Question

Passage A

For generations, the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture was depicted by historians as a remarkable triumph of human ingenuity—a so-called "Neolithic Revolution" in which humans deliberately discovered farming techniques and enthusiastically abandoned their ostensibly arduous foraging lifestyles for the security and comfort of settled life. However, modern archaeological and anthropological evidence flatly contradicts this triumphalist narrative. The transition to agriculture was in no way a voluntary step up the ladder of cultural progress, but rather a necessary, and perhaps inevitable, adaptation to relentless demographic pressures. As human populations expanded slowly but steadily during the early Holocene epoch, the natural carrying capacity of local environments for nomadic foragers was gradually stretched to its absolute limits. Faced with dwindling wild resources per capita, these groups were essentially forced to intensify their exploitation of specific plant species, a process that eventually and inadvertently led to full-scale domestication. Far from immediately improving the human condition, the adoption of early agriculture was a desperate measure. Bioarchaeological studies consistently reveal that early agriculturalists actually suffered from substantially narrower diets, more frequent periods of acute starvation, and significantly higher rates of infectious disease compared to their immediate foraging ancestors. Thus, farming was not a brilliant discovery to be universally celebrated, but rather a highly burdensome necessity driven primarily by the inexorable mathematics of population growth.

Passage B

The traditional historical view that agriculture was primarily an intellectual breakthrough—a sudden realization that planted seeds reliably grow into food-producing plants, thereby leading to an immediate and voluntary lifestyle upgrade—is simply no longer tenable in light of modern scientific research. Instead, the origins of agricultural domestication must be fundamentally understood through the complex lens of environmental constraint and climatic instability. During the Younger Dryas, a well-documented period of abrupt global cooling and drying, wild food resources became increasingly scarce and highly unpredictable in pivotal regions such as the Levant. Hunter-gatherer societies, who had previously enjoyed abundant stands of wild cereals in a relatively stable climate, were suddenly forced to cluster tightly around shrinking oases and a few reliable water sources. To merely maintain their baseline food supply in these geographically restricted territories, they had no choice but to begin actively cultivating and managing the wild grasses they had previously only gathered. The long-term consequences of this dramatic shift were biologically profound and largely detrimental. Skeletal remains dating from this specific transition period consistently show clear markers of severe physiological stress, including stunted skeletal growth, pervasive dental caries, and bone lesions indicative of severe nutritional deficiencies and the effects of dense crowding. Agriculture was therefore not a conscious choice for a demonstrably better life, but a reluctant, albeit necessary, coping mechanism deployed in response to profound ecological degradation. This climatic pressure, rather than any intrinsic desire for agrarian life, explains the simultaneous emergence of farming in multiple isolated regions.

Based on the passages, which of the following statements represent a perspective shared by both authors? Select all that apply.