Hunter-Gatherers vs Agriculture

You dont need to buy it. Humans who relied on agriculture thrived in numbers or at least survives compared to the ones who relied on other means.

Humans were a lot better before they invented agriculture.

This seems to be one of Harari’s arguments in Sapiens. In many ways, hunter-gatherers lived better lives, ate more varied foods, suffered fewer health problems, and left a much less lasting mark on their environment. But now that we’ve gotten to a point where much of the population lives in relative comfort, we can see that there was a long-term payoff from investing in agriculture.

We are no longer a hunter-gatherer or agrarian society -- people of olden times would fare as well in our society as we would in theirs. Maybe they could be more self-sufficient, but modern society is free from tending to our fields or bison or whatever so we can have more time to do things beyond just subsistence farming during all our waking hours.

I think this is quite a rosy view of being a hunter gatherer or a subsistence farmer. From what I've read, there's like, a LOT of murder in existing hunter gatherer societies. And back when everyone was either a hunter gatherer or a farmer, lots of people starved to death all the time. It may be true that a farmer of 500 hundred years ago got to keep all of the rewards of their labor (though many... most(?) of them had to give up some portion to the local strongman), but those rewards

I remember reading about a similar dynamic in Harari's 'Sapiens'... the shift to from hunter/gatherer to agriculture being better for 'society' (more people) but worse for the average individual within the society, at least in terms of health (poorer/narrower diet, increased disease, shorter lifespan.)

From what I remember reading, agriculture was actually a downgrade from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Early crops were terribly hard to grow, had little nutrition value and agricultural practices too were primitive.People started growing crops out of necessity. In terms of food security, hunting-gathering was far easier. The average hunter also worked far fewer hours than the average farmer in antiquity.

Starting with agriculture, when we gave up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, according to some people.

It's been theorised that hunter gathers in good times did ok without blood, sweat and tears.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society

OK, the phrase about the exhausting the capacity of the land had that vibe. Because there’s literally no evidence that this is what happened. Agrarian and hunter-gatherer societies coexisted side by side for millennia and becoming a settled community was hardly an upgrade based on the data we have (diet, health, leisure time and longevity).