Settling down

[ZenitYerkes]

Prehistoric men, specially in the very beginnings, shared in their different cultures common elements such as the hunting-gathering system which lead to a nomadic lifestyle. Once there were no food left nearby, people moved from their places and carried their baggage around: animals, tools, tents,... This period was the Paleolithic.

Around the 7000 BC the Neolithic Revolution took place. People from Middle East and surroundings of the river Nile began to grow crops and stock their animals; such territories were extremely fertile and produced great amounts of nourishment, meaning that there was no longer a need to move on: first villages appeared. At first, there were the "polis" or city-States, independent metropolis governed by a single monarch in most of cases; which later on associated or fought against each other, thus creating the vast ancient empires.

As a consequence of this spectacular growth and the establishment of population, scripture and therefore culture arose, as well as organized religion that to that moment was nothing but a bunch of familiar rituals and traditions. Economy and mercantile activities appeared as well, and the excesses of agriculture and stock breeding was distributed to other cities in order to get other lacking products.

All these events happened and shaped us to what we are now in a great part -for good or bad. We have developed ourselves and enlarged our social and financial network, we have brought the steam and the oil engine to ease our work, our culture is immense and our science is vast and precise, being perfected almost on a daily basis; but we still gather in villages and cities, we still maintain our commercial activities and we still work the land and feed animals to bring food to our markets.

The question is, would we have been better off without it?

[Isard]

Given our mentality, our curiosity and such. I think that settling down and working on developing time to dedicate to non-survival pursuits was necessary. Since agriculture can produce a much larger supply of food using fewer people, it allows others to devote time they would normally be forced to use gathering food to other practices.

It allows us more freedom in what we choose to do with ourselves.

[Human No More]

Every solution to a problem so far has created another... maybe one day we can solve everything, but it won't be in the near future (likely not our lifetimes)...

[Sonoran Na'vi]

I don't know if we would have been better off without it - that may depend on what perspective one wishes to take. I could imagine that we would be much more at the mercy of nature if we didn't start developing agriculture. Damaging weather in the short run and climate change in the long run could prove devastating to a society that depended on hunter-gatherer methods of finding food.