Human evolution with highly limited agriculture

For some reason agriculture does not arise. Let's say that there's some mild ecological disaster worldwide. At the same time, viruses kill off all the major plants that will become food crops. Implausible for that to happen at the same time, but that's not the point.

Let's say that the only crops that are domesticated are weird nutrient-poor tubers and other similar plants.

With agriculture stifled, urban civilization, which arguably slows down evolution, is impossible.

How do humans evolve after this point?
 
Well, anatomically modern humans supposedly diverged around 200,000 years before the introduction of agriculture, so I imagine things wouldn't change much in the interim if agriculture were to be developed later.

This is also problematic because we don't have a very good idea of the effect agriculture has had on our evolution, since it's only been a measly 10,000 years since we started it...
 
Well, anatomically modern humans supposedly diverged around 200,000 years before the introduction of agriculture, so I imagine things wouldn't change much in the interim if agriculture were to be developed later.

This is also problematic because we don't have a very good idea of the effect agriculture has had on our evolution, since it's only been a measly 10,000 years since we started it...
Well what I'm basically asking is, how might human evolution proceed in the future. Only without the dampening effect of civilization to have a larger population (in which it takes a longer time for mutations to spread) whose members have a lower chance of dying and higher chance of living a long life and having multiple descendants who survive.

To make the starting point as close to modern humans as possible, let's say that the extinction of the good food crops happens a few hundred years before the advent of agriculture ~10,000 years ago. Even though there probably isn't all that much difference between 12,000 BP humans and modern humans (as far as the entire species goes, obviously there's been ethnic diversification since then).
 
Well, if we're using ASBs to totally rule out any possibility of agriculture developing such that we have, say, another million years of hunter-gatherers, we'll probably at the very least see populations in different regions adapt and change to suit their distinct environments. This may lead to a similar situation as the splitting off of homo neanderthalensis and homo sapiens from homo erectus in the distant past, with separate human populations diverging to form new hominid species.
 
This is a very tenuous scenario because I don't see any way the trend towards larger brains will be reversed - it's just too advantageous: even without agriculture humans rose to the very top of the food chain and annihilated every competitor - so as soon as the climate becomes suitable for agriculture again humans are going to latch onto it. In certain areas they will also probably find ways of enhancing food production to the point where civilization is possible without resorting to agriculture, as happened in Jomon period Japan where food was so plentiful agriculture wasn't needed to produce a vibrant culture.
 
This is a very tenuous scenario because I don't see any way the trend towards larger brains will be reversed - it's just too advantageous: even without agriculture humans rose to the very top of the food chain and annihilated every competitor - so as soon as the climate becomes suitable for agriculture again humans are going to latch onto it.
Well the idea is that the good food crops go extinct. There could be agriculture with tubers and the like, but grain, corn, rice, etc., those are gone. Cities won't arise.

In certain areas they will also probably find ways of enhancing food production to the point where civilization is possible without resorting to agriculture, as happened in Jomon period Japan where food was so plentiful agriculture wasn't needed to produce a vibrant culture.
By civilization I just mean cities, not culture. There were the Venus figurines and detailed, motion-depicting cave paintings in before agriculture too, in Europe. And every tribe in inland Africa and the Amazon today has culture, but not all live in cities or practice agriculture.
 
For some reason agriculture does not arise. Let's say that there's some mild ecological disaster worldwide. At the same time, viruses kill off all the major plants that will become food crops. Implausible for that to happen at the same time, but that's not the point.

Let's say that the only crops that are domesticated are weird nutrient-poor tubers and other similar plants.

With agriculture stifled, urban civilization, which arguably slows down evolution, is impossible.

How do humans evolve after this point?

I think humans would focus more on Animal Husbandry and Pastoralism rather than focus on growing Vegetables which would hamper the start of people forming cities, basically a more Carnivore Mankind.
 
Farming has genetically weakened mankind, I`ve heard that the best olympic athletes aren`t as fast, strong and powerful as your average caveman was 5-10,000 years ago. Without farming those of us who survived to adulthood would be virtual supermen by today`s standards; muscular, athletic giants who can tackle a buffalo with bare hands.

Cool!
 
I think humans would focus more on Animal Husbandry and Pastoralism

This is a very compelling idea. After all, it's possible that the first pastoralists leaped straight from hunting-gathering to keeping herds of animals for food. Without farming I can see pastoralism becoming dominant in the same way as agriculture did OTL, as in terms of food production it definitely trumps hunting-gathering in most environments. Eventually horses will be domesticated and a fully nomadic civilization will soon follow.

What this poses for human evolution is hard to guess at: in OTL, given their mobility, nomadic groups on the Eurasian steppe were incredibly dynamic genetically.
 
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This is a very compelling idea. After all, it's possible that the first pastoralists leaped straight from hunting-gathering to keeping herds of animals for food. Without farming I can see pastoralism becoming dominant in the same way as agriculture did OTL, as in terms of food production it definitely trumps hunting-gathering in most environments. Eventually horses will be domesticated and a fully nomadic civilization will soon follow.

I think with limited crops mankind might stay on Slash/Burn type agriculture and Horticulture(especially in the tropics) for the domesticated crops and pastoralism will be more dominant compared to OTL.
 
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