Over the eons of life’s journey on Earth, there were golden ages for fortune species, in which they had few competitors, predators, etc. They were usually due to “lucky” events such as surviving a mass extinction or an evolutionary innovation that enabled their dominance. All golden ages came to an end, as competitors caught up or other vagaries of living on Earth exerted their constraints. The human journey had similar golden ages, usually at the beginning of exploiting a new energy source, whether it was tortoises, other megafauna, intact forests and soils ready for farmers, or virgin hydrocarbon deposits for industrializing economies to extract. But the golden ages ended when the easy energy ran out.
By 12,000 years ago, the golden age of the hunter-gather was long gone in Africa and Eurasia and it had long since degenerated into fierce territorialism once more. The Old World’s human population was hundreds of times greater than what it was before Earth’s conquest by Homo sapiens, as humans reached their Malthusian limit with that lifestyle. But the ice sheets retreated, right on schedule, Earth became warmer, wetter, and had higher carbon dioxide levels from the newly exposed land, and Earth became paradise restored for a time. The easy meat was extinct, women began experimenting in their gathering duties, and plants began to be domesticated. Collecting wild grain began over 20,000 years ago. Plant domestication happened independently in several places, and in the so-called Fertile Crescent it has been called the Neolithic Revolution.
Otterbein argued that the domestication of plants could only initially happen where megafauna hunting was no longer the dominant form of subsistence, and I find that idea persuasive. In many of those societies that domesticated plants, they became matrilocal, perhaps for the first time since monkeys, as women became the most important food providers. Those became the human journey’s most peaceful pre-civilized societies, as it broke up the gangs of related men (multi-local societies also broke them up).
The transition to farming took thousands of years, and it eventually began to spread in what has been called the Neolithic Expansion, such as the spread into Europe. Thousands of years later, sub-Saharan Africa had a similar expansion. The spread of farming was irresistible for hunter-gatherers. Some pockets held out for centuries, but farmers always prevailed, primarily from the far greater numbers that farming could support. Hunter-gatherer men began disappearing from the gene pool, as hunter-gatherer women mated with the relatively rich farmers. Hunter-gatherers either went extinct, were pushed to marginal lands where farming and herding were infeasible (dry, cold, mountainous), or took up farming themselves. There are no pure hunter-gatherer societies on Earth today, as all have been affected by agrarian or industrial societies.
When the Fertile Crescent domestication began, the first Americans were still killing off the megafauna, which put the Old World in the “lead” in socio-economic development, with devastating later consequences for the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia. In their turn, the invaders of the Americas domesticated plants and even a few animals, and most crops grown on Earth today were domesticated in the Americas.
During the Second Epoch, some fortunate hunter-gatherers became sedentary, but only where there was some kind of sustainable energy source, usually along a migration route, but some hunter-gatherers were able to farm fish and eels and become somewhat sedentary. Becoming sedentary was a radical change in the human journey and was the chief outcome of domestication, along with skyrocketing population levels.
Farming was initially very successful in the honeymoon phase, with intact soils, forests, and a lack of “pests.” When that golden age was over, however, life became drudgery, their diets were unhealthy, people became smaller and sicker than hunter-gatherers, but there were far more of them, so there was really no going back. It was a one-way ratchet effect. Humanity’s population grew by a factor of about 200 during the Third Epoch.
Once plants and animals were domesticated, agrarian and pastoral life dominated until the Industrial Revolution several thousand years later, and it was a brutal existence. Another perfect “lab” to test the neo-Rousseauian idea of peaceful subsistence farmers was Highland New Guinea, which was completely isolated from the rest of humanity until it was “discovered” in the 20th century. As anthropologists descended on those isolated highlanders, it soon became evident that they were the most violent societies on Earth, as a third of all societies went extinct each century from warfare. They were patrilocal, however, which contributed to the situation. The Malthusian Trap prevailed until the Industrial Revolution, through infanticide and other childhood death, famine, epidemics, and warfare, as carrying-capacity constraints eventually reared their heads. Neolithic Europe, for instance, was very violent, even cannibalistic, and sedentary societies allowed for an “improvement” on the hunter-gatherer practice of stealing women from neighboring societies, as slavery made its rise.