Practice question · Multiple choice
Farming populations grew rapidly while individual farmers were shorter, sicker and worked longer than foragers. How are both true at once?
Hints
- Ask what selection between ways of life actually rewards: individual welfare or numbers?
- More people per hectare, each worse off. Which quantity decides who takes the land?
Show the answer
C. Farming raises calories per hectare and lowers quality of life
Why
What spreads is what produces more people, and those two measures came apart, the farmers were worse off and there were vastly more of them. It is a genuinely uncomfortable result, and it is why 'progress' is a poor description of the most consequential transition in human history.
Practise The Neolithic Revolution
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on The Neolithic Revolution
- How did wheat become domesticated?
- Domestication was a deliberate human decision to improve wild species.
- Why did farming begin independently in seven regions within a few thousand years?
- The Neolithic ratchet describes farming as hard to abandon once adopted. What locks a group in?
- Sort each consequence of farming: bad for the individual, or good for the population?
- Farming was invented independently, with no contact between the regions. How many separate centres are…
- What do the skeletons of early farmers show, compared with the foragers before them?