ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how agricultural practices were transmitted across societies, and how farmers, nomads, fishers, and hunter-gatherers interacted. Indeed some scholars argue that agriculture only emerged in places where permanent settlements had existed for millennia. But over a period of some thousands of years agriculture spread to virtually all suitable landscapes, with groups of nomads and hunter-gatherers either becoming farmers or being squeezed out of existence or pushed onto lands ill-suited to agriculture. Farmers and nomads developed the ability to digest milk products as adults. If this was indeed the general case, and author accepts that farmers domesticated animals long after they domesticated plants, then nomadism must have appeared a thousand years or more after agriculture. If agriculture predated nomadism, then at least some of the earliest nomads may have been former farmers.
