ABSTRACT
The origins of agriculture are visible to us today only from archaeological digs and studies of foraging societies and groups that survived into the twentieth century. Western ideas about agricultural origins began when Europeans encountered “primitive” peoples, who were often foragers and knew little or nothing about farming. Other investigations found that humans and their societies and technologies had evolved over long evolutionary periods that came to be called Paleolithic and Neolithic, and that crop plants and domesticated animals of the world’s agricultural systems had definite geographical and temporal origins. These findings led in the 1930s to the idea that early humans had devel-
oped agriculture in a “Neolithic Revolution” approximately 10,000 years ago, in response to a drying climate after the end of the last Ice Age. This shift to agriculture led to the development of cities and civilization some 5,000 years later. In this view, farming first developed in the “fertile crescent” of Mesopotamia, where the local flora and fauna included the wild progenitors of the main domesticated food crops and animals. New archaeological research has qualified this conception of the first
“agricultural revolution.” Several scholars argued that the shift to farming was so rapid that it must have been preceded by “protoagriculture” for thousands of years before the Neolithic period. A cool and dry period about 11,000 years ago, the Younger Dryas, was followed by a warmer period favorable for the spread of plants and animals in the Near East. New research and rethinking of the evidence have shown that some of the presumed centers of agricultural development actually acquired the idea and techniques of farming from one or more of the smaller number of earlier centers. Studies of human remains from the periods before and after the shift to farming, and of modern surviving pre-agricultural peoples, have led to more complex and uncertain explanations for the shift to agriculture and evaluations of its nutritional, social, and political consequences. The Earth’s changing climate, especially its history of ice ages, served as
the background for these developments. The last expansion of the ice sheets peaked about 20,000 years ago and then receded. By 14,000 BCE the planet
was in a warm interglacial period, but around 11,000 BCE a brief resurgence of cold in the Younger Dryas, expanded glaciers for several centuries. By 10,000 BCE warmth returned and the recent period or Holocene began. In the Holocene glaciers steadily receded until by about 5000 BCE they may
have covered a smaller area than they do now. Climate in the equatorial and temperate regions became warm and humid; much of the Sahara desert until about 6000 BCE had significant plant growth. These were ideal conditions for developing farming in many parts of the world.
