Foragers to farmers: a tale of collective action?  By Razib Khan
| March 18, 2011 1:46 am  The economist Samuel Bowles recently
had a paper out in PNAS which caught my attention, Cultivation
of cereals by the first farmers was not more productive than
foraging. This naturally begs the question: why did farming
conquer foraging as a lifestyle? First, let’s look at the
abstract:   My own working assumption is that the “first
farmers” existed in a state of land surplus, and so like the
medieval peasants in the wake of the Black Death found
themselves released from Malthusian constraints, at least until
their natural increase swallowed up their affluence. Bowles
gives several reasons to be skeptical of this conjecture. The
list in table 2 shows the positive and negative biases in the
model when one back-projects later stages of farming to the
initial period. Metal tools, well developed distribution
channels, and more productive varieties, were features of mature
agricultural societies. On the time-insensitive sca