About 10,000 years ago
Human civilization discovered how to grow food crops to support its tribes, villages, and towns. Understanding agricultural methods encourages settlement, population increase, and spare time for people. People used to hunt and gather food, including other animals, on the surface of the planet. They had just enough food from hunting to get by, not enough to thrive. Due to the abundance of food crops produced by agriculture, people ceased to engage in hunting and gathering. On the other side, growing food crops has the drawback of degrading the soil and causing wild animal habitat to disappear.
Agriculture has been advantageous to humans
I feel agriculture has been advantageous to humans because it allows settlement, job specification, and increased food availability. The advancement of agriculture had caused an exponential growth of food availability unlike in the past when our evolutionary ancestors had to gather edible food in the forests. Agriculture provided the people with enough food to support more offsprings. Therefore, it led to increment in family sizes as result of a significant starvation decrease. Agriculture also helped individuals with nomadic tendencies to settle down and concentrate on their farms because crop growing requires constant attention. Growing of crops made such people to build shelters and irrigation in specific places where they could store food, raise livestock and establish a government. Agriculture also helped humans to acquire job specification. For instance, cultural activities such as building and tool and cloth manufacturing emerged due to increase in demand for agricultural items. The need for such goods enabled people to specialize in different tasks for trade.
The various disadvantages of humans shifting to a more sedentary society
The various disadvantages of humans shifting to a more sedentary society include environmental degradation and increase in labor. Sedentariness triggers environmental hazards that lead to deforestation, soil loss, and loss of native species of plants and animals. Raising crops in a given place also requires much more labor than foraging because people have to prepare the land, plant crops, and protect them from predators before harvesting.
