A Brief Overview: The Origin of Agriculture

The history of agriculture dates back thousands of years. The origins of agriculture are scattered in a number places across the globe and interestingly, they rise roughly around the same times. Today, I would like to have a brief introduction to the origin of farming. 

Prehistory: Neolithic Revolution

In the Palaeolithic period, about 200,000 years ago, anatomically modern human has first appeared. Since then into the Neolithic (15,200 BC in the middle east), human were living a nomadic lifestyle, moving constantly with the food supply chain. From around 15,000 to 10,000 years ago, the cultivation of crops seems to have risen independently over the course of millennia in a number of places. There are at least 11 separate regions being regarded as an independent origin. 

The Fertile Crescent

Fig 1. Fertile Crescent Map. Credit: Thing Link

As one of the early recognized area of origin of agriculture, the Fertile Crescent in the Levant region presented some of the evidence of the transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer society to an agriculture-based one. For example, the Natufians which are recognized as semi-sedentary hunter-gathers before the introduction of agriculture. They build villages that seem to be lived in all year around. There was evidence of summer and winter kills all brought back to the village through the teeth of hunted animals such as gazelles. Also, evidence of house mice, rats and sparrows number accords with a village occupied all year. The houses they live in shows a surprising degree of care in organisation and maintenance (Bar-Yosef, 1998). 

Fig 2. Neolithic grindstone for processing grain

They also seem to be harvesting grains. The settlements of the Natufians occurred in the woodland belt where the underbrush was grass with high frequencies of grain. Archaeologists have found burnt of remaining grains in their fireplace, sickles that were probably used for harvesting and grinding stones for processing grains. More importantly, studies have provided with results of isotope tests of Natufian teeth showing that their diets were rich in grains.

Hypotheses of the Origin of Cultivation

There are several hypotheses trying to discern how crop domestication originate. Some of the theories concern with the global climate variability of the time. Most of the literature assumes either a better climate made agriculture more suitable in comparison to foraging, or that a worse climate that has the same effect.

As the start of the cultivation roughly coincides with the end of small ice age, the Younger Dryas (~1,1000 BC). Rickerson et al. (2001) argued that the end of the ice age brought a warmer, wetter climate which is favorable for the cultivation of plants. However, the empirical problem is there is no evidence of agriculture around the world during the initial warming, only ~2000 years after the start of warming. Other scientists such as Bar-Yosef and Meadow (1995) have proposed that the cold and dry conditions during the Younger Dryas caused the wild grasses to decrease in yield and thus provide motivation for cultivation. The connection between the beginning of agriculture with the end of Younger Dryas Period is still highly debated. 

Other hypotheses that were put forward is related to population growth. Archaeologists such as Cohen (1977) suggest that population pressure is the dominant factor causing the transition into agriculture. However, this is regarded as inconsistency with recent archaeological evidence which is that population growth is extremely slow prior to agriculture and only exploded after the transition. 

Technology change has been considered as one of the driving force of this transition. In this view, farming is invested by a group of pioneers and spread widely as soon as it benefits were recognized. This is opposed by some archaeologists saying that people in hunter and gather society are experts in botany and it's inconceivable that they could not understand how harvesting crops works. 

Overall, since none of the major factors have been shown to be dominant in the transition of agriculture, it can be argued that agriculture arose from a combination of these factors. 

The Early Anthropocene Hypothesis 

The hypothesis has been suggested by William Ruddiman who believes that the Anthropocene started 8000 years ago due to intense farming activities instead of starting in the industrial age of 18th century. He argues that as agriculture became worldwide, along with the deforestation associated with it, caused increased levels of GHGs. He also argues that this forestalled the arrival of the scheduled ice age. This made the Holocene warmer and more stable than it otherwise would have been. And the elevated greenhouse gases is also thought to also contribute significantly to modern global climate change. However, this hypothesis is still highly debatable but it does put forward farming's possible impacts on climate change.