Chapter 6 - TO FARM OR NOT TO FARM

This chapter describes how people on earth turned from hunters and gatherers to food producers like farmers. It starts with questions like why food production took place here abut not there and why at that time but not earlier. Then before answering the question, the author first explains some common misconceptions. The first one is that the turning from gathering and hunting to farming was an invention or discovery. In fact, it was a much slower procedure like evolution. The first person who adopt food didn’t do that consciously because that person had no idea about what farming would be and the consequence of farming. The transition was more like a by-product during decision making, in which people decide what to do everyday that would benefit them the most. The second misconception is that there was a sharp divide between nomadic hunter-gatherers and sedentary food producers. The authors demonstrates this idea using the example of nomads of New Guinea’s Lake Plains, who planted bananas and the went off as hunter-gatherers, and then came back again to check out their crops. The third dichotomy is that food producers are active managers of their land and hunter-gatherers are collectors of the land’s wild produce. The author explains this point using counterexamples like Aboriginal Australians and New Guinea people. 

Then the author tries to answer the questions raised at the beginning of this chapter by analyzing the transition from hunting or gathering to farming, step by step. Firstly he describes the process of people’s decision making on how to spend their time and effort. He mentions that human and animal foragers prefer the choice which yields the higher payoff with the least effort. Then he talks about the risk of starving, which was avoided at all cost by rational beings. Finally he concludes that the differences between people’s decision making actually resulted from lots of elements including considerations of prestige, cultural preferences, and even relative values they attach to different lifestyles. 

Later on the author makes it clear that food production and hunting-gathering were actually alternative strategies. The author comes up with another question on what factors contributed to the shift from hunting-gathering to farming. He lists five main factors.

1. Decline in the availability of wild food, which is self- explanatory as the less food available in the wild, the more likely people would start food production.
2. The depletion of wild game tended to make hunting-gathering less rewarding.
3. Cumulative development of technologies on which food production would eventually depend — like those or collecting, precessing, and storing wild food. As people were more capable of strong food, they would produce more when possible and put them in storage for future use to avoid possible starvation.
4. Two-way link between the rise in human population density and the rise in food production. 
5. The much denser populations of food producers  enabled them to displace or kill hunter-gatherers by their sheer numbers. This explains the geographic boundaries between hunter-gatherers and farmers. 

To conclude, according to all these reasons/factors, more and more hunter-gatherers were replaced by food producers, because the hunter-gatherers were either eliminated by food producers, or they became food producers themselves. 

Works Cited

Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1999. Print.