Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
animals, the process that anthropologists call
domestication
. To be sure, there are
some groups in the world today that still hunt and gather, but these are a very small
minority of the human population, well under 0.1% of the more than 6 billion Earth
inhabitants. It is amazing to think that for nearly all of human evolutionary history,
humans had eaten plants of all kinds, but that they had never planted and then har-
vested them. It is even more amazing to see how rapidly the transition from foraging
to farming took place—an eyeblink in human evolution!
We know that the change to farming began quickly, but this is not to say that it
happened overnight. Rather, it evolved over a period of centuries, but still fast in light
of the 6 to 7 million years that humans and human-like ancestors were committed
to foraging and hunting prior to the Holocene. In addition to when plant domestica-
tion first took place, authorities have developed a reasonably good understanding of
where it occurred. In this regard, it appears not to have been a one-time event, then
spreading around the world from a single center. Rather, plant domestication started
as an independent event in at least 10 or 11 places around the world, including Asia,
Africa, North America, and South America (Smith 1998). It was slow to develop in
some of these places, taking several thousand years to gain a dominant place in diet,
but a matter of decades in other localities. From these “primary” centers of domesti-
cation, it then spread from place to place. With the exception of Australia, every hab-
itable continent saw the change begin to take place by at least by 5000 years ago.
Among the earliest centers of domestication was a region of southwestern Asia
known as the Levant (Smith 1998). In the Levant, people began to harvest and pro-
cess the wild ancestors of wheat, barley, and rye. These grains began to supply food
for the growing populations that were beginning to form permanent and semiper-
manent villages. Around 11,000 years ago, these plants were fully domesticated.
Within a few thousand years, agriculture—especially cultivation of wheat, barley,
and rye—was well in place across the Fertile Crescent, a large region of grasslands
and open woodlands of the eastern Mediterranean region. This was accompanied
by the appearance of numerous small villages, some which grew into towns and
cities, such as Jericho and Çatalhöyük in the Palestine territories and Turkey, respec-
tively. Plant domestication may have been as early in China (millet and rice) as in the
Levant. Other early domesticated plants are documented in Mexico (bottle gourds,
10,000 years ago; corn, 6,300 years ago); New Guinea (taro and banana, 7,000 years
ago); eastern North America (squash, sunflower, and goosefoot, 6,000 years ago);
South America (potatoes, sweet potatoes, and manioc, 5,250 years ago); and Africa
below the Sahara Desert (sorghum and yams, 4,500 years ago).
What explains this dramatic change in how humans went about getting food?
Some authorities believe that the disappearance of very large animals—such as
the now-extinct mammoths—at the end of the Pleistocene created circumstances
whereby people had to turn to something else for food, forcing them to domesticate
plants and animals. This explanation seems rather far-fetched, however, especially
given the abundance of other wild animals (and a variety of plants) available for con-
sumption (Smith 1998). Alternatively, the foraging-to-farming transition may have
been motivated by humans' seeking a food that could be more predictably acquired
and stored, thereby reducing risk of not having enough to eat. Domesticated plants fit
the bill in terms of this kind of predictability (Winterhalder and Goland 1993, Smith
