Quantitative Arguments On ! Kung Bushman's Forging

2. Foraging to Agriculture
Richard Lee has provided several quantitative measurements on !Kung Bushman’s foraging lifestyle in Dobe-area. Lee used examples to measure the subsistence status of the foraging lifestyle such as diversity of food resources, food choice, population density, work force, work and leisure time, and nutrition in the diet. (Lee, P3) His research mentioned that as foraging lifestyle, !Kung Bushman in Dobe-area are moving their camps with high frequency and traveling long distances to keep their population at low densities. With that living habit, !Kung Bushman have to live close to waterhole, and they would use every available nutritional source once they were approaching to hunger level. Also, in camps, there are about
40 percent of productive individuals contribute to food supplies from age group 20 to 60. Due to foraging lifestyle, productive adults have flexible work time on hunter-gathering food resources. Lee has stated an important measure determines food resources abundance is based on whether or not a population exhausts all the food available from a given area. In the foraging lifestyle, hunting means high risk with low return, and gathering means low risk with high return.
After that, changing over to agriculture as a subsistence strategy has dramatically effected a society with deep class divisions. Jared Diamond described that from Greek tombs at Mycenae c age, the skeletons around 1500 B.C. shows royals had a better diet than commoners because the royal skeletons taller with had better teeth. (Diamond, P3) He stated that agriculture was bad for health because early farmers gained cheap calories from poor nutrition, and there were limited number of crops that early farmers could account on, which may cause high risk of starvation if some of the crops failed. Then, as the most important factor that author said agriculture encouraged people to live together into several crowded societies, some of them may carry on trading goods with other crowded societies, which may cause the spread of parasites and epidemic diseases. (Diamond, P3) In the class lecture, there has listed some other social changes like social inequity that switching foraging lifestyle to agriculture caused social class divisions includes some of people own property and some of them have to work for those people who owned properties, which caused sexual inequity that females get high birth rate asking women stay at home and gender division of labor
asking more men go out to work.(Wild, Foraging to Agriculture, Feb 11) The text book provides explanation of societies might have made the switch from foraging to farming that hunters and gatherers to settle down and plant crops and raise animals into agricultural development because in that way people can get food easier, safer, and more productive. People realized that they could get more food through plant crops and raise animals rather than foraging lifestyle, so they began switch to agriculture. (Robbins, P43)