Why Humans Took Up Farming: They Like To Own Stuff

The appeal of owning your own property — and all the private goods that came with it — may have convinced nomadic humans to settle down and take up farming. So says a new study that tried to puzzle out why early farmers bothered with agriculture.

For decades, scientists have believed our ancestors took up farming some 12,000 years ago because it was a more efficient way of getting food. But a growing body of research suggests that wasn't the case at all.

"We know that the first farmers were shorter, they were more prone to disease than the hunter-gatherers," says Samuel Bowles, the director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, describing recent archaeological research.

Bowles' own work has found that the earliest farmers expended way more calories in growing food than they did in hunting and gathering it. "When you add it all up, it was not a bargain," says Bowles.

So why farm? Bowles lays out his theory in a new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The reasons are complex, but they revolve around the concept of private property. [...] NPR


Actualización 24-08-13. Human transition from foraging to farming was a gradual co-evolution, not a rapid innovation
Research by SFI Professor Sam Bowles on the co-evolution of agriculture and private property features prominently in a review in Current Biology about scientists' current understanding of the factors leading to humanity's transition from foraging to farming.

"The archaeological evidence that has accumulated so far suggests that the introduction of farming wasn't a straightforward technological revolution driven by key inventions like the introduction of steam engines or airplanes," writes Current Biology's Michael Gross. "While the efficiency per hectare improved dramatically, the efficiency per person certainly did not, as Samuel Bowles from the Santa Fe Institute (New Mexico, USA) has calculated." A 2011 paper by Bowles found that the earliest farmers produced significantly fewer calories per work hour, on average, than foragers.

Gross also cites a 2013 paper by Bowles and Jung-Kyoo Choi that examined the interaction between farming and the emergence of private property by modeling population dynamics, climate variability, different approaches to food provision, and different approaches to property sharing. The model showed that property rights among farming populations likely co-evolved with the introduction of farming methods, and only under tightly constrained conditions.

"Bowles and Choi argue that it was the co-evolution of food production and property rights—rather than technological progress based on inventions—that secured the success of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent and the small number of other regions where agriculture evolved independently at later times," Gross writes.
Gross also reviews recent archeological evidence, which generally support the hypothesis that "a confluence of various developments catalysed each other...Only after millennia of slow changes did the early farmers gain the advantages that enabled them to push aside populations adhering to the earlier hunter-gatherer lifestyles."

Read the article in Current Biology (August 19, 20213)