The numerical inferiority of the hunter-gatherers stems directly from the higher reproductive capability of the farmers. Following the increase in the high-fitness populations of farmers, the need arose to find new farming lands that would provide the requirements of the growing community. Since agriculture itself violates the balance of its surroundings and in the long run causes a lack of ecological stability, farmers are time and time again forced to find new and better lands for their multiplying offspring. Thus, they spread to new territories and new frontiers. On these new frontiers they encounter neighbors, whom they must in fact expel. These neighbors are the hunter-gatherers. Then, the possible scenarios are that one of the two groups withdraws, or that the two groups intermix or that one adopts the other’s way of life. Again, grow bucket human history clearly describes the triumph of the agricultural societies.
These societies, with their larger population and more complex social organization, at best caused the hunter-gatherers to recede to more remote regions, and at worst led to their disappearance, whether by conquest and killing, or by their assimilation to agricultural practice, ultimately turning them into farmers as well. Occasionally, the conflict between these two ways of life did not necessarily culminate with a real clash and that the hunter gatherers adopted the agricultural way of life even before the farmers’ frontier had reached them. In other words, some hunter-gatherers adopted the concept of agriculture by way of hearsay only; doing so, in fact, in order to gain prestige among their own people. Prestige is a most significant factor in the behavior of human beings. It is most important in other animals as well, mainly with respect to the potential to attract mates and the ability to reproduce. Indeed, the relationship between acquiring prestige and a male’s higher reproduction ability is noted also among hunter-gatherers, but is much stronger in agricultural societies.
The structure of the agricultural society is such that it enables certain individuals to amass property, to engage in commerce, to attain a better economic status than other individuals and, as a result, to gain prestige. The immediate result is that such individuals who achieve prestige have a better chance both of attracting mates and as a result, of having more offspring. Commerce and the amassing of property are ancient component of human societies. These components in fact preceded agriculture by thousands of years , and thus they have a major role in the hunter-gatherer societies. It can be assumed that hunter-gatherers, dutch bucket for tomatoes when seeing both the prestige achieved by a handful of farmers and its sociological and biological consequences, could not resist the temptation of improved economics and status that agricultural life could offer. In other words, despite the many draw- backs of the agricultural way of life, it can ultimately lead to the amassing of property, wealth, prestige, and in turn to polygamy and to a greater number of offspring. All the above mentioned behavioral traits, beyond being rooted in culture, are highly valuable with respect to fitness. As such, they are naturally selected for in the evolutionary process, since the many progeny also inherit those behavioral traits that motivate accumulating wealth and prestige and will in turn pass these behavioral traits on to their offspring as well.
Thus, the generation of abundant food and gaining of prestige , offer those who possess either of them enhanced biological fitness; all the more so those who possess both. As mentioned before, another scenario of much quicker spreading of agriculture involves the scattering of the idea of agriculture’s benefits. Remote hunter-gatherers possibly adopted agricultural way of life even before the farmers’ frontier reached them, following reports about wealth, prestige, polygamy and multitudes of children. Such hunter-gatherers may have received the founder crops and agricultural-technological knowledge that they may have lacked, from the distant farmers them- selves through commerce or marital ties. However, it is most important to note that even before agriculture time, hunter-gatherers possessed extensive botanical and environmental knowledge. Hunter-gatherers have exercised vast varieties of mobility levels and different ways of subsistence, and different populations through- out the world manipulated their environment using irrigation, fire or weeding in order to obtain better yields of the wild plants in their environment. Hence, the crucial point was not the acquiring of the concepts of botanical and agro-ecological knowledge of agriculture, but rather the ideas of agriculture’s benefits.