of human inhabitation is found in large areas over a short contemporary time period. Although communities that were sited on the Pacific and made heavy use of seafood for their diet were continuous throughout post-arrival centuries, other groups traveled farther inland. The presumption is that they followed game into unhunted areas. Staying in one place would have led to conflict over hunting grounds and tribal boundaries, as is known from other hunter-gatherer societies.
A similar process can be seen in speeded-up form after the American Revolution. Americans established a myriad of towns and cities along the eastern seaboard. They’re all still there. But a small fraction of the population saw untouched land and opportunities farther west. They went from New England into western new York, from western New York into Ohio and the Northwest Territory, from the Northwest Territory into the Great Plains. A southern route took them from Virginia and the Carolinas through Georgia into Mississippi and eventually Texas. The is the exact opposite of nomadism. It is settle, some move on and settle, some move on and settle, etc. Many of the original settlers never set foot out of their villages for the rest of their lives. The population boundary moved instead.
That in some fashion describes every Out of Africa and subsequent population dispersal argument. The details are hotly debated; the overall scheme is not. We have piles of historic documentation of the American westwardly movement as well as the smaller one inland from the Pacific in California, Oregon, and Washington. All others can be traced through archaeological records.
The remnants of true nomadism can still be seen in northern Africa among tribes that move along the edges of the various great deserts seeking food supplies and driving cattle long distances. The long-term use of cattle has selected for lactose tolerance, giving them genetic markers that are easily distinguished from most African tribal peoples. (In the same way, lactose tolerance can be traced out of Anatolia or the Middle East north and then west to Britain, as well as east to India. When tolerance shows up and the percentage in current populations dispersion pattern give excellent timelines for the population dispersal.) African nomadic behavior has been thoroughly studied and is different from either hunter-gatherer or farming communities. Could it have been an intermediate state between the two? Possibly, although I don’t remember anybody seriously postulating this. Nor is it necessary as an explanation. We have a good one in boundary expansion backed with loads of evidence.
An equally fascinating example is the Polynesian expansion - in a matter of about 1,000 years they covered the entire Pacific despite the effort required to find new lands. IIRC population pressure was the driving force for most expansion - something more immediate when most societies are on smaller islands; population can grow quickly enough to provide a need to expand, given good resources.
Wild edible plants aren’t a reliable food source. You may have seen wild berry bushes growing along a fence. A couple handfuls of berries won’t keep several people alive for even a few days. A small group of people would exhaust all the edible plants in a area very quickly.
People had to develop plants that could be grown & harvested each year. Giving a constant source of food. Saving starter seed to plant again the following spring.
My wife’s French is pretty good, but the only meaning she knows for soudure is solder. Perhaps the word you want is “thaw”, which here in Quebec is called “le degel”. At any rate that is the time when the food has run out and there is no new harvest yet. We have just started gathering early greens (had sorrel soup last night), but there are generally few calories to be had yet. A farmer has to learn to store his grain and maybe salt his meat and make jerky, but he will usually have a steady supply of food. And then, and only then, population will increase, people will discover war and all that.
It seems pretty clear to me that farming became a fall back when population density got too high to support hunter-gatherer economies. The increased political capacity that comes with farming likely then made it possible to push remaining H-G groups to increasingly marginal land.
I think this thread in general overstates the insecurity of hunter gatherer economies and overstates the upsides of farming. Small holder low tech farming is a singularly insecure and miserable way to live, and one that our ancestors stopped doing as soon as possible.
That seems pretty unlikely, given that we spent 90% of human history as hunter-gatherers.
What succeeds continues and what fails does not. But there is no easy definition of “success”.
Imagine a campfire near a wood pile. There’s a person chopping dead wood and adding it to the pile. There’s another person slowing feeding wood onto the fire. The surrounding trees are growing very slowly, but fast enough to keep up with the wood chopper. It’s a stable system. Then the fire jumps to the wood pile. In five minutes, the entire wood pile is up in flames. Suddenly you have ten times the light and ten times the heat. Would you call that success? It’s not sustainable.
Exponentially increasing population seems like success in the short run but it could lead to disaster in the long run. It may be too soon to call modern civilization a success yet. In the few thousand years that we’ve been doing it, modern civilization has been successful (like a forest fire is successful) and could not have done so without agriculture. But how would a time traveler judge that success when, in the year 3000, the human population has shrunk back down to a quarter billion hunter-gatherers?
Farming could have been a clear choice for and not just a fall back. Gathering was the start of agriculture and may have appealed to HGs for a long time until they were able to reliably sustain crops and give up the minimal HG lifestyle.
Why do you think agriculture started with small holders? That would have been highly impractical. Whole tribes would have worked as much land as they could. The concept of individual land ownership likely followed the development of agriculture. I can’t imagine individual or small families of HGs starting to farm by themselves.
Your analogy would be like someone gave you a metal axe now so you can cut 10 times as much, but the forest can still keep up. Then (industrial revolution)you get a chainsaw, so you can’t cut as fast as you want to any more - you have to hold back some.
But note that the system is self-correcting somewhat also. In developed countries population will start shrinking. A revolution is starting in electric vehicles, for example, that will significantly dent oil consumption. Solar cells and batteries. The question is, can these sort of tech save the planet before the old tech destroys it? In 1000 years we could be flying around the world in electric flying cars, or we could be hunter-gathers with only scrapped wreckage for metal resources.
But places like Egypt have sustained stable agricultural ecology for 10,000 years, until the industrial revolution came along, so I wouldn’t call that a runaway forest fire. Other places have succumbed to problems like irrigation leaching salt, so not all such situations are stable.
From 1960 to 2015, the global urbanization rate rose from 34% to 54%. In high income countries, its rose from 64% to 81%. In middle income countries, the rise has been a whopping 24% to 51%. Even in low income countries, where at least a family farm offers some basic access to calories and where the city has next to no safety net, the urbanization rate has rose from 10% to 32%. And all this despite a generally higher fertility rate in rural areas.
It’s not so much that they stopped doing it as much as social & market forces destroyed it as larger farmers, rich city folks and the Church bought up all the small, individual plots over time.
Yep. The same Anatolian HGculture that built Göbekli Tepe is one of the ones that we think first transitioned to agriculture and built the first proto-cities like Çatalhöyük - they seemed big into collectivism.
