RE:RE Agriculture was mankind's biggest mistake

Sorry for taking so long to post my last round, I've been trying to find a quote to use for part of my argument, but unfortunately I couldn't find it. Again, my opponent fails to see that not all hunter and gathers where the same. It is true that many clans of hunter and gathers where nomadic and frequently moved, but that is just one type of people. There where hunter and gathers who found a place that they could get an abundant amount of food to feed everyone without having to move, and people who built more "permanent" homes. Usually, in hunter and gather societies, the men would go on the hunt, which could take weeks, and bring back food, so if you did get sick or weak you wouldn't be slowing them down, and like I said earlier, most dieses developed because of agriculture. Even the nomadic people didn't have to move to far away because most of them where migratory. Birds fly south in the winter and go to the same spot to breed, and then return north. Some of the nomadic hunter and gathers did this as well; every hunter and gather didn't travel across the world. To reiterate and make sure my point about the Native Americans getting small pox if clarified; Crossing the Atlantic Ocean was a fast way to travel back then, it is the equivalent to traveling across the world in a day by aircraft in today's standers. If you have seen the move Contagion (it was not good at all), they plot is that a woman gets a dieses in Asia, gets sick, and spreads it everywhere she goes. Because she went to different places all over the world, everyone on her plain got sick and spread it in the places they lived. People populated South America by 38,000 BC, it took thousands of years to get there and many generations, each time they moved further they adapted slowly, it was a gradual change, whereas crossing the Atlantic Ocean in just a few months was a sudden change. Before you go to parts of Africa, you have to take shots to build up immunity to the native dieses, if you just when without it you would get sick quickly. The rest of the points Con makes are about overpopulation and issues it caused, which I will talk about this round. The reason why the population of humans exploded is directly related to agriculture. After the invention of agriculture populations of individual clans increased, due to the surplus of food, they were able to support more people, more people more labor, specialization of labor, development of civilization, ect. By the time the whole world had discovered agriculture, civilization was starting to develop all around the world. This caused a population explosion. If instead of having one child, everyone has two, and then they have two, you see how the population rapidly expanded. The rest is common sense, more people, less land, more competition. Mammals are instinctively competitive to insure the survival of a species. This still leaves the question; wouldn't human population eventually expand in a hunting and gathering lifestyle? The answer is simple, no. It is a basic biological fact that population is limited by available resources in the ecosystem. There are good times, and there are bad times. If bears eat fish, and fish eat plants then they all stay equal. If bears start to thrive, then fish population decreases. With less fish bears are more completive and some die of hunger. When there are less fish, the fish that don't get eaten have it easier because there are less fish and more plants. If one part of the food chain is affected, all the other parts are affected. By developing agriculture we messed with the food chain and allowed ourselves to be the bears and control the fish populations. This sounds like a good thing but eventually crops don't grow and fish die. When there is not enough food to go around, people die of hunger. So, like you said, when there are too many people, there are conflicts. Interesting points: It is a little late to bring this up and it is somewhat irrelevant to this debate. Agriculture was first developed in places where there was enough game to support a larger population. This shows that in the beginning (of agriculture), people made a choice to do it rather than hunt and gather. Once hunter and gathers became the minority, they were pushed away from farmers and only gave up their lifestyle because they had to, not necessarily because they had to. Irrelevant points: "Anthropologists such as Tim White suggest that cannibalism was common in human societies prior to the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, based on the large amount of "butchered human" bones found in Lower/Middle Paleolithic sites. Cannibalism in the Lower and Middle Paleolithic likely occurred because of food shortages. Maybe this is just me but I prefer grossery shopping to eating my next door neighbor." This shows a bias by Con, it is not wrong to have an opinion, and obviously he is debating his side. I just ask that if you (the voter) are going to vote on this debate to think open-mindedly and not make assumptions just because something is true today. It is hard to look at history and not compare it to modern standers, which makes it unfair when we judge past civilizations. If you do vote pro, it doesn't mean you have to completely agree with my argument and go out in the woods and start to hunt and gather, just that you see that I make good enough points to defeat cons arguments. Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org... http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com...