Consider in particular Jared Diamond’s argument that agriculture was “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”

“As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It's not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their lifestyle, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn't want.”

A variation on this is Stephen Hawkings’ warning about meeting alien species: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race

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In response to this claim, let’s take a look back to the spread of agriculture into Europe starting about 9,000 years ago. Most of Western Europe was, at that time, populated by a community that geneticists have creatively dubbed “Western Hunter Gatherers.” These people—dark skinned and light-eyed—hunted and fished and foraged, preferring woodlands and the edges of wetlands and bodies of water.

Archeologists wondered for a long time if agriculture spread by adoption—if these foragers took up farming. But, thanks to genetic studies, we now know that agriculture spread into Europe mostly by migration as early farmers from Anatolia migrated first into what is now Greece and then into the rest of the continent.

These Neolithic farmers brought with them cereal crops, like wheat, and domesticated animals, like cattle, that had originated in the ancient Near East. They resembled modern Sardinians, the modern community with the highest percentage of these Neolithic farmers among their ancestors.

(Basically, if you have ancestors from Europe, your ancestors almost certainly included people from both of these foragers and these farmers.)

These two communities, rather than clashing, co-existed with each other throughout Europe for thousands of years. They sometimes interbred, but for the most part they left each other alone, each preferring very different environments.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/ancient-face-cheddar-man-reconstructed-dna-spd

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At the Blätterhöhle cave in what is now Germany, researchers found the remains of three different ancient communities.

The first were hunter-gatherers, based on both their genomes and the stable isotopes in their teeth and bones, which revealed a diet of wild game. The second group also belonged to the same genetic population as the first, but ate a diet heavy in freshwater fish. And the third were agriculturalists, descended primarily from those Anatolian farmers but with some hunter-gatherer ancestors as well. This last group ate a diet heavy in domesticated animals.

So three very different communities, with different but overlapping ancestries and very different ways of life, lived side-by-side, sometimes intermarrying, and using the same cave to bury their dead. And, based on radiocarbon dating, they continued to do so for 2,000 years after the arrival of agriculture.

It’s hard to square 2,000 years of co-existence with Diamond’s Just So story about the inexorable and mechanical expansion of farming at the expense of hunter-gatherers.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257648697_2000_Years_of_Parallel_Societies_in_Stone_Age_Central_Europe

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In Britain, agriculture arrived about 6,000 years ago with those Neolithic farmers. As at Blätterhöhle, they intermarried with the local hunter-gatherers, eventually absorbing that community.

But, several centuries after agriculture arrived, the evidence for farming starts to drop off in the archeological record and doesn’t reappear for almost another thousand years. Chris Stevens and Dorian Fuller argued in the journal Antiquity in 2012 (sorry, no full text link) that “cereal cultivation was abandoned throughout many parts of the British Isles in favour of increased reliance on pastoralism and wild resources during the Middle to Late Neolithic.”

People seem to have abandoned the growing of crops like wheat in favor of gathering wild hazelnuts, the shells of which show up in large quantities at sites throughout this period, and herding domesticated animals. Stevens and Fuller note that this period also coincides with population decline, which they suggest was driven by a worsening climate but which I wonder might not have been a product of the plague (genetic evidence for which shows up all across Europe around this time).

But the authors also note that this is the period during which monumental stone architecture, like Stonehenge, was constructed. So clearly the people of Britain were still able to coordinate and mobilize for massively complex undertakings, even if they had abandoned agriculture for a long while. It’s hard to square a thousand-year abandonment of agriculture by a sophisticated and energetic society with a teleological story about agriculture’s inevitable advance and structural advantages over foraging.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/abs/did-neolithic-farming-fail-the-case-for-a-bronze-age-agricultural-revolution-in-the-british-isles/DDC019088534FB8D35AF356D346842E1

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