How Did the Transition to Farming Over 10,000 Years Ago Affect Human Lifespan? — Here’s What Scientists Suggest

Over 12,000 years ago, humans were living a very different life from today. They haven’t learned how to deliberately grow their own food through farming yet. Instead, they relied on their natural surroundings to provide what was necessary for them to survive. They were hunter-gatherers who would hunt animals and collect wild plants to eat.

However, 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, they started farming and agriculture. Since then, their lives have changed. But, was this new lifestyle really made human lifespan longer or worse? And how exactly did this transition to farming affect how long a human lives? Let’s answer these questions and find out in this article.

How Lifespan Changed with the Advent of Farming

Contrary to popular beliefs, the advent of farming did not immediately increase the human lifespan. In fact, it may have dropped even further in some places. Before agriculture, the estimated lifespan of humans was around 30 years, but research found that it may have gone and stayed lower than that in early farming communities.

Hunter-gatherers before did not have a reliable food supply. They could try to hunt for a day but never catch any prey, or collect wild plants only for them to be inedible. Their sources of food are also prone to being wrecked by climate change and natural environmental shifts.

However, for farmers, they could have a reliable food supply and even a surplus in a good harvest. Over generations, this phenomenon, along with a more sedentary lifestyle and fewer migrations to another habitat, led to their birth rates going up. Farming was able to support this growth, and gradually, their population exploded.

But this does not mean that each individual in the increasing number of people living together in a farming community has their lifespan getting longer. It actually may have gone down, especially during the beginning of the transitional periods to this new lifestyle.

Read more: PubMed Central

What Caused Lifespan to Change — Diet, Disease, Work, and Settlement

Mankind: The Story of All of Us: Birth of Farming | History

So, if there was a population boom, a reliable food supply, and less need for migrations to new habitats, why would the early farmers’ lifespan go down? Well, it’s because of the trade-offs that farming brought. First is their diet. Yes, farming communities have a more reliable food supply, but it is not as varied as hunter-gatherers.

Hunting different animals and gathering edible wild plants, in different environments, means that humans over 12,000 years ago may have eaten a wider variety of food supply than that of farmers. On the other hand, the early agricultural societies only had select seeds and crops that they could farm and consume. Their livestock is also limited to the animals that could survive after being domesticated.

In other words, early farmers may have had fewer variations in their diet, which led to insufficient amounts of necessary proteins, vitamins, and other micronutrients that they would have otherwise consumed in a wider range of food supply.

Another factor was the more rapid pace of spread of diseases to these farming communities. Before, there were less number of people living together, but with farming, they had to create permanent homes and stay in one place to be able to tend to their crops and livestock. This meant spending more time with animals and more humans who may carry diseases and other pathogens.

So, the population density of this new lifestyle became a double-edged sword that would increase the pace at which infections and illnesses spread through the whole group. This could mean that if they were infected with diseases their population is not immune to, it could wipe them all out.

Both of these factors, combined, the dietary limitations and the faster pace of spread of diseases in dense population groups, may have contributed to why early farmers’ lifespan was cut shorter than their hunter-gatherer counterparts.

Trade-Offs, Risks, and Long-Term Benefits

So, why did our ancestors still continue farming after all the drawbacks observed? It is most likely because of the trade-offs, and the long-term benefits may have outweighed the risks.

On the positive side, farming brought them a reliable food supply, less need for migrations to new environments, and it produced a surplus of resources. This means that they were now able to store food for leaner times, and they could build permanent settlements because they didn’t have to move as much anymore. It made their previously nomadic lifestyle into a more sedentary way of life.

It also allowed them to support more people and have a denser population in a village or farming community, which has probably contributed to an increase in the pressure to stay with this lifestyle, because hunting and gathering would not be able to sustain these numbers.

On the negative side, farming introduced new risks to early humans, such as less variation in their diet, becoming more susceptible to diseases because of how quickly they would be able to spread, and poorer sanitation due to an increase in waste and being unskilled at managing it.

However, in the long term, people were able to improve their agricultural skills, leading to a greater variety of crops and livestock that they could grow and consume. This led to a reliable food supply that was able to give them the necessary nutrition. They also learned how to deal with waste management better, reducing the risks from poor sanitation.

Farming also led to a technological revolution that allowed humanity to innovate at a greater pace and grander scale than ever. With a more reliable food supply, not everyone needed to work at producing food, so it gave birth to specialized roles in order to provide value to the community in other important ways. Examples include artisans making potteries for the storage of food and water, and builders who would create permanent houses.

Over time, the transition to farming eventually helped increase the lifespan of humans. It could be that it was only near the beginning or when disasters hit a certain region, where the lifespan of humans went down from an average of 30 years around 10,000 years ago.

Read more: University of Cambridge

What This Means for Today and Life Expectancy

How Human Lifespan Changed Over Time (10,000 BC - 2100 AD)

Understanding the drawbacks and trade-offs of a change to a new lifestyle reminds us that our bodies and health are greatly affected by our environment and way of life. While in the modern world, many societies experience longer lifespans of their population, this was not always the case, even during our transition to farming, which provided a more reliable food supply.

Simply settling down and transitioning to a more sedentary lifestyle did not guarantee our early ancestors longer lives immediately. It took many generations and mass improvements before they were able to achieve a longer life, and even then, it pales in comparison to the current day.

What this ultimately tells us is that the modern gains in lifespan are not built in a day or a generation, but instead came from layers upon layers of sacrifices and changes to our way of life as humans. This long path from the transition to farming to modern long lifespan expectation shows how our health is shaped by biology, culture, and our lifestyle.

Author's Final Thoughts

Over 10,000 years ago, humans were living as hunter-gatherers, where they had a less reliable food supply, and were constantly moving to chase a more hospitable and abundant habitat. But soon, they were able to learn how to farm, and it changed their lives greatly, both in a positive and a negative way.

Farming gave them more food, but also less variation of nutrients in their diet. It allowed them to support a higher population in their community, but it also allowed a faster pace of spread of diseases. In short, their transition from hunting and gathering to farming and agriculture did not immediately make people’s lives longer.

But what it did was that it also set the foundation for how a longer life expectancy could be achieved, and eventually, a civilization and society that enabled longer lives was born.

Read next: Why Did Humans’ Bones and Skeletons Become Lighter Over the Last 10,000 Years? — Here’s What Scientists Suggest

References & Further Reading

Larsen, C. S. (1995). Biological changes in human populations with agriculture. Annual Review of Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.24.100195.001153

Bocquet-Appel, J.-P. (2011). When the world’s population took off: The springboard of the Neolithic Demographic Transition. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1208880

Mummert, A., et al. (2011). Stature and robusticity during the agricultural transition: Evidence from the bioarchaeological record. Economics & Human Biology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2011.03.004

Gurven, M., & Kaplan, H. (2007). Longevity among hunter-gatherers: A cross-cultural examination. Population and Development Review. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2007.00171.x

Larsen, C. S., et al. (2019). Bioarchaeology of Neolithic Çatalhöyük reveals fundamental transitions in health, mobility, and lifestyle in early farmers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1904345116