The Worst Mistake in Human History.

[The Dharma Bum]

The main takeaway is this.

Agriculture was adopted as a system to increase population as a force multiplier. To an agricultural society more people is better. This is not necessarily so for a hunter/gatherer society. They have a social structure that is designed to sustain a static number of people indefinitely. This population doesn't increase unless something occurs in the natural world that affords them a larger food supply.

This is why HG society is stable, and also why the agricultural society's world is facing overpopulation and the inevitable food shortages that will occur when industrial farming collapses. The natural world can't support our numbers, we have to use tricks like using stored energy in hydrocarbons to make up the shortfall.

Agricultural society is a baby-making system, by design. That's why the religions/social mores of agricultural society are horrified by the idea of infanticide and euthanasia, practices which are common in HG society's.

[PoS]

The advantages and benefits of agriculture (namely civilization, life expectancy, infant mortality, etc.) far outweighs its "side effects" as you claim them.

[Mathurin]

[Mathurin]

[Lobster]

Stable and stagnant, unchanging over hundreds and possibly thousands of years. The luddite undertones are strong.
I can't believe you are saying there is no proof HG societies do not progress technologically. We only have all of recorded history as a testament. Your perception of them as "stable" shows that even you don't believe it, really.
No one is saying that it is because HG's are inherently "stupider" or some such bollocks. It is because all of their inherent human cleverness and transfer of knowledge is devoted to accomodate to their environment, as opposed to manipulating it. What you denigrate as "baby-making" societies are ones where women aren't forced to birth a dozen kids throughout their lives in the hope that a few might possibly reach the age of adulthood. Societies where there isn't one unique job that everyone is forced into by necessity. I don't see the interest in glorifying subsistence level existence entirely at the mercy of nature and all it's caprices. It smacks of "Noble Savage" rhetoric to me. Possibly by virtue of our psychology and the fact we are genetically identical to homo sapiens that have lived in such societies for far longer than "civilization" has existed, I can entertain the idea that it is a more "natural" state of affairs. I don't see how that makes it objectively better than "unnatural" agricultural societies.
Even if you accept humanity as nothing more than another animal, agricultural societies have supplanted HG's practically everywhere they have met. They are far more resilient and addaptable, not on an individual level (where the opposite is true), but as a whole.

[saltwn]

It is what it is. We lived this long because we found a way to become more efficient in feeding ourselves. That had its draw backs but none of them as bad as constantly warring with other migrating tribes, the diseases of a feast-famine sort of diet, and the stress of constantly moving to new territory.