I have yet to see a balanced perspective on this thread. I'm also not keen on speculation when it comes to the abstract emotions of ancient populations, which are not easy to deduce from things like osteo data and pollen floats, our primary means of learning anything about these epochs.
Was it a choice? Everything humans do is a choice. Whether a choice was "right" is s subjective question and partially depends on your goals. Agriculture does constitute a choice that is difficult to reverse at a certain point, both because it requires a dense population tl be efficient and because its time expenditure negates the possibility of also participating in prime foraging episodes in the same year. But it has occasionally happened. There are at least three areas where intense agriculture gave way to foraging-dominant economies during a relatively short amount of time: the Mayan lowlands around the 9th c., the US southwest after 1250 ce, and the Amazon basin over several recent centuries at different times.
But we do not know why those episodes occurred, though we are speculating heavily in the direction of environmental pressure, which makes the most sense. These populations were not overtaken by HG populations. The Greenland Norse for example did not become HGers, they simply vanished while indigenous HG populations survived.
Civilizations do not "vanish", aside from on poorly conceived tv specials. They may move or change though, and often do.
It depends on your meaning of 'vanish'. There are quite a few old civilizations that we only know they existed because there there have been unique relics and ruins found.
Well, sure. Time eventually takes all things. But people do not just disappear. When the US Southwest was "abandoned" by the Ancestral Puebloan cultures, for instance, they did not simply bip out of existence, we have ever-increasing stores of detail about the dissolution of these communities. There was widespread migration, with whole clans moving south to the Rio Grande River Valley, concentration into historical communities like Taos and Hopi pueblos, and (very frequently!) people following family lines to join other neighboring ethnic groups. Which is relevant to this discussion, since many of those groups - the Yuman-speakers along the Colorado, the Apachean dwellers of the Northern Sonora - were nomadic foragers, not agricultural societies. Indeed, those groups were fully aware of agricultural technology and even used it opportunistically in wet years, but from the 15th century onward their dominant mode of life was based on hunting, gathering, scavenging, and trading or raiding of the farmers who remained in the area. In short, the Puebloans didn't vanish, they changed. Often, though not always, by retreating from the kind of intensive dry-land maize agriculture their ancestors had relied on in favor of a foraging way of life ultimately more practical to the desert environment in which they lived. What clan you belonged to had a huge say in which course your family took through the chaos.
The situation with the Maya, at least, is quite similar. There was, beyond any shadow of doubt, a major collapse of the political system of the day. But the Maya
people themselves obviously did not disappear, given the self-evident fact of their continued existence in the present. They largely farm in the modern era, but there were long centuries in which many of the Maya groups did not, either by choice or due to soil depletion. We know it was sometimes by choice for some, despite (like the desert foragers mentioned above) their knowing perfectly well how to farm. The flaws of state life loom large in the stories and mythology of both Mayans and modern Puebloans; big-city-dwellers are always the enemies ("Anasazi", the popular name for the Ancestral Puebloans literally means "Ancient Villains" in the Dine language) and they are openly mocked for forsaking their family and spiritual ties, and trying to accumulate power in human institutions (and depending on who you ask, perhaps relying on witches to maintain power through terror
). This isn't all the fault of corn of course, but trying to disentangle the role of agriculture from the other realities of densely populated living would be difficult. The two tend to come together.
