The previous three chapters of this book examined the hunter-gatherer migrations that led to the hominin and modern human colonizations of virtually all habitable regions of the world, except for the remotest islands. Now, in the final four chapters, we turn to the dominance of food production as the major stimulus for migration, from about 10,000 years ago until the present day. Food production underpinned dramatic population growth and migration across all continents and oceans during the Holocene, giving rise to many of the major language families and ethnolinguistic populations that existed on the eve of the colonial era, in all regions where food production was possible. This chapter introduces the topic of food production in prehistory, and the following chapters examine consequent developments in the Old and New Worlds, respectively.
What impact on world history, and on the patterns of diversity in humans, can we attribute to the human ability to produce food rather than harvest it from the wild? In this chapter, I wish to introduce the concept of food production and to explain how it has led, on many occasions within the past 10,000 years, to the migrations of many of the direct ancestors of the indigenous agriculturalist populations of the world. It also led to the spreads of many of the world's major language families. The major issues to be discussed concern where and when food production began, why it developed in certain regions and not others, and what impact it had on human population sizes and densities. Since my emphasis is on human migration, I will not be especially concerned with theoretical debates about why food production developed in the first place.1
Many terminological issues arise in the definition of food production. Agriculture can serve as a generalized term for it, with reference to both plants and animals. Different kinds of food production include multicrop gardening, tree-crop arboriculture, and ruminant pastoralism, as well as open field (Latin ager, Greek agros) agriculture in which single stands of crops are produced, all utilizing varying combinations of rainfall and/ or irrigation to ensure production. Agriculture also has two separate components, one being the human activity patterns that we term cultivation and animal husbandry, and the other being the impacts of these activities, via both unconscious and conscious selection, on the animals and plants themselves. These impacts result in genetic change, the foundation of what we term domestication. The first farmers obviously cultivated wild plants (by practicing pre-domestication cultivation) and captured or tamed wild animals.
First Migrants: Ancient Migration in Global Perspective, First Edition. Peter Bellwood. © Peter Bellwood. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The domesticated phenotypes of these species developed later, often several millennia later, allowing for the full course of domestication to take place.
World History
