Not long, but actually longer than the first agricultural societies is my understanding. With the agrarian transition, population density and family sizes went up (a lot) but life expectancy went down a bit and infant mortality and disease rates (zoonotic diseases + higher concentration of population to spread through) went up.
Ag gives more calories per square km, so more people. But also more vulnerability to disease, periodic famine, and in some cases malnutrition from over reliance on cereal crops (e.g. Pellagra). Hunter gatherers are/were constrained by wild food source densities but also tended to have smaller families, breast feed longer (so fewer pregnancies), and could sometimes migrate when local wild animal populations were exhausted. If you have a bad crop year you can't migrate to the next valley and find a new field of wheat waiting for you.
However there were likely many millennia of societies that mixed agriculture with hunting/gathering. Eastern woodland native Americans were like that pre-contact; maize agriculture + hunting game + fish etc. Seems like a good overall strategy.
> With the agrarian transition, population density and family sizes went up (a lot) but life expectancy went down a bit and infant mortality and disease rates (zoonotic diseases + higher concentration of population to spread through) went up.
Infant mortality going up is the same thing as life expectancy going down. Neither one tells you much about whether people die before or after you'd expect to start seeing problems in their teeth. After ignoring infant mortality, it's mostly afterward, but "remains" are not a representative selection.
> Hunter gatherers are/were constrained by wild food source densities but also tended to have smaller families
This conflicts with the idea that they had lower infant mortality.
I gave you the reason right there above, but you cared not to read it: longer breastfeeding period.
Plus the fact that in a hunter-gatherer society people choose not too have too many children for the same reason people make that choice in advanced capitalist economies. Children become a resource burden.
In an agrarian economy, your children are extra hands for farm work. In a hunter gatherer society they are mouths to feed in an environment with intrinsically limited resources.
> However there were likely many millennia of societies that mixed agriculture with hunting/gathering. Eastern woodland native Americans were like that pre-contact; maize agriculture + hunting game + fish etc. Seems like a good overall strategy.
Aren't there parts of rural China still living in that mixed model today? And Africa too iirc...
Ag gives more calories per square km, so more people. But also more vulnerability to disease, periodic famine, and in some cases malnutrition from over reliance on cereal crops (e.g. Pellagra). Hunter gatherers are/were constrained by wild food source densities but also tended to have smaller families, breast feed longer (so fewer pregnancies), and could sometimes migrate when local wild animal populations were exhausted. If you have a bad crop year you can't migrate to the next valley and find a new field of wheat waiting for you.
However there were likely many millennia of societies that mixed agriculture with hunting/gathering. Eastern woodland native Americans were like that pre-contact; maize agriculture + hunting game + fish etc. Seems like a good overall strategy.