Slim Pickins

 The reason the ancient hunter-gatherers were free to roam all over was there were a lot less people in those days.  The reason there were a lot less people was because life was generally nasty, brutish, and short.  The reason they had to roam all over was they would quickly exhaust all the resources in their vicinity and went looking elsewhere for more.  If they ran into another tribe along the way, their choices were either fight or flight.  The stronger tribes ended up with the best territory, leaving the weaker tribes with the slim pickins.  In this respect, the humans were not much better off than the other animals they hunted for subsistence.  

At some point, some people discovered that the hunting would be easier if they rounded up a bunch of animals and built a fence around them.  In addition to making the animals easier to find when they were needed, it protected the animals from predators so they were able to become fruitful and multiply.  The downside was that, since the animals were no longer able to roam in search for food, the food had to be brought to them. Cultivation was developed so that the food would be closer to the animals and the people wouldn't have to haul it so far.  The whole process became more efficient over time, leading to an increase in population of animals and humans alike.  

These advances did not advance with the same speed everywhere.  The stronger tribes with the best territory got ahead of the weaker tribes that were still wandering in search of a better life.  To level the playing field, the weaker tribes would form alliances with other weaker tribes, attack the stronger tribes, and steal their stuff.  This inspired the stronger tribes to form alliances with each other, some other stuff happened, and eventually we ended up with the nation state.  

In general, hunting and gathering will not support as many people per square mile as nomadic herding, which will not support as many people per square mile as agriculture, which will not support as many people per square mile as industrial development.  Okay, we still need agriculture to feed the industrial workers, but the agriculture of today has become pretty industrial itself.  We can still fool around with our gardens and hobby farms, but they won't support us as well as the modern agricultural-industrial complex.  

That's not, however, why I gave up gardening.  In my climate and soil type, gardening is a chancy thing.  One year you may get a bumper crop, but so does everybody else, and you can't hardly give the stuff away.  The next year you may get slim pickins, as does everybody else, and so it goes.  As I got older, I found it harder and harder to do all the things I enjoyed, so I had to set priorities and give up some things, and gardening was one of them.

When I went to Alaska, I started out in Anchorage, then I went to Palmer where I worked on a pig farm for over a month, then I went to Paxon, where I washed dishes and pumped gas for almost three months.  Paxson was not really a town, more like an outpost.  There was a hotel, restaurant, and bar in one building, and a gas station in another.  Then there was a trailer park that housed some highway workers, which we fed in the restaurant along with tourists and anybody else who passed through and was hungry.