IP Blog

Why is it that hunter-gatherers converted to farmer-herders?  Jared Diamond provided countless reasons in his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel.  The usual answer is that it is easier and less time consuming to produce your food than find it, but there is evidence that this may be untrue.  Diamond says, “Time budget studies show that they [farmer-herders] may spend more rather than fewer hours per day at work than hunter-gatherers do” (105).  In a previous blog, Agriculture: The Best Mistake in the History of the Human Race, I discussed how food production lowers living conditions for farmers, so what actually causes this change in philosophy?  Diamond suggests that there are five proximate causes for the development of food production: a decrease in wild foods, an increase in domesticable plants, the introduction of new technology, a rise in population density, and the spread of food production from other areas (110-112).  To fully comprehend the reason hunters changed from their lifestyle, we must take a closer look at the actual change.  Once we see how this change occurred, we can begin to understand why and what caused this change.

Let’s catapult back in time to 9000 B.C., before anyone had started food production.  A hunter-gatherer spends all day foraging through the forest, killing animals and picking roots, berries, and leaves that are edible.  Despite the common misconception, this human does not miraculously decide to stick the strawberry that he just picked in the middle of a field and water it.  No, instead he eats the strawberry, and some of the seeds pass through his digestive tract, getting planted in his waste.  The next year, he discovers a strawberry plant, ripe with fruit (115-117).  In this way, our hunter-gatherer has unconsciously started to become a food producer.  As food starts to become scarce (cause 1) because of an overpopulation of hunters (cause 4), our farmer realizes that he could increase his yield if he “planted” some of his berries in better spots.  Gradually, he plants more crops in his nomadic range (cause 2).  “Some modern nomads of New Guinea’s Lakes Plains make clearings in the jungle, plant bananas and papayas, go off for a few months to live again as hunter-gatherers, return to check on their crops, weed the garden if they find the crops growing, set off again to hunt, return months later to check again, and settle down for a while to harvest and eat if their garden has produced” (Diamond 106).  Through his planting of different crops, he will develop tools to help him harvest his crops (cause 3).  Finally the big day arrives, and the hunter-gatherer just decides not to move on.  The combination of his garden and wild foods has proved productive enough to feed him and his family for a whole year.  I’m not quite sure where he technically becomes a farmer-herder, but at this point he has definitely crossed the threshold, never to return to his hunter-ways.  Meanwhile, his neighbors see his success, and begin to try planting their own crop.  Thus, they become farmers as well (cause 5). 

Now that we have traced the beginning of food production, we see the true reason that hunters change to food production is because they are gradually forced to.  The hunters make decisions that lead to unknown consequences (106).  As shown above, all of Diamond’s proximate factors cause food production, so which one guarantees the rise of food production?  The answer is what happens first in the development process.  Food has to become scarce, otherwise the painstaking process of planting food to increase an areas yield would have been unnecessary.  As Diamond says, “People seek food in order to satisfy their hunger and fill their bellies.  They also crave specific foods. . .” (107). Without the hunter-gatherer requiring a certain food, he would never be driven to plant it.  Thus food production would never evolve, and the hunter would continue foraging.  But where did this decline come from?  Diamond suggests that the major cause of this drop is over-hunting, and he quickly implies a climate change (110).  This climate change, in the form of global warming, caused a loss of grassy plains.  In combination, human hunting and the climate caused a decrease in animal population, which facilitated the switch from the hunter-gatherer to the farmer-herder lifestyle (Laing).  Finally, without this initial development of food production, it would never spread to other areas.