Soru

Read the paired passages below, then answer the question that follows.

Passage A
For decades, historians and archaeologists characterized the Neolithic Revolution as a serendipitous intellectual breakthrough. In this traditional view, humanity finally deduced the mechanics of plant germination, recognized the superiority of this method of food production, and happily abandoned the supposed precariousness of the foraging lifestyle. This "discovery" narrative, however, fundamentally misapprehends both the profound botanical expertise of foraging societies and the grim physical realities of early agrarian life. Extensive anthropological evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer communities possessed an intimate and sophisticated understanding of plant lifecycles, yet they actively and rationally avoided systematic cultivation. The reason is evident in the bioarchaeological record: early agriculture was a grueling enterprise that demanded significantly more caloric expenditure than foraging, while providing a markedly less varied and nutritionally inferior diet. The skeletal remains of the earliest farmers show dramatic increases in signs of chronic malnutrition, infectious diseases, and degenerative joint conditions. Given these detriments, the transition to agriculture was a forced adaptation rather than a voluntary leap forward. Only severe and localized demographic stress—specifically, regional population densities outstripping the natural carrying capacity of available wild food resources—could have compelled communities to adopt such a punishing subsistence strategy. In this light, farming was not a triumph of human innovation, but rather a desperate, labor-intensive measure of survival in the face of ecological constraints.

Passage B
The enduring mystery of agriculture’s origins is why human communities ever chose to surrender the relative leisure and dietary diversity of a foraging lifestyle for the relentless, backbreaking toil of the fields. The traditional explanation—that prehistoric populations simply lacked the requisite intellectual knowledge of plant reproduction until the dawn of the Neolithic era—has been thoroughly discredited by modern ethnography, which confirms that foragers were, in fact, master botanists. Yet, the prevailing alternative theory, which posits that environmental depletion and overpopulation forced desperate human populations into farming, is equally flawed when subjected to archaeological scrutiny. The fossil record demonstrates unequivocally that the earliest sustained domestication efforts frequently occurred in regions of extraordinary natural abundance, not in zones of ecological scarcity. Instead, the initial impetus for crop cultivation was primarily social and political in nature. In resource-rich environments, certain ambitious individuals sought to amass surplus food not for basic community survival, but to host elaborate, competitive feasts. By dedicating labor to the production of specialized, high-value foods—such as early fermented beverages or prestige grains—these "aggrandizers" accrued political power, social status, and a loyal following. Agriculture, in its nascent stages, was therefore less about feeding a starving population and much more about funding the political aspirations of emerging elites through the deliberate accumulation of cultivated wealth. Consequently, the shift away from foraging was a socially engineered transformation rather than a purely physiological necessity.

Based on the passages, the authors share which of the following perspectives regarding the origins of agriculture?