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Earliest "Writing" On 60,000-Year-Old Eggshells
New Scientist reports on research published in PNAS (abstract here) about what may be the earliest writing yet discovered, on eggshells dated to 60,000 years ago. "Since 1999, Pierre-Jean Texier of the University of Bordeaux, France, and his colleagues have uncovered 270 fragments of shell at the Diepkloof Rock Shelter in the Western Cape, South Africa. They show the same symbols are used over and over again, and the team say there are signs that the symbols evolved over 5,000 years. This long-term repetition is a hallmark of symbolic communication and a sign of modern human thinking, say the team. [Another researcher is quoted:] 'Judging from what we know about the evolution of art all over the world, there may have been many [written language] traditions that were born, lasted for some time, and then vanished. This may be one of them, most probably not the first and certainly not the last.'"
... and as I recall, the results were that hunter-gatherers were better nourished (both in terms of just calories and the various essential nutrients) than earlier farming populations... on average. The trouble was that excursions from the "average" were a lot bigger for the hunter gatherers.. it was quite literally feast or famine. So although the H-G populations got more nutrition over the course of, say, a year, they were also more likely to starve to death during the lean times. Agriculture was, comparatively, a sure thing, which is why most groups took to it. But the move wasn't without cost - for one thing, you ended up having to work a lot harder to be successful at agriculture, as someone pointed out above.