Agriculture was initially just an additional source of food for hunters and gatherers, who settled in the lower reaches of the rivers along the sea coast near rich food sources. For primitive communities, however, abundant food was not the rule, but rather a rare exception:
“For some groups the total foraging effort was relatively low, only a few hours a day. This finding led to foragers being portrayed as ‘the original affluent society,’ living in a kind of material plenty filled with leisure and sleep (Sahlins 1972). Most notably, Dobe !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, living on wild plants and meat, were thought to provide an excellent window on the lives of prehistoric foragers, who allegedly led contented, healthy, and vigorous lives. This conclusion, based on very limited and dubious evidence, must be—and has been—challenged. … A reanalysis of energy expenditure and demographic data collected in the 1960s found that the nutritional status and health of Dobe !Kung ‘were, at best, precarious and, at worst, indicative of a society in danger of extinction’ (Bogin 2011)” (Smil 2017, p. 37).
The subsequent spread of agriculture (at least in Europe) occurred due to the migration of members of agrarian communities, rather than due to hunter-gatherers willingly adopting the agricultural practices of their neighbors (Smil 2017, pp. 43-44). This may suggest that agriculture had no clear advantages over hunting and gathering. The shift to farming represented, in a sense, the collapse of primitive society. James Scott notes that the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture entails a more monotonous rhythm and simpler activities:
“I am tempted to see the late Neolithic revolution, for all its contributions to large-scale societies, as something of a deskilling. Adam Smith’s iconic example of the productivity gains achievable through the division of labor was the pin factory, where each minute step of pin making was broken down into a task carried out by a different worker. Alexis de Tocqueville read The Wealth of Nations sympathetically but asked, ‘What can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life putting heads on pins.’” (Scott 2017, p. 92). “It is no exaggeration to say that hunting and foraging are, in terms of complexity, as different from cereal-grain farming as cereal-grain farming is, in turn, removed from repetitive work on a modern assembly line. Each step represents a substantial narrowing of focus and a simplification of tasks” (ibid., p. 90).