I studied anthropology as my college minor and the consensus in my classes seemed to be that farming was never really a new discovery that was 'invented.' Rather it seems likely that ancient people had known about the possibility of raising crops for a while but had simply forgone that in favor of less labor intensive hunting and foraging. Later, as the large game that early humans relied on began to die out, we resorted to the much more labor intensive lifestyle of farming.
Some points of evidence include:
1) The advent of farming coincides roughly with the Late Pleistocene Extinction event which saw many of the large game mammals (human prey) die out
2) Bone samples from the era show that the advent of farming coincides with a decline in human height and greater enamel defects showing malnutrition. This is strong evidence that farming was a step down for our early ancestors not a step up.
3) Tribes like the San Bushman and early Australian aborigines knew full well about farming but chose to forgo it because in their region, food was plentiful enough to be hunted and gathered. This is evidence that farming is not necessarily the result of new innovation (people don't instantly and automatically switch to farming just because they know about it).
Based on this it seems like farming was not invented separately in separate places but rather that most early humans were aware of the possibility of farming and that switched to it as conditions deteriorated as a result of climate change at the end of the last ice age.
Interesting thoughts. Agriculture (even horticulture or herding) vs. immediate-return hunter/gathering of course isn't a single invention but a complex co-operative enterprise necessitating quite an array of disruptive changes in lifestyle and establishment of social structures such as hierarchy, property, trades (constructing, protecting grain storage caches etc), marriage etc.
Anything so complex, you tend to figure out various optimizations (from tooling to timing and beyond) from painful long-term on-the-ground experience. I'd argue "the knowledge of farming" is really that, rather than the simple notion that planting seeds may (or may not) grow new plants.
That ancients "kinda sorta knew" that "planting" (or discarding) a plant's seeds someplace may yield a new growth there, I don't doubt. Of course actual farming needs to yield a maximum of kcals per acre/crop, given the massive amount of labour investment and social disruption required. To maximize this yield over the generations under the given local conditions (weather, soil, crops), isn't that the actual "knowledge of farming", only obtainable by doing the actual toil over the decades and indeed centuries? And when they encountered a new crop, a new soil or a new clime, knowledge for maximizing ROI had to be gained from scratch.
Farming also had a hand in the invention of math & geometry. You want to know things like "How much land do I have?" and "How much seed do I need to set aside for next season based on that size?" And also "Do I have more or less land than Ahmed next door?" Once taxes got invented, it became "Based on the size of your field and crop, you owe 8 talents."
Farming is only 'hard' in a competitive landscape. If you have redundant food sources such as fishing or small game and a lot of high quality land it's a relatively low effort and low risk activity. It's only after your population booms and you need to subsist completely off of farming that it's risky.
Consider, vermin are going to take more of the harvest the longer it's around. But, if your only trying to cover winter months then even fairly small harvests can make a huge benefit which dramatically reduces effort.
> If you have redundant food sources such as fishing or small game and a lot of high quality land it's a relatively low effort and low risk activity. It's only after your population booms
Agreed, farming isn't hard when you do only very little of it on the side because fish and game still abound ;)
It's about risk not just calorie production as you need a huge surplus to cover poor crop years. After that you need to support non farmers (leaders, warriors, priests).
If we want to think about early farming something like a medieval peasant that only supported themselves, and had a surplus of high quality land to work with they might have only needed to work 1/5th or less as much.
Don't forget farmers have something to steal in both land and food. A hunter gather only has some tools not much food and are nomadic anyway. But, a village with 1+ years worth of food for 30+ people is a huge and stationary target.
PS: I suspect the tipping point was selective breading producing high yield plant strains which kept lowering the effort of farming. Until a population boom prevented anything else from being viable.
If you ever interested in this sort of stuff then the book "Guns, Germs and Steel" [1] explores all these trade-offs in great depth (and places them in the larger context of the development of human societies in general.)
I thought academic anthropology was moving away from ideas like Diamond's "Geographic determinism" and towards a more "Historical particularism" view of civilizations progress?
G,G,S is focused on why civilizations arise in the first place, and also why it is that Eurasian civilizations became so more powerful over the long term than any others, and for that he has a good explanation. He agrees there are many other factors involved in particular cases.
Except to my knowledge it's fake, at best fish traps.
Which is why I knew there was no evidence, when this came out, and seemed obviously not true I was surprised at the time everyone as saying this was the 'first' evidence of farming.
"In the first evidence of a sedentary Aboriginal community, Builth found what she argues is an ancient eel farm in the form of countless channels crisscrossing the landscape at Lake Condah."
Makes for a good thesis but she(one person in the whole community) is still arguing the point.
It's really interesting in a sense where a "new" technology was initially inferior to the "old" one. If I'm not mistaken, iron was originally inferior to bronze and was only adapted because of trouble with trade routes; but then new iron smelting technologies were invented which finally allowed higher quality. Wonder how many other such examples are there.
> most early humans were aware of the possibility of farming
Maybe, but for them to be aware of it, someone had to come up with the idea, right? Farming isn't an obvious idea at all if hunting and gathering is all you've done your whole life.
Maybe it is. If you gather seeds, some of them will get spilled or partially spoiled and thrown out. Some of these will grow, so it will be pretty obvious that humans can scatter seeds which will grow and can be gathered. That's farming.
The point is there's a huge difference between knowing that manually sowing and harvesting crops is possible, maybe even small scale incidental agriculture such as sowing seeds at a site and returning to harvest it months later, and choosing to settle permanently and thoroughly adapt your lifestyle around it. Maybe they knew it was possible for thousands of years, or even more, but only chose to do it in a systematic way when they ran out of other options.
I disagree. A lot of "simple" ideas we take for granted today evolved over thousands of years. The wheel, for example, took a lot of time to appear, place value is a notion we take for granted today but it became widespread only a couple hundred years ago, also whether zero was a number had been heavily debated around the time of its invention.
Making wheels used to be labour intensive and difficult, and even then remained quite inefficient. Wheels suddenly became energy efficient when the ball bearing was invented in the late 18th century.
the article suggests that farmers from different regions domesticated different animals and farmed different crops and concludes this as a strong cultural tradition that could not have been communicated.
I don't agree with this. What these communities were domesticating or farming is indicative of their local geography and would worked best for them in that region, it's not enough to conclude that since they are farming different crops, then they must have come up with idea independently. That's like saying we found group A burning wood and group B burning leaves therefor they must have discovered fire independently.
If you can find tools or instruments that are unique or specific documents that highlights varied farming processes that are unique then you have a better argument, and even then I wouldn't state it as conclusively as the article suggests.
> What these communities were domesticating or farming is indicative of their local geography and would worked best for them in that region, it's not enough to conclude that since they are farming different crops, then they must have come up with idea independently. That's like saying we found group A burning wood and group B burning leaves therefor they must have discovered fire independently.
This does not reflect the observed behavior of humans. As noted here, hunter-gatherers generally are not willing to start farming even when a model for that lifestyle is known to them. Moving farmers are extremely reluctant (with good reason!) to just eat what's available in the new area. The Polynesians spread all over the Pacific, and they did it by bringing their pigs, chickens, and roots with them. The part of the Polynesian diet that reflects local geography is: fish. Europeans came to America and they brought their crops and animals with them too. They did copy local crops -- but they copied them from local farmers, not from the wilderness (wild plants are never going to compete with food crops anyway -- they are adapted to radically different circumstances). And to this day we eat more wheat than maize in the US, because that is our cultural tradition. Local geography has nothing to do with that.
For knowledge to be transferred from one group to another, all it takes is one person. For genetic markers to change it would need at least two, in good health and enough intermingling for it to be evident.
On the face of it seems highly unlikely to me that two groups had a level of contact that was enough for farming knowledge to be spread between them but not enough for genetic flow between them.
Farming is not a simple technology. It's a way of life and encompasses a package of technologies.
And the crops and animals raised in the respective origins could be raised in both locations so there's no obvious reason why diffusion of the farming knowledge would not be accompanied by the spread of those crops and animals.
Some points of evidence include:
1) The advent of farming coincides roughly with the Late Pleistocene Extinction event which saw many of the large game mammals (human prey) die out
2) Bone samples from the era show that the advent of farming coincides with a decline in human height and greater enamel defects showing malnutrition. This is strong evidence that farming was a step down for our early ancestors not a step up.
3) Tribes like the San Bushman and early Australian aborigines knew full well about farming but chose to forgo it because in their region, food was plentiful enough to be hunted and gathered. This is evidence that farming is not necessarily the result of new innovation (people don't instantly and automatically switch to farming just because they know about it).
see:
http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in...
Based on this it seems like farming was not invented separately in separate places but rather that most early humans were aware of the possibility of farming and that switched to it as conditions deteriorated as a result of climate change at the end of the last ice age.