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http://en.brinkwire.com/science/life-was-easier-when-humans-hunted-for-food/Switching from hunting to farming made life more difficult and forced people to work longer hours, a Cambridge University study on modern tribes has claimed.
The agriculture revolution is heralded as a major turning point in human history as it ushered in stable settlements and allowed culture to blossom.
But scientists found it was not without its costs as the arduous work was less productive and took longer to make the same amount of food as a hunter-gatherer.
In a study of modern day Agta tribes scattered around remote regions of the Philippines, they found hunter-gatherers spend 20 hours a week getting food whereas those that had recently taken up farming took 30 hours to get the same quantity.
The research goes against the commonly held belief that the advent of agriculture benefited humans and made life easier, and researchers are yet to understand why.
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Dr Mark Dyble, first author of the study, says: ‘For a long time, the transition from foraging to farming was assumed to represent progress, allowing people to escape an arduous and precarious way of life.
Actually, what farming allowed was a less violent way of life than hunting, at the cost of more labour. That it was maintained despite the ergonomic cost fits our conjecture that noble behaviour was what mattered most to the people of the Golden Age (which is what made it the Golden Age!).
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More mainstream journalists are now using a more accurate definition of agriculture:
riverdalepress.com/stories/without-agricultural-revolution-todays-society-wouldnt-exist,69621
Agriculture — which is the domestication of plants — began between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago during the Neolithic period in several different global centers. Wheat, barley, lentils and peas were domesticated in the Near East. Millet and rice were grown around the same time in China.
In Mesoamerica, squash plants were also grown around that period as well as the early ancestor of corn (teosinte). Corn, as we know it today, was only developed around 4000 B.C.
It wasn't that long ago when it was common for the term to be misused to include herding.
Of course, strictly speaking, agriculture is cultivation of plants with or without domestication (ie. mutation such that the cultivated plant is no longer capable of growing uncultivated) occurring. But this is a minor detail.