Greetings. I am Arianrhod, a history buff who is studying to be an anthropologist at university. Much of my worldbuilding. I plan to post a number of resources from my library here to aid other worldbuilders in their work. To start with:

Agriculture and its Consequences​:

The transition from foraging to agriculture did not happen at the same time in all parts of the world: it happened when foraging was no longer a viable option, and the pressures that caused this transition came to a head at different times in different parts of the world.

99% of human history was spent as hunter-gatherers; the advent of agriculture emerged as a long-term consequence of the Pleistocene Extinction. The megafauna that had provided large game hunters with quick access to millions of calories died off at the beginning of the Holocene, forcing humanity to rely on low-calorie, difficult to obtain foods. Many adaptations were invented to maximize the food acquired and minimize the time and energy put into its acquisition; domestication and agriculture emerged as such strategies, though not for millennia.

Domestication occurs when humans, knowingly or unknowingly, manipulate the traits of a wild species of plant of animal, selecting those phenotypes advantageous for them, often to the detriment of the organism’s ability to survive in the wild and making the domesticate dependent on humanity for its survival. Neolithic communities reliant on agriculture formed settled villages and began to fire pottery to store food. Hunter-gatherers were no strangers to ceramics but generally shunned ceramic pots for woven baskets, as pots were heavy and difficult to transport without beasts of burden.

Agriculture solves some problems but created others in is wake. Foragers ate a broad-spectrum diet of a wide variety of foods, exploiting a large area of land lightly but extensively. Agriculturalists ate a narrow spectrum diet of only one or two staple foods and often suffered from nutritional deficiencies as a result. They required a much smaller area of land but cultivated it extensively, to the point that they were prone to degrade the land and cause famine and soil exhaustion. Foragers could simply move when in conflict with other groups; agriculturalists were often forced into war. Foragers could leave for greener pastures if their food supply vanished agriculturalists would have to trade for food, forcibly take it from someone else, or face famine.

How Domestication Works​:

Domestication entails human intervention in the natural life cycle of plants and animals, changing them in ways desirable to humans, often unintentionally. All species have a variety of different traits; domestication acts as an artificial selection, much faster than natural evolution.​

Domestication may have started by accident. For example, humans like to eat grasses with big seeds and thin seed coats, making them nutritious and easy to digest. When humans eat the seeds, some of them are undigested and excreted into their middens, where they grow surrounded by abundant fertilizer and propagate their genes.​ The relationship of agriculturalists and domesticates is symbiotic, as both are reliant on one another for survival. The traits selected for the benefit of humans may be harmful to the survival of the organism in the wild.​
  
Primary centers of domestication are where domestication is invented; secondary centers of domestication are locations where domesticates spread to. Domestication was independently invented in many different regions at different times, almost exclusively in rich environmental contexts, rather than poor ones.​
   
 Cereals, for example, attach their seeds to the plant with a thin fiber called a rachis. In the wild, these rachis are brittle and thin, so they may break in the wind and their seeds may be carried off easily to grow into new plants. But a human farmer has surely wasted their time tending to their plants if a gust of wind carries off all the seeds they intended to eat. Thus, humans selected for plants with thick, flexible rachis – such plants would never be able to reproduce in the wild, as the wind would not be strong enough to carry off their seeds; the seeds would rot on the plant and the plant would die out.​
    
In another case, humans selected for smaller, more docile goats with twisted, dull horns rather than sharp, straight, saberlike ones. Breeding out sharp horns kept goats from stabbing and killing human farmers, but it also removed their ability to defend themselves from predators, making them dependent on humans for survival.​

What Agriculture Entails :

Agriculture entails a totally new relationship between humanity and the landscape; where foragers exploited the land extensively, agriculturalists do so intensively. Foragers are only involved in the final stage of the life cycle of plants and animals, where agriculturalists are intimately involved in the entire life cycle:​

    Propagation: The seeding of plants and breeding of animals​
    Husbandry: Caring for the plants and animals​
    Harvest/Slaughter: The harvest of plants and slaughter of animals​
    Storage/Maintenance: The storage of plants and winter maintenance of animals​
    Agriculture provided a greater food supply to support higher populations and provides a constant, predictable food supply. 

Stored surplus gets people through times of scarcity. Animals provide milk, wool, leather, and ivory in addition to meat and can be used as beasts of burden.​