fnord888:

raginrayguns:

ciphergoth:

I’ve heard two things about the transition to agriculture:

• it made a much larger population possible, but
• it made the people much worse off, to the extent that archaeologists use signs of malnourishment as an indicator of whether a body is that of a forager or farmer.

I don’t really understand how those things go together. How was it possible for foragers to be well-nourished? Surely their population would simply grow until people were going hungry, in classic Malthusian style? Surely having the means to make more food per head should mean that people are better fed on average?

I don’t mean “I don’t believe it”, I’m pretty sure the experts know what they’re talking about, I mean I actually don’t understand it, and I’d like to. 

gonna register a guess: agriculture created more calories which meant more people, but not enough protein or iron or other nutrients for those people

It’s not necessarily the case food availability* was the constraint on hunter-gatherer population growth, if fertility is limited by other constraints and prereproductive mortality is high.

Multiple sources mention that birth spacing is greater in hunter-gatherer than in early agricultural societies. It’s noted here that weening occurs earlier in agricultural societies.

*Particularly if you mean “food availablity” in the purely Malthusian sense, ie in terms of how large a population can be supported by a given area of land. Even if the land could support more maximally efficient hunter-gatherers, the food production ability of a hunter-gatherer band may not be able to support more than a certain fraction of children at a given time.

One source suggests that childhood mal/undernutrition may be common in hunter-gather societies. Though it’s comparing modern hunter-gatherers with other moderns so it may not be the best comparison to early agriculturalists

Another source seems to suggest that women’s food gathering ability is significantly reduced while they have a young child (though I didn’t track down the original citation). 

Population carrying capacity isn’t determined by average food availability, it’s determined by food availability at the narrowest bottleneck - for forager populations that would be winter, and specifically a winter in which game is particularly scarce - say from a drought suppressing flora growth which in turn caused die-offs or low reproduction in prey animals, combined with competition from rival apex predators (wolves, say) at a high point in their population cycle.

The switch from foraging to farming allowed for food preservation - grains can be stored and preserved (brewing didn’t just allow for drunkenness, it didn’t just allow for the purification and thus use of tainted water sources, it also rendered grain into a form that resisted spoilage from vermin and fungus [by spoiling it under controlled conditions, basically]), sedentary lifestyles allow for storehouses of salted/smoked meat, etc. This supplemented the existing technology of feasting (eating past satiation in times of high availability so as to preserve food as body fat) in allowing food availability to be “averaged out” over the course of a year/multi-year famine cycles, which made bottlenecks not as severe.