Emergence and Evolution of Agriculture - Adequate Food for All - page 4

ago set the stage for health and other quality-of-life issues that we are experiencing in
the twenty-first century, brought about by the continuation of dietary and nutritional
changes, population increase, and disease generally in a rapidly changing world.
IntRoductIon
Imagine for a moment what our lives in the twenty-first century would be like with-
out domesticated plants and animals, 1 especially the kind that provide the foods
we eat on a daily basis. These provide all form and substance of everything we eat,
ranging from the tossed salad at lunch to the baked chicken at dinner. Bottom line:
today, human beings are completely dependent on domesticated species of plants and
animals—thousands of them—for the food we eat.
It has not always been this way. In fact, domestication did not start until about 10
to 11 thousand years ago. Prior to that, all foods were nondomesticated. All foods
were caught, trapped, hunted, fished, or gathered. The dramatic shift in the manner
in which food was acquired, processed, and consumed was a huge turning point in
human evolution, the shift from foraging (or hunting and gathering 2 as many anthro-
pologists call it) to domestication, especially farming, was a transformative event in
human evolution, along with bipedalism, speech, dependence on material culture,
and other features that are uniquely human.
Growing up in a small town in southeastern Nebraska in the heart of the corn
belt, I had been raised with the notion that agriculture was important in the lives of
humans, and for the better. After all, corn was the centerpiece of the economy that
fueled my state. When I went off to college to study as an anthropology major, in my
archaeology class I was thrilled to read a textbook written by one of the world's lead-
ing archaeologists, Robert J. Braidwood, that agriculture was indeed central to the
success of humanity. Agriculture, in his view, relieved humans from the drudgery
of life before agriculture for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was “a savage's existence,
and a very tough one … following animals just to kill them to eat, or moving from
one berry patch to another [and] living just like an animal” (1967, p. 113). From this
perspective, to be a forager was to be deprived.
Does this characterization of the shift from foraging to farming present an accu-
rate picture? Study of human remains from archaeological settings—a subdiscipline
of anthropology called bioarchaeology —has revealed important insights about the
past, especially with regard to testing hypotheses about the role of agriculture (and
domestication in general) in quality of life and well-being (see Larsen 1997). In this
chapter, I talk about early agriculture, its origins, and what has been learned about
past health and lifestyle based on the study of ancient skeletons.
the context foR eARly AgRIcultuRe
At the end of the Pleistocene epoch—10 to 12 thousand years ago—Earth's climate
became relatively warmer and wetter compared to the cold, dry climate of the pre-
ceding 2 million years (Smith 1998). This period of global warming marked the
beginning of the Holocene, the geological epoch that we live in today. It is during
this climate shift that people began to control the growth cycles of some plants and