Under selection by humans, changes in annual plants may evolve rapidly and plant population structures might be changed considerably from one year to the next. Thus, during a human life span, several dozens of generations of the annual plants are passed, turning this period to an intensive quick laboratory of crop evolution. Thus, it seems that the first farmers have carefully chosen the particular species for their assemblage of founding crops. Indeed, those plants, chosen in the early days of agriculture, were plants that gave the farmer positive feedback for cultivation and this, first and foremost due to their life-history traits, namely, annual habit, self-pollination mating system and the above mentioned beneficial mutations. Has man’s fitness increased as well as a result? The answer is, of course, a resounding yes, and this can be seen in the meteoric increase in the number of human beings on earth. Indeed, the transition to subsisting on agricultural products enhanced man’s fitness. Up until the shift to agricultural life, man subsisted on hunting and gathering—a method that proved itself well: in the long run, this way of life is relatively safe in terms of the availability of food, is nutritious and healthy in terms of food variety, dutch buckets system and requires a relatively low investment of time.
On the other hand, agricultural life is much more demanding: crop fields are exposed to the fortunes of weather, to insects, pathogens and robbers. In addition, it was found that the health of those who adopted farming was deteriorated , probably due to a poorer variety of food and the epidemics associated with agricultural life and the tremendous investment required in terms of labor. The advantages of agricultural life are ostensibly negligible, aside from one advantage, which is indeed fundamental, and which tips the scales— the advantage of higher fitness.The advantage to the farming man is that more children, although constituting more hungry mouths, can also provide more working hands that will in turn help to enhance the farmer’s economic situation. Wealth in itself constitutes an advantage that enables the farmer to attract women , who, again, will pro- duce more children with the farmer, and so on. The social organization of farmers is such that it enables the “village” to care for the babies so that they are not totally dependent on their mothers to carry and nurse them. Farming mothers can, therefore, raise a greater number of babies concurrently, and on the whole can bring more children into the world, without risking their children’s chances of survival.
Summing up, the evolution of man and the evolution of his cultivated plants are interrelated by an unbreakable bond. This is, in fact, a process of co-evolution that, from a practical viewpoint, has been irreversible from the early days of agriculture. Plants that rapidly underwent changes during domestication could no longer exist as successfully without the conditions man provided them and without being dispersed in fields by man, whereas enlarging human populations that engaged in agriculture and produced more children could not subsist as successfully without the consistent surplus of food provided to them by such plants. That is, dutch buckets more progeny inheriting these evolved changes are produced, and those, in turn, will produce many new progeny who will bear and bequeath these qualities. It was mentioned previously that the ability to have more offspring is what tips the scales and leads to the almost absolute dominance of this way of life in human societies. However, one has to elucidate several factors that pertain to the behavior of different human societies in ancient times, their motives and the interaction between these societies.
When discussing the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, one must remember that this transition was not a clear- cut or a smooth one. Even in this day and age, hunter- gatherers can be found who sporadically engage in farming and vice versa. Since both groups lived side by side, there was, and still is, contact between hunter- gatherer communities and agricultural communities in the form of marriage, commerce, labor and the exchange of knowledge. Despite such relations, a great deal of antagonism probably existed be- tween these two groups, as farmers regard hunter-gatherers as inferior whereas hunter-gatherers perceive the farmers’ way of life disapprovingly, and in general, re-fuse to adopt it. If so, why have societies of hunter- gatherers throughout human history yielded to farmers and their harsh way of life? Two main reasons can be given, both of which are tightly linked to biological fit- ness: numerical inequality and the aspiring of prestige.