The Origins of Agriculture

At one time, researchers believed there was a clear “wave of advance”of agriculture through Europe between 8,000 and 6,000 years ago. And it may seem easy to explain such a sudden and thorough transition from foraging (depending primarily on wild foods) to agriculture by human societies. Processes of collective learning ensured that human communities would continue to explore ways of extracting resources from their environment, and eventually they were bound to stumble on agriculture. Besides, agriculture was so much more productive than most foraging lifestyles that it is tempting to suppose that once it had been “invented.” it was bound to spread fast. The earliest attempts to explain the Neolithic Revolution (the transition from foraging to settled agricultural societies)did indeed make these assumptions. These explanations saw agriculture as an invention that spread from a single center because of its inherent superiority to all other human adaptations.

However, research in the twentieth century revealed two significant problems with such explanations First, agriculture did not in fact spread from a single center. Instead, it appeared, apparently independently in many different regions of the world. How can we explain the near-simultaneity of these changes in parts of the world that seem to have had no contact with each other? As anthropologist Mark Cohen has stressed, “The most striking fact about early agriculture .. is precisely that it is such a universal event.

Second, we can no longer assume that communities of foragers were bound to adopt agriculture once they learned about it. Indeed, we are no longer so confident that the appearance of agriculture can automatically be regarded as a sign of progress. To be sure, agriculture can support larger populations than foraging lifestyles, and thus in the long run agricultural communities are likely to outcompete foraging communities when the two lifestyles come into conflict. But it is also clear that many foraging communities have resisted adopting agricultural practices even when they knew about them. As members of a foraging community in the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa told a modern researcher, why would one want to work as a farmer when there are so many mongongo nuts to eat? Foragers saw agriculture as an option, but not an inevitability.

And their conservatism may have been perfectly rational. Evidence from skeletal remains shows that early agriculture bred new forms of disease and new forms of stress. Farmers have less varied diets than foragers in warm climates, so they are more subject to periodic shortages; foragers can more easily switch to alternative sources of food.Famine is a paradoxical by-product of the agricultural revolution. Farming communities are also more subject to diseases carried by the rats, mice, bacteria, and viruses that flourish in moderately large sedentary communities. Even more important, genetic comparisons of modern disease suggest that in Afro-Eurasia where livestock were domesticated, disease bacteria spread easily from herd animals such as cattle. chickens, and pigs to humans. The diseases exploited the fact that humans. too. became like herd animals in their susceptibility to disease once they settled down to farm in village communities. The most successful strains, and the ones that survived longest, were those including smallpox and flu that infested their human hosts without killing them. A further sign of declining health in early agrarian communities may be that Neolithic skeletons seem to be shorter, on average, than those of Stone Age foraging societies. In both types of society, no more than 50 percent of all children born could expect to reach adulthood; those who did generally had a life expectancy of no more than about 25 to 30 years, though some individuals may have lived into their fifties and sixties. Bioarchacologists have linked the agricultural transition to a significant decline in nutrition and to increases in disease. mortality. overwork, and violence in areas where skeletal remains make it possible to compare human welfare before and after the change.

Any adequate account of the origins of agriculture must explain both the chronology of early agriculture and the reasons why communities of foragers took up agricultural lifestyles despite their apparent drawbacks. Why would one prefer a lifestyle based on the cultivation, collection, and preparation of a small variety of grass seeds when it was so much easier to gather plants or animals that were more varied ,larger and easier to prepare.?

1.At one time, researchers believed there was a clear “wave of advance”of agriculture through Europe between 8,000 and 6,000 years ago. And it may seem easy to explain such a sudden and thorough transition from foraging (depending primarily on wild foods) to agriculture by human societies. Processes of collective learning?ensured?that human communities would continue to explore ways of extracting resources from their environment, and eventually they were bound to stumble on agriculture. Besides, agriculture was so much more productive than most foraging lifestyles that it is tempting to suppose that once it had been “invented.” it was bound to spread fast. The earliest attempts to explain the Neolithic Revolution (the transition from foraging to settled agricultural societies)did indeed make these assumptions. These explanations saw agriculture as an invention that spread from a single center because of its inherent superiority to all other human adaptations.?