Why have we settled while foragers used to be healthier instead?
score:8
Read the book Guns, Germs and Steel from Jared Diamond. He writes in 480 pages what I try to surmise in a few lines.
The trick is quantity over quality. A farmer has an (almost) guaranteed source of calories. Hunter-gatherers have not. The food sources of hunter-gatherers are more varied, and more healthy. But they can't store it long term. Farmers can.
Hunter-gatherers sometimes have a bountiful harvest of berries or a very successful hunt. All they can do is eat until they barf. Perhaps carry a few slaps of meat, or a basket with berries to the next camp, but no more. They couldn't store the meat or the berries for the next couple of months. They could carry it, but if they did, they would have to leave the same weight of utensils behind. A human can only carry so much.
Farmers build storage facilities where they stored their surplus. While waiting for better times, or the next planting season. Hunter-gatherers would suffer starvation.
As the food supply was more bountiful and more regular (at the cost of being less nutritious), farmers could father children every year. Hunter-gatherers could father children only when the youngest had learned to walk - which is about every 2-3 years.
That all gave farmers a real advantage over hunter-gatherers. Their food was of lesser quality, but far more regular and plentiful. Famines did happen, but far less often than it hurts hunter-gatherers.
Upvote:5
Peter Kropotkinβs now outdated but classic Mutual aid: a factor in human evolution discusses goods and population densities versus property forms and hierarchalisation. For the historical materialist historian a society's accumulation of social surplus under anything less than social control (ie: under anything less than direct democratic economics) encourages within society violence. Intrasocial violence produces a society more capable of intersocial violence. Gathering societies have fewer combatants and less developed intersocial violence techniques than husbandry, pastoral or agricultural societies.
English translation: Societies that make more food than they need for bare survival either get more organized to prevent fighting over the excess wealth, or they end up fighting over the excess wealth. The winners in the fights end up being the folks better at fighting. Add in that there are orders of magnitude more of these organized fighting folks than there are gatherers, and when they look your way, its a bad day to be a gatherer.
Upvote:10
Who are "we" in your question? Organization of society is not a result of some collective, democratic decision.
Farming societies are stronger for two reasons: a) they allow a greater population density, and b) farming is connected with stronger organization of society. This permits farming societies to win over hunter gatherers, take their territory, displace them etc.
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