>Before agriculture, humans spent almost all of their time hunting and gathering. Agriculture freed up some time

Agriculture is more work than hunting and gathering, but it's a much more consistent food source.

https://www.zmescience.com/science/hunter-gatherer-farmer-ti...

And agriculture itself is less work than we think of. Medieval peasants worked less hours than we do.

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

> And agriculture itself is less work than we think of.

That depends entirely upon the ratio of agriculture to other industries in a society and the level of automation.

People operating today's corporate farms in the US probably work fewer hours than their 1920s analogues, but produce far more output. People operating today's small/"family" farms are probably about on par in terms of hours worked, but still produce much more and there are far fewer of them.

It doesn't. People working today's farms (corporate and self operated) AFAICT put in more hours than their 1920s analogues as much more of their time is consumed by the other parts of the business rather than working the fields component.

They do create significantly more for their time, true. But this idea that exists that automation has given us more free time isn't quite borne out by the evidence.

I didn't say agriculture gave us leisure, I said it freed us up to do other things. You may spend less time hunting and gathering but everyone is a hunter and gatherer. With agriculture a smaller part of your society is dedicated to food production. This allows for specialization and civilization.

Leisure, as we understand it is a pretty modern development. In that study they are defining leisure as the opposite of labor. I wouldn't call that leisure personally. Partaking in or consuming entertainment and hobbies is leisure.

It would seem plausible to claim agriculture put demand on innovation; tools to make more efficient agriculture. Things like irrigation channels, planting tools, harvesting tools, etc.

Maybe technology developed for conflict came first but I’d guess peacetime uses also put demands on innovation.

Interestingly, I watched some video somewhere where in some part of India[1] there were people who were harvesting wheat with a curved knife (sickle) like implement rather than a scythe. So people had to bend down to harvest a field. Meaning sometimes technology doesn’t diffuse everywhere —even well known solutions.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iU0uYeO7XI

Hunter gatherers worked at best 4 hours a day.

Agriculture did not free up time, it costs more time. It also has been a catastrophe for the human diet, which was superior before. Besides food, living constantly next to cattle has caused all kinds of new diseases.

Finally, agriculture established the concept of property. Almost all the negative behavior we commonly attribute to people...greed, competition, theft, envy, hoarding...come from the invention of personal property. It's not a natural occurrence of human behavior.

It was a catastrophe for the human diet, back when most people ate grains for 90% of their meals. Now we benefit from having basically any food available to us consistently. Hunter gatherers had better diets than their farming descendents and we know this because of their skeletons. But what farming provides is a surplus of food. Extra food means you feel comfortable enough to have a bunch of kids and all sit around inventing things like computers and Hacker News

There still are hunter gatherer societies, and they don't spend all their time hunting and gathering.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/5510187...