Around 10,000 years ago humans began to shift from hunting and gathering towards farming. This settling down marked a key turning point in our history; paving the way for cities, civilisation and all that fun stuff. It clearly worked out for the best . . . . eventually. The first farmers were actually plagued by a host of issues. In fact - by many standards - they were actually a lot worse off than those hunter-gatherers.
The big change was obviously in diet; with a shift from wild plants and animals to domesticated ones. Whilst domesticated foods aren't any worse for you than their wild counterparts (whatever paleodiet promoters try and tell you) the first farmers still had problems. Most notably they didn't as many varieties of domesticated food. The breadth of their diet fell. Some groups supplemented their diet with wild food to make up for this, but where they didn't malnutrition sparked up.
And that's not the only problem that their new food source caused. Animals are filthy. Have you seen them? They poop everywhere. As a result of this living in close proximity to them can often cause an increase in disease and all that nasty stuff. So not only was their new food source not giving them everything they needed, it was actively harming them as well.
So why did groups around the world begin adopting farming?
Some have argued that a key benefit was that it overall requires less effort. You don't have to spend hours each day hunting down and finding food. Instead, it's right on your doorstep. Sure, a bit of extra work is needed during harvest and planting time; but for the rest of the year you've got time off. Time to build fancy buildings, make some nice art or go to war. In fact, many early farming cultures would plant food in the spring, head off to war in the summer then come back home for harvest.
Yet research on hunter-gatherers has shown that their lives aren't as hard work as you might think. In many cultures they wind up spending only a few hours a day at work. Now, this can vary quite a bit. Hunter-gatherers living in harsher environments do have to put in a lot more work. But crucially, this isn't always the case and they can often survive with far less work than farmers.
What about predictability? Unless you're very forgetful, you'll always know where your farm is. Wild resources on the other hand can move all over the place. You may well be faced with a famine tomorrow because that herd of gazelle you've been hunting have decided to leave. Yet research also shows that this assumption is faulty. Hunter-gatherers are actually less likely to encounter resource unreliability and famine than early farmers.
At this point the list of advantages to staying still is growing quite thin. But what if the actual advantage was simply in staying still. Hunter-gatherers get a lot of advantages over farmers, but they have to stay mobile in order to get them. This puts a pretty hard limit on how fancy your technology can be. If you've got to drag it all over the place then you can't have too many tools. Stay sedentary though and your technology can flourish. So whilst farming might take more man hours, they'll be a easier hours since you can have more tools to help you succeed.
Moving about also puts a pretty hefty strain on the human body. Removing this issue could make it a lot easier for people to recover from ailments. Like pregnancy. If women aren't trying to have babies and spend a lot of energy walking about they could have even more babies. Could the popularity of farming simply be the result of demographics? Nobody chose to settle down, those that did just outcompeted those that didn't through sheer numbers.
Or maybe they just fancied a pint of beer.
There are a lot of possible reasons farming spread (and they likely all played a role together). But one thing is clear, it wasn't the obvious choice it might seem with hindsight. Farming changed the world, but it was a hard path to walk. Or plough.
References
Berbesque, J. C., Marlowe, F. W., Shaw, P., & Thompson, P. (2014). Hunter-gatherers have less famine than agriculturalists. Biology letters, 10(1), 20130853.
Larsen, C. S. (2002). Post-Pleistocene human evolution: bioarchaeology of the agricultural transition. Human diet: its origin and evolution. Westport: Bergin and Garvey. p, 19-36.
Larsen, C. S. (2006). The agricultural revolution as environmental catastrophe: implications for health and lifestyle in the Holocene. Quaternary International, 150(1), 12-20.
