The question of agriculture

The standard story used to be that some aboriginal peoples experienced a great leap forward when they learned how to harvest and plant seeds. By preparing the ground for such and then tending the shoots, they were enabled to grow a great deal more food than they formerly could obtain from hunting, fishing, and foraging. Agriculture enabled a surplus, then a division of labor, then all the benefits of civilization.

But seeds going into the ground and resulting in edible plants was . . . really obvious. There was no great new revelation about food production. Most hunting-fishing-foraging peoples practiced some degree of horticulture:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquian_peoples

Before Europeans came into contact, most Algonquian settlements lived by hunting and fishing, although quite a few supplemented their diet by cultivating corn, beans and squash.

If full-scale agriculture was such a great thing, it needs to be explained why so many aboriginals never bothered to “advance” from horticulture to agriculture.

Anthropologists still can’t answer that question. The answers may revolve around intuitions about how hard the agricultural lifestyle actually is; and/or how accumulating surpluses can set up issues of wealth and power imbalances.

The state of nature was generally bountiful. Agriculture involves about twice as much labor as the hunting-fishing-foraging lifestyle does. The early-period agricultural diet was inferior to the diverse hunting-fishing-foraging diet.

Transitioning to agriculture may not have been an “advance” at all. It may have been foisted upon the masses by elites who benefited from wealth disparities and power imbalances. It may have been “encouraged” at swordpoint. With agriculture and civilization come empire, slavery, and a new kind of scarcity.

Re-wilding involves abandoning what Daniel Quinn called “totalitarian agriculture” (clearing the land of all flora and fauna except human-desired food). Re-wilding might constitute a social, cultural, and technological betterment (if not “advancement”).