For most of history people ate only wild plants and animals. But around 10,000 years ago global climate changes seem to have induced some societies to enhance their food supplies with domesticated plants and animals. More and more people became food producers over the next millennium. Although hunting and gathering did not disappear, this transition from foraging to food production was one of the great turning points in history because it fostered a rapid increase in population and greatly altered humans’ relationship to nature (see Map 1.2).
What should this historic transformation be called? Because agriculture arose in combination with new kinds of stone tools, archaeologists called the period the “Neolithic” and the rise of agriculture the “Neolithic Revolution.” But that name can be misleading: first, stone tools were not its essential component, and second, it was not a single event but a series of separate transformations in different parts of the world. A better term is Agricultural Revolutions, which emphasizes that the central change was in food production and indicates that agriculture arose independently in many different places. In most cases agriculture included the domestication of animals for food as well as the cultivation of new food crops.
Food gathering gave way to food production in stages spread over hundreds of generations. The process may have begun when forager bands returning year after year to the same seasonal camps took measures to encourage the nearby growth of the foods they liked. They deliberately scattered the seeds of desirable plants in locations where they would thrive, and they discouraged the growth of competing plants by clearing them away. Such techniques of semicultivation could have supplemented food gathering for many generations. Families choosing to concentrate their energies on food production, however, would have had to settle permanently near their fields.
Settled agriculture required new, specialized tools. Indeed, it was the presence of new tools that first alerted archaeologists to the beginning of a food production
OCEAN
Economic Regions
I Cereal farming Root farming
Map 1.2 Early Centers of Plant and Animal Domestication Many different parts of the world made original contributions to domestication during the Agricultural Revolutions that began about 10,000 years ago. Later interactions helped spread these domesticated animals and plants to new locations. In lands less suitable for crop cultivation, pastoralism and hunting remained more important for supplying food.
Domesticated Animals and PastoraLIsm
Revolution. Many specialized stone tools were developed or improved for agricultural use, including polished or ground stone heads to work the soil, sharp stone chips embedded in bone or wooden handles to cut grain, and stone mortars to pulverize grain. However, stone axes were not very efficient for clearing away shrubs and trees. To do that, farmers used a much older technology: fire. Fires got rid of unwanted undergrowth, and the ashes were a natural fertilizer. After the burn-off farmers could use blades and axes to cut away new growth.
Also fundamental to the success of agriculture was selecting the highest-yielding strains of wild plants, which led to the development of valuable new domesticated varieties over time. As the principal gatherers of wild plant foods, women probably played a major role in this transition to plant cultivation, but the heavy work of clearing the fields would have fallen to the men.
The transition to agriculture occurred first in the Middle East. By 8000 b. c.e. human intervention had transformed certain wild grasses into higher-yielding domesticated grains, now known as emmer wheat and barley. Farmers there also discovered that alternating the cultivation of grains and pulses (plants yielding edible seeds such as lentils and peas) helped maintain soil fertility.
Plants domesticated in the Middle East spread to adjacent lands. Farmers in Greece were cultivating wheat and barley as early as 6000 b. c.e. Shortly after 4000 b. c.e. farming developed in the light-soiled plains of central Europe and along the Danube River. As forests receded because of climate changes and human clearing efforts, agriculture spread to other parts of Europe over the next millennium (see Map 1.2).
Early farmers in Europe and elsewhere practiced shifting cultivation, also known as swidden agriculture. After a few growing seasons, the fields were left fallow (abandoned to natural vegetation), and new fields were cleared nearby. In the Danube Valley of central Europe between 4000 and 3000 b. c.e., for example, communities of from forty to sixty people supported themselves on about 500 acres (200 hectares) of farmland, cultivating a third or less each year while leaving the rest fallow to restore its fertility. From around 2600 b. c.e. people in central Europe began using ox-drawn wooden plows to till heavier and richer soils.
Although the lands around the Mediterranean seem to have shared a complex of crops and farming techniques, wheat and barley could not spread farther south because the rainfall patterns in most of the rest of Africa were unsuited to the growth of these grains. Instead, separate Agricultural Revolutions took place in Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, beginning almost as early as in the Middle East. During a particularly wet period after 8000
B. C.E. people in what is now the eastern Sahara began to cultivate sorghum, a grain they derived from wild grasses they had previously gathered. Over the next three thousand years the Saharan farmers domesticated pearl millet, blackeyed peas, a kind of peanut, sesame, and gourds. In the Ethiopian highlands farmers domesticated finger millet and a grain called tef. The return of drier conditions about 5000 b. c.e. led many Saharan farmers to move to the Nile Valley, where the annual flooding of the Nile River provided moisture for cereal farming. In the rain forests of equatorial West Africa there is early evidence of indigenous domestication of yams and rice.
Eastern and southern Asia were also major centers of plant domestication, although the details are not as clearly documented as in the Middle East. Rice was first domesticated in southern china, the northern half of Southeast Asia, or northern India, possibly as early as 10,000 B. C.E. but more likely closer to 5000 b. c.e. Rice cultivation thrived in the warm and wet conditions of southern China. In India several pulses (including hyacinth beans, green grams, and black grams) domesticated about 2000 b. c.e. were cultivated along with rice.
While food production was spreading in Eurasia and Africa, the inhabitants of the isolated American continents were creating other major centers of crop domestication. Recent evidence dates the cultivation of several important food crops to about 5000 b. c.e.: maize° (corn) in the Tabasco area of eastern Mexico, manioc in Panama, and beans and squash in Mesoamerica. It seems likely that the domestication of maize occurred earlier in western Mexico and that manioc originated from Brazil. By 4000 b. c.e., the inhabitants of Peru were developing a food production system based on potatoes and quinoa°, a protein-rich seed grain. Insofar as their climates and soils permitted, other farming communities throughout the Americas adopted such crops as these, along with tomatoes and peppers.
The fact that people in Asia, the Americas, and Africa developed their own domesticated plants in isolation from outside influences added to the variety of cultivated plants. After 1500 c. e. many of these crops became important foods throughout the world.
The domestication of animals also expanded rapidly during these same millennia. The first domesticated animal was probably the dog, tamed to help early maize (mayz) quinoa (kee-NOH-uh)
Domestication of Animals Carved in Egypt in ca. 2380 b. c.e., this Limestone relief sculpture shows two workers leading a prize bull. It is from the funerary chapel of Ptahhotep, a high-ranking official who lived in the period of the Old Kingdom (see Chapter 2). (G. Dagli Orti/The Art Archive)
Agriculture and Ecological Crisis
Hunters track game. Later animals were domesticated to provide meat, milk, and energy. Like the domestication of plants, this process is best known in the Middle East.
Refuse heaps outside some Middle East villages show fewer and fewer wild gazelle bones during the centuries after 7000 b. c.e. This probably reflects the depletion of such wild animals through overhunting by the local farming communities, but meat eating did not decline. The deposits show that sheep and goat bones gradually replaced gazelle bones. It seems likely that as wild sheep and goats scavenged for food scraps around agricultural villages, the tamer animals accepted human control and protection in exchange for a ready supply of food. Differences between the bones of wild and newly tamed species are too slight to date domestication precisely. However, selective breeding for desirable characteristics such as high milk production and long wooly coat eventually led to clearly distinct breeds of sheep and goats.
Elsewhere, other animal species were domesticated during the centuries before 3000 b. c.e. Wild cattle were domesticated in northern Africa or the Middle East; donkeys in northern Africa; water buffalo in China; and humped-back Zebu° cattle in India. As in the case of food plants, varieties of domesticated animals spread from one region to another. Zebu cattle, for example, grew important in sub-Saharan Africa after about two thousand years ago.
Once cattle became tame enough to be yoked to plows, they became essential to successful grain production. In addition, animal droppings provided valuable fertilizer. These developments and the widespread use of wool and milk from domesticated animals occurred much later than initial domestication. However, there were two notable deviations from the pattern of mixed agriculture and animal husbandry. One variation was in the Americas. There, comparatively few species of wild animals were suitable for domestication, and domesticated animals could not be borrowed from elsewhere because the land bridge to Asia had submerged as melting glaciers raised sea levels. Domesticated llamas provided transport and wool, while guinea pigs and turkeys furnished meat. Hunting remained the most important source of meat for Amerindians.
The other notable variation from mixed farming occurred in the more arid parts of Africa and Central Asia. There, pastoralism, a way of life dependent on large herds of small and large stock, predominated. As the Sahara approached its maximum dryness around 2500 b. c.e., pas-toralists replaced farmers, who migrated southward (see Chapter 8). Moving their herds to new pastures and watering places throughout the year made pastoralists almost as mobile as foragers and discouraged accumulation of bulky possessions and construction of substantial dwellings. Like modern pastoralists, early cattle-keeping people probably relied more heavily on milk than on meat, since killing animals diminished the size of their herds. During wet seasons, they may also have done some hasty crop cultivation or bartered meat and skins for plant foods with nearby farming communities.
Why did the Agricultural Revolutions occur? Some theories assume that people were drawn to food production by its obvious advantages. For example, it has recently been suggested that people in the Middle East might have settled down so they could grow enough grains to ensure themselves a ready supply of beer. Beer drinking is frequently depicted in ancient Middle Eastern art and can be dated to as early as 3500 b. c.e.
However, most researchers today believe that climate change drove people to abandon hunting and gathering in favor of agriculture or pastoralism. Temperatures warmed so much at the end of the Great Ice Age that geologists give the era since about 9000 b. c.e. a new name: the Holocene°. There is evidence that temperate lands were exceptionally warm between 6000 and 2000 b. c.e., the era when people in many parts of the world adopted agriculture. The precise nature of the crisis probably varied. Shortages of wild food in the Middle East caused by a dry spell or population growth may have prodded people to take up food production. Elsewhere, a warmer, wetter climate could turn grasslands into forest, thereby reducing supplies of game and wild grains.
Additional support for an ecological explanation comes from the fact that in many drier parts of the world, where wild food remained abundant, people did not take up agriculture. The inhabitants of Australia continued to rely exclusively on foraging until recent centuries, as did some peoples on all the other continents. Many Amerindians in the arid grasslands from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico hunted bison, while in the Pacific Northwest others took up salmon-fishing. Abundant supplies of fish, shellfish, and aquatic animals permitted food gatherers east of the Mississippi River to become increasingly sedentary. In Africa conditions favored retention of the older ways in the equatorial rain forest and in the southern part of the continent. The reindeer-based societies of northern Eurasia were also unaffected by the spread of farming.
Whatever the causes, the gradual adoption of food production transformed most parts of the world. A hundred thousand years ago there were fewer than 2 million people, and their range was largely confined to the temperate and tropical regions of Africa and Eurasia. The population may have fallen even lower during the last glacial epoch, between 32,000 and 13,000 years ago. Then, as the glaciers retreated and people took up agriculture, their numbers rose. World population may have reached 10 million by 5000 b. c.e. and then mushroomed to between 50 million and 100 million by 1000 b. c.e.1 This increase led to important changes to social and cultural life.
World History
