23.1: The Origins of Agriculture

Hunter-Gatherers

Archeological evidence suggests that nomadic human tribes began farming during the Neolithic period, and so it is often referred to as the Neolithic Revolution. About 12,000 years ago, one of the first attempts at farming began in the Fertile Crescent, the Levant region of the Near East that includes the interior areas of present-day Turkey, Israel, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Turkmenistan, and Asia Minor. The ancient inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent, known as Natufians, gathered wild wheat, barley, lentils, almonds, and so on and hunted cattle, gazelle, deer, horses, and wild boars (see figure 1.1).

Throughout this region, thousands of archeological excavations have been conducted and numerous objects—including grinding stones, flint, bone tools, stone sickles, dentalium, shell ornaments, and many fine tools of polished stone—have been unearthed. These show that prior to the adoption of agriculture, the inhabitants of this region had already acquired knowledge about their surrounding vegetation and used tools for cutting, uprooting, and harvesting wild plants, which could have made their transition toward farming easier. The direct descendants of the Natufians, the pre-pottery Neolithic people, successfully domesticated more than 150 crops, including barley, wheat, pulses, and so on. They also domesticated animals and built the first villages in human history.

Fig 1.1 “The Fertile Crescent” by OSU OERU is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Numerous discoveries in recent years indicate that besides the Fertile Crescent, parallel efforts of cultivation began in several other parts of the world. For example, 9,000 years ago, in China’s Yellow River valley, rice cultivation began; 5,000 to 8,000 years ago, in Africa and East Asia, the cultivation of a variety of roots and tubers was underway; and 7,000 to 9,000 years ago, people in South America were growing maize, beans, and squash. Hence the history of agriculture is only 12,000 years old, and it spread around the globe relatively quickly. But how did geographically isolated human groups, unaware of one another’s existence, begin farming within this short period of time, ditching the hunter-gatherer way of life?

Agriculture?

Australian archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe first linked the beginning of agriculture to climate change. He suggests that at the end of the last ice age (6,000–13,000 years ago), the earth’s average temperature increased and glaciers moved rapidly northward. Additionally, rainfall progressively decreased in Southwest Asia and Africa; thus year after year, this region suffered spells of drought that caused the loss of vegetation and several animal species. Over a prolonged period, the rainforests turned into savannas, where herbivores dwelled only for a few months. Under the changed circumstances, humans were unable to sustain themselves throughout the year by hunting and foraging. The human groups, living on different continents and unaware of one another’s existence, were forced to produce their own food, and farming began within a short span of time all around the globe.

Women’s Enterprise

It is believed that agriculture was invented by women. The women of the pre-agrarian societies collected wild fruits, berries, tubers, and roots and had generational experience in identifying edible plants and knowledge about plants’ life cycles and how they grow. It has been suggested that women’s extraordinary vision, more developed motor skills, and ability to process finer details evolved due to the importance of their involvement in foraging activities for millions of years. For example, the average woman’s eyes can distinguish about 250 shades and hues, while an average man’s can only see 40–50.

When droughts became regular, the tribes of our ancestors made temporary encampments along the lakes and ponds where men ambushed animals who came to quench their thirst. Their foraging experience helped womenfolk take the initiative in growing food. They sowed the seeds of wild grasses in the surrounding marshes and planted parts of the tubers to propagate new plants.

In most traditional societies, even today, this historical association of women in agriculture is revered: often, women sow the first seeds to bestow good luck for a bountiful harvest. Invariably, across all cultures, we find a similar feminine influence in stories related to the origin of farming. For example, in ancient Egypt, Isis was deemed the goddess of agriculture. In Greek mythology, Demeter was the goddess of fertility and the harvest. In Mexico, Hispaniola, and Latin America (the sites of the great Mayan and Aztec civilizations), we find stories about the origin of man and corn, "maize is the mother of man". Hindu mythology has several goddesses, including Bhudevi (the earth goddess), Annapurna (the goddess of grains, who provides nutrition to everyone), and Shakti (the creator of the entire plethora of vegetation).

The common thread of all these myths is the appearance of the savior female deity who taught mankind to cultivate grains to survive. Although these myths have no literal value, they serve as metaphors or narratives of human experiences and survived through generational memories. They are also, in fact, consistent with the climate change theory of the origin of agriculture.

Slash and Burn: Shifting Cultivation

At the dawn of agriculture, the primitive people of the Neolithic era only had some tools made of stones and animal bones at their disposal. These tools were useless for such a monumental task as embarking on the path to farming. Fortunately, mankind’s knowledge and experience of taming fire came in handy. Long before the origins of modern humans, Homo erectus, an ancestor of the hominid branch, had learned to light and control fire. Afterward, the members of genus Homo moved northwards from Africa and survived the cold weather of Europe and Asia with the help of this skill. Humans used their best weapon, fire, to create the first farms. First, they slashed the vegetation, then burned it to clear the small patches in the forests, and finally, sowed seeds in the ashes. This practice of farming, known as slash-and-burn agriculture, still survives in the Amazon rainforests and in many mountainous regions of the world. The plots created by this method are very fertile initially, but with each passing year, they are overtaken by more and more weeds, pests, and parasites, which causes a decline in their fertility. So after three to four years, the people move to another site. Thus this practice is also known as “shifting cultivation” or “swidden agriculture.” In India, it is known as “jhoom” among the native Adivasi tribes (descended from an ancient forest-dwelling people). After people abandon a site, in the fallow field, grass and weeds grow, and it serves as a pasture for herbivores and hunting grounds. Slowly, the fertility of these pastures returns, shrubs and trees grow, and they become part of the forest again. In this way, the field, fallow land, and the surrounding forest are recycled. Also, weeds, insects, and other parasites are kept in balance.

Today, we are farming with highly sophisticated machines and have specialized tools for various tasks, from sowing to harvesting, and yet farming is still a tremendous task. We cannot even grasp how difficult it would have been in prehistoric times. For thousands of years, generations of mankind struggled to make farming productive. They also continued to gather and hunt to make up for the shortfall or crop failures. Since farming required much more time and effort, farming would have been abandoned from time to time if nature was bountiful. It has been suggested by various studies that agriculture did not progress smoothly; it took several thousand years before humanity could fully rely on agriculture.

So to summarize, the history of agriculture is 12,000 years old, and traces back to a time when changes in the earth’s global climate led to widespread drought and a decline in natural resources, forcing our ancestors to produce their own food. For thousands of years, shifting cultivation supplemented their diets while hunting and gathering remained the main source of sustenance. The discovery of agriculture was not an accident but the product of trial and error as well as improvisation that spanned many centuries, a process that still continues today.

Animal husbandry is considered a by-product of agriculture. It has been suggested that during droughts, people survived on stored grains, and they used some grains to feed herbivores to keep them around for easy hunting. The credit to domesticating animals primarily goes to men.

Emergence of the First Agricultural Societies

Even though agriculture started almost simultaneously in many regions of the world, its progress was not uniform. The biodiversity of various geographical regions (e.g., their flora, animals, birds, insects, and microorganisms) influenced the emergence of stable agricultural societies. In some areas of the tropics, particularly in Africa, people had great success in growing tubers like yams, potatoes, eddoe, sweet potatoes, and cassava. These plants can be propagated by burying a small part of the tuber in the ground and so did not require an understanding of the plant’s life cycle. So these groups had an easy head start thanks to vegetative propagation that produced identical plants (clones), which did not differ significantly in yield. They learned to process many types of tubers and invented a very complex process of separating cyanide and starch from cassava to make starchy tapioca pearls. These undertakings helped folks sustain themselves year-round, but did not accumulate enough surplus to free a section of the population from farming, allowing them to pursue other tasks needed for the further advancement of their societies.

In South and Central America, maize was the mainstay of civilization. However, the natural structure of maize plants promotes outcrossing: on this plant, male flowers, known as tassels, hang from the tip, whereas the female flowers (silk) grow on the stem. Maize pollens are very lightweight and reach the female flowers via wind. Thus male flowers can pollinate female flowers of the same plant (self-pollination) or of another plant (cross-pollination). Although in maize, the chances of self-pollination and cross-pollination events are equal, the progeny born of selfing is inferior (gives lower yield) compared to the progeny born of outcrossing. Thus farmers need to plant different varieties of maize in the same fields to ensure maximum yield. In the absence of this knowledge, the productivity of the crop cannot be assured from one year to another. Only after such an understanding developed could people rely fully on maize farming and utilize the surplus to build the great civilizations of the Aztecs and Mayans.

In the Fertile Crescent, about thirty-two species of grass—including the wild species of wheat, barley, sorghum, millet, and oats—grow naturally. Incidentally, most grasses have complete flowers with both male and female organs, and self-pollination rules over cross-pollination. As a result, the characteristics of grasses remain stable, and crop yields do not vary from one year to another. If the plants with large grains are picked and carried forward, then crops with large seeds can be harvested for generations. Additionally, the grass seeds can be stored for a very long period of time and year-round dependence on these grains was easily established. So the early farmers of this region benefitted from growing grasses.

In the Fertile Crescent, animal husbandry began in parallel with farming. Some groups exclusively pursued this path and so developed a nomadic way of life. They moved with their herds following the availability of grazing grounds and trading the products of one farming community with another. These pastoralists thus further strengthened the stability of farming communities and broadened the region’s resource base. Such advances helped the people of the Fertile Crescent settle in one place permanently and establish the first villages.

In China, along the Yellow River, people learned to cultivate rice. Rice is also a self-pollinated grass, and so these early farmers could rely on its harvest for yearlong sustenance and could store surplus seeds. Unlike their contemporaries in the Fertile Crescent, Chinese farmers could harvest two crops of rice per year and so their surplus grew even more rapidly. So they reaped similar advantages and almost simultaneously established permanent settlements.

About 5,500 years ago, an independent initiative of paddy cultivation was undertaken in the Indo-Gangetic plains that are spread across South Asia. In addition to rice, the peoples of South Asia and East Asia independently learned to grow a variety of minor grains, pulses, vegetables, fruits, tubers, roots, and oilseed crops.

As agriculture progressed, many river-valley civilizations—in the Indus Valley, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China—came into existence. Meanwhile, the populations of hunter-gatherers remained more or less stable. As agriculture developed and productivity increased, the human population grew proportionally (see figure 1.2). The first minor jump occurred after the discovery of metals that made many more tools like plows, available to farmers. The use of a plow powered by domesticated animals resulted in a significant increase in food production. In this way, 5,000 years ago, farming began to seem like a better alternative to the hunter-gatherer’s way of life. The surplus grain freed a large section of the population from farming and allowed them to invest energy in other tasks that led to the second major change—the division of labor in human society. Subsequently, the collective sharing of resources was replaced with individual ownership—private property—which gave rise to a need to ensure the succession of one’s own bloodline. As a consequence, rules of strict sexual conduct for women were formulated and, like infields and domesticated animals, they became the property of men. As class divisions deepened, the unit of a family, headed by a patriarch, strengthened. Soon, tribes headed by patriarchs began to fight for control over their possessions and to expanding their domains, which gave rise to more complex and organized social and political structures, like states, nations, and religion. In societies dependent on subsistence agriculture—where property has not developed and most of the people remain engaged in agriculture—complex social structures, division of labor, crime, patriarchy, and other sociopolitical structures are also poorly developed.

Fig 1.2 “World population growth” by OSU OERU is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Agriculture transformed human society, but this transformation also, in turn, influenced agricultural practices. While the family, private property, and various institutions were born as by-products of agriculture, these sociopolitical advancements also impacted agriculture. To this day, agriculture continues to be highly entangled with society and human history. In the following chapters, we will review the historical progress of agriculture, advancements in science and technology that influenced farming, and the impact of agriculture on humanity.

References

1. Lee, R. B. (1968). What hunters do for a living, or, how to make out on scarce resources. In R. B. Lee and I. DeVore (Eds.), Man the hunter (pp. 40, 43). Aldine. (↵ Return 1) (↵ Return 2)

2. Sahlins, M. (1968). Notes on the original affluent society. In R. B. Lee and I. DeVore (Eds.), Man the hunter (pp. 85, 86). Aldine. (↵ Return)

Further Readings

Diamond, J. (1997). Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human societies. W. W. Norton.

Lee, R. B. (1979). The !Kung San: Men, women and work in a foraging society. Cambridge University Press.

Attribution

This page was edited by students in the Spring 2024 General Botany class at Norco College