Hunting/gathering lifestyle vs. an agricultural lifestyle

Before the last glacial maximum of Earth around 20 000 years ago, humans were living a hunting-gathering lifestyle. Using advanced projectile weapons such as bows, arrows, and spears, coinciding with advanced intelligence and good communication skills, humans became excellent hunters. However, this lead to many of the Earth's large animals being killed off. 

This was not the only disadvantage to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that humans used for many years.

• Finding animals to hunt and then actually killing them took lots of time and energy for humans. This meant they couldn't focus on other things that would've helped them develop eg. cultural development. 
  
  
  
• Humans couldn't carry many belongings on them because they were always on the move: everything they owned, they had to carry.
  
  

There were some advantages to this hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

• Less resources and land were required to gather food. 
  
  
• There was reduced transmission of diseases, as livestock weren't held in captivity/in close range to each other to allow for disease to spread far. 
  
  
• Since humans had to always be on the move to find animals to hunt, there was less exploitation of the resources of just one certain area, meaning there was less pressure on the species inhabiting that area.
   
• There was less reliance on just 1-2 limited food sources, they could hunt a variety of lean and fatty meats from different animals which did provide good nutrients. 
  
  

However, around that 20,000 k.y.a mark, Earth went through a significant climate change where it became warmer, forested areas and grasslands become more prominent: the region became more favourable for human living. As a result of this, they could live in one place at a time and form simple settlements. With the killing off of many large animals happening at the same time, the first evidence of agriculture appeared in this time period.

A settled, agricultural-rich lifestyle provided many advantages to humans.

• For one, less energy was required, since humans didn't have to go travelling for miles finding their prey to kill. Instead they could stay in one spot, their simple settlement, and use that energy towards other useful activities. Farming gave humans the time for reproduction, increasing populations and therefore protection from predators, and cultural development: i.e learning about farming, developing new and better techniques and technology, and sharing that knowledges with others in their settlement: role specialisation and division of labour would've started to be used for more productive farming as agriculture become more prominent. 
  
  
• Farming provided humans with a steady and high quality food supply.
  
  
• Humans no longer had to rely on 'mass kill sites' for meat, which would have often went to waste if it wasn't eaten quickly enough due to rot. They could kill exactly however many animals they needed to feed settlements at a time and not waste food.

However, changing to settled and agricultural rich lifestyles also had it's disadvantages:

• Natural disasters could wipe out entire crops at a time, meaning entire settlements could lose most or even all of their food supply. 
  
  
• Nearby settlements or other humans could easily come and steal crops and harvests.
  
  
• Lots of animals living in very close proximity to each other increased the risk of disease transmission spreading quickly through livestock.

Despite these disadvantages, agriculture was one of the greatest developments in human history because it supported large populations of people living in settlements and eventually villages and cities, lead to the technological innovation such as the invention of the wheel, plough, hoe etc, helped introduced trade, and the domestication of animals, helping humans move up and eventually dominate the food chain, and Earth itself. To this day, we rely so heavily on agriculture without even necessarily realising the full extent to which we do.