ACT I
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Our story is up to 8,500 BC. Humans are spread over all the continents, and their mental abilities are essentially equal. Everyone in the world are hunter-gatherers. They found their food in the environment just like their ancestors and all the other animals in the world always have.
Today most of our food comes from farms. So what happened?
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The development of farming changed the world. Many people would tell you that hunter-gatherers were nomadic, and then at some point they decided to settle down and plant seeds.
That story does start with hunter gathering and end with farming. But the middle of that story is so oversimplified it’s completely misleading.
What really happened was an epic tale of environmental science and evolutionary psychology. All over the world people always made
the best decisions
they could think of
in the situations
they were in
in getting food from the environment.
Five places in the world, or maybe as many as nine, had combinations of environmental factors that made people and plants coevolve into symbiotic relationships. Farming means managing land to cultivate plants that produce food or other products for us, and killing ones that don’t.
Farming is so different from hunting and gathering that people who have never heard of it can’t think of it all at once. Instead, a number of environmental factors have to come together in the right order. People had to make a sequence of developments over time that eventually led to farming.
ACT II
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First, farming depends on people living on the same land year round. Nomadic people who got their food by following game herds and growing seasons weren’t prepared to do that. They couldn’t stay one place all year because they’d run out of food.
But in a few parts of the world the food was so plentiful that people did live in the same place year round.
People who lived in the same place year round could watch how the plants there grew over the course of the growing season. They could also watch how new plants grew from their trash dumps, from the seeds they threw away with their food scraps.
Bringing wild food plants into their permanent villages for hundreds or thousands of years affected the evolution of the plants that grew around their villages, because it added a new selection pressure. When people went out to gather plants for food, they brought home the best food they could find. You do the same thing when you go shopping for produce at the grocery store and pick out the best looking fruits and vegetables you can find.
Plants that produce food have evolved that as a way of spreading their seeds. When birds or squirrels or monkeys take fruit or nuts home to feed their offspring, they’re carrying seeds away to new places.
Fruit has seeds in it. Nuts are seeds. Even if most of them get eaten, some of them are going to get dropped along the way. Or if squirrels stash nuts in underground burrows and then get eaten by predators before they come back to eat them, they’ve planted them.
Now that people were picking the best fruits and vegetables and grains and bringing them home, that meant they were also bringing home the seeds that grew the best fruits and vegetables and grains. Over the years, that made the food plants that grew around their villages some of the best at producing food.
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Farming depends on specialized tools to do the different steps of planting, cultivating, and harvesting.
Nomadic people can’t carry that many tools with them. Because they have to be able to carry everything they own with them every time they move.
Sedentary people don’t need to do that. They can make more things and invent more things, because they can save all those things where they live.
Farming also depends on buildings to store the food in after it’s harvested. Nomadic people don’t have much incentive to build permanent buildings. But sedentary people do.
Sedentary people would also get into routines of gathering food in the summer and fall and storing it to eat later. That wasn’t much different from harvesting and storing food they grew themselves.
Farming depends on a combination of plants that produce a balanced diet, or most of a balanced diet. Other plants, like cotton and flax, produce fibers for clothing, blankets, ropes, and cords, which are also helpful. The more people can produce by farming, the more time they can spend farming, and the less time they need to spend hunting and gathering to get the other things they need.
The development of farming depends on local wild plants that are easy to grow. Since the people are figuring out how to farm for the first time, the less they need to do to the plants to get them to grow, the fewer things can go wrong.
Finally, the development of farming depends on something reducing the food productivity of the land compared to the number of people living on it. The people who have been living on the land year round and learning how plants grow need to start running low on food. If they’ve been experimenting with planting seeds, and it starts getting harder for them to find enough food growing wild every year, planting more seeds and spending more time helping them grow is a fairly easy decision to make.
ACT III
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This combination of factors happened in at least five places in the world. The people there went through all these steps on their own.
In most of the rest of the places in the world where people farm now, they made the shift to full time farming by bringing in seeds that people domesticated somewhere else.
There are four places in the world that are a mystery, because the people there started farming hundreds or thousands of years after people nearby started farming.
It’s not clear how they got started. They each have their own story.
They could’ve started growing foreign plants and then domesticated their own.
Or they could’ve learned about domesticating plants from a nearby agricultural society, then domesticated their own plants, and then added foreign plants.
Or they could’ve domesticated their own plants all on their own, and come into contact with nearby agricultural societies soon afterwards.
In other places some of these factors happened and the people there took some steps toward farming.
In some places nomadic people planted seeds, and came back later to see if any plants had grown.
Some nomadic people cleared land of plants that didn’t produce food to make room for plants that did.
People in some parts of the Amazon forest planted trees that produced food and cut down trees that didn’t produce food.
In Australia and North America people used what’s called fire farming. They set fire to grasslands every year to promote the growth of new plants. New plants would grow food with seeds near the ground, where they were easy for people to pick. Also new plants attracted animals for people to hunt. In Australia people have been doing that so long that plants there have evolved to depend on annual fires for their normal life cycles.
In the Pacific Northwest the people had all of the factors except the last one. The land was so fertile they lived there hunting and gathering year round. They built permanent buildings and invented specialized tools. The one thing they never had was a food shortage, so they never went to the trouble of planting their own seeds.
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Mesopotamia, also known as the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, had the most favorable combination of factors of anywhere in the world. That was the first place people started farming, about 10,500 years ago.
They started with eight crops. They had barley and two strains of wheat for carbohydrates. They had peas, chickpeas, lentils, and bitter vetch for protein. And they had flax for making cloth and rope.
People started farming in China about 9,500 years ago, around the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. The Maya in what’s now southern Mexico and northern Central America, started farming about 5,500 years ago. In the Andes Mountains in South America, people started farming around the same time. That’s where the Incan Empire arose. People started farming along the Mississippi River about 4,500 years ago.
People started farming in north eastern Africa soon after people began farming in Mesopotamia. People started farming on New Guinea, off the coast of Asia, about 500 years after people started farming in China. People started farming in inland west Africa about 7,000 years ago. People started farming in coastal west Africa about 5,000 years ago.
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Whether farming originated in five, six, seven, eight, or nine places, it was the same few themes with every story.
It’s what biologists call a coevolution. Humans’ domestication of plants began with people bringing home the plants that were most valuable to them, and it led to more dependable food sources. Our accidental, and then intentional, breeding of plants has made our plants evolve into forms that are much different from their wild ancestors. They produce more of what we want. But many of them depend on us to plant and cultivate them now.
But did we really domesticate plants, or did plants domesticate us?
Plants produce seeds to sprout more plants, and we plant lots of their seeds every year and help them grow. Every year we get lots of food from the plants, and our population keeps growing and we keep planting more seeds. There are so many people in the world now we can’t feed ourselves without planting seeds.
Every species of plant has a way of spreading its seeds. For wheat, rice, corn, potatoes, and everything else you can buy at the grocery store, that way is now us.
ACT IV
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This part of the story was discovered by a biologist named Jared Diamond. His very long and thorough book about it is called Guns, Germs, and Steel.
He worked with National Geographic to produce a three-part documentary series about it. You can watch it on You Tube.
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The development of farming at its first point in Mesopotamia 10,500 years ago was the beginning of humans’ alteration of the global environment.
In the 5,000 years after that it also led to population growth, cities, governments, kingdoms, the Bronze Age, and then writing. Each of those things made their society more physically powerful. Combined, they made them the most physically powerful society in the world at the time. That made it easy for them to conquer and subjugate neighboring people, move onto their land, and plant more food.
That was the beginning of imperialism.
