For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It's a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread until today it's nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive. What was so hard about hunting and gathering? Why do so many people today think that the lives of hunters and gatherers were so difficult? Cite text-based evidence to support your answer. According to this paragraph, what human action set off the agricultural revolution? Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture? Agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries…Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to construct complex buildings and compose [great music]. How did the adoption of agriculture allow people to “construct complex buildings and compose great music”? Are modern-day hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?" Based on the rest of the paragraph, what is the answer to the question that begins the paragraph? Explain.
The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. "I don't think most hunter-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity," says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting lifestyle in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it… Underline the sentence where the author uses the phrase “trade quality for quantity”. What does it mean to “trade quality for quantity”? Why do you the author choose to include information about the people of the Dickson Mounds? What purpose does it serve in the text?