ABSTRACT
During the Pleistocene (a period that lasted from 2.6 million years ago until 11,700 y.a.), foragers roamed the earth, and climates fluctuated frequently and strongly. Agriculture was attempted (Snir et al. 2015) but its cultural evolution could not keep up with the climate fluctuations, and hence, early attempts failed (Richerson, Boyd, and Bettinger 2001). Temperatures became more stable and at higher averages during the Holocene (starting 11,700 y.a.), and the climate got warmer and wetter in a broad zone around the equator. When environmental conditions stabilized, it became possible to permanently domesticate plants and animals. 1 Agriculture took several thousand years to develop, at a pace far too slow to speak about an agrarian revolution. It is a form of genetic engineering that was discovered through a great deal of trial and error (Christian 2011) and many complementary inventions, among other things, to figure out how to compose a nutritious diet, agriculturally. During this time of discovery, people both farmed and foraged in parallel (Bellwood 2009). Agriculture was actually invented by insects, first by ants that domesticated fungi (Mueller, Rehner, and Schultz 1998) and subsequently by others. Humans followed 50 million years later. Farming insects are more efficient than humans because they clone their crops, which reduces within-crop competition (as all specimens become genetically identical) and increases yield (Schultz, Gawne, and Peregrine 2022).
