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Big History - Kobo Web Reader
5. Early Agriculture (8000–3500 BCE) · 5 - 6 of 16
Hence agriculture could support a human density fifty to a hundred
times greater than hunting and gathering could.6
By about 6000 BCE settled life was becoming the norm in the
Fertile Crescent. All the suitable crops and animals in the region had
been domesticated, and they became the basis for the adoption of
agriculture in adjacent areas: Europe, where different adaptations were
necessary, and in the Nile Valley, almost unchanged.
In 6000–5000 BCE Greece and the southern Balkans, where the
climate was similar to the Near East, shifted to agriculture and probably
domesticated cattle. Archaeologists have hotly debated whether
agriculture spread by people circulating the knowledge by word of
mouth or by people themselves moving into new areas. But genetic
research has revealed unequivocally that people themselves moved
rather than just talked about how to do it.
The movement of agriculture into central and northwest Europe
took about 3,000 years after its adoption in Greece. By 4000 BCE
farming had moved into the river valleys of central Europe—the
Rhine/Danube and the Vistula/Dniester areas. Between 3000 and 2000
it had been adopted in northwest Europe and a thousand years later
in Denmark and southern Sweden. In these areas forests had to be
cleared by slash and burn techniques, with permanent fields coming
BCE
later when population pressures increased. Oats and rye, which grew as
weeds in the Middle East, proved to be the food crops that flourished in
the cooler, wetter climate of northwest Europe.
As farmers fanned out from the Middle East and Turkey, they took
with them their language, called Indo-European. One of perhaps ten
protolanguages spoken in the world at that time, Indo-European was
used in parts of the Near East and around the Caspian and Black seas
from about 8000 to 2000 BCE. Sanskrit evolved from it in about 1500
BCE
or earlier, as did Greek in about 1450 BCE.
Agriculture waited some 2,000 years after its start in the Middle
East to begin in the Nile River valley, in about 4300 BCE, based on
barley, wheat, and cattle. Why farming took so long to get under way in
a valley climatically suited for it is a puzzle. Cattle probably were
domesticated independently in the Sahara as early as 7000 BCE, but as
it dried up after 6000 BCE, cattle herders were forced to the fringes.
papaya, guava, and beans. Maize emerged slowly; gene study shows
that domestication began about 7000 BCE. In the wild the cob was about
the size of a human thumb. Gradually larger cobs with higher yields
were developed, until about 2000 BCE when the production of maize
sufficed to support village life. Since there were no suitable animals to
be domesticated, other than dogs and turkeys, hunting continued as
long as possible. Cotton and peanuts were also cultivated.
In the mountains of Peru (including large parts of present-day
Bolivia and Ecuador) another set of domesticated crops and animals
developed. The llama and alpaca were used as beasts of burden, not as
food. People based their diet on potatoes and quinoa, a protein-rich seed
grain. Maize spread to Peru by about 1000 BCE.
In the long view of time, the domestication of plants and animals
leading to agriculture as a mode of production occurred nearly
simultaneously in various parts of the world. In the short view of time,
however, within a few thousand years some areas lagged behind others
with fateful consequences. Because people in the Americas had no
suitable grains and animals for early domestication, the evolution of
complex societies there began 3,000 to 4,000 years later than in the
Middle East, Europe, and Asia. As a consequence, when Europeans
arrived in the Americas in 1500 CE, they found societies in many ways
comparable to those of the Middle East in about 2000 BCE. With their
horses, guns, and diseases, products of their more evolved agrarian
societies, Europeans were able to strangle the more slowly emerging
civilizations of the Americas.7
People’s experiments with plants between 9000 to 3000 BCE were
so successful that no new basic food plants have been domesticated
since then. The only exceptions seem to be cranberries, blueberries, and
pecans, which were gathered by native North Americans but have been
domesticated only in the last two centuries.
Out of approximately 200,000 speciesNext
of flowering
page plants, only
about 3,000 have been used extensively for human food. Of these, only
fifteen have been and continue to be of major importance: four grasses
(wheat, rice, maize, and sugar), six legumes (lentils, peas, vetches,
beans, soybeans, and peanuts), and five starches (potatoes, sweet
potatoes, yams, maniocs, and bananas).8
Three Small Towns
Africans domesticated the ass, as a beast of burden; the guinea fowl,
a favorite dish of ancient Egypt and later of Rome; and cats, as
mentioned earlier. Millet, sorghum, wild rice, yams, and palm oil are
other foods domesticated in Africa. Yams belong to those plants that are
propagated not by seeds but by stem cuttings, tubers, or roots. These
plants include maniocs, bananas, sugarcane, and taro. Since these crops
leave no seeds as evidence to find, African and Asian people may have
cultivated them much earlier than can be known.
In Asia the evidence for early food production remains sketchier,
possibly because the climate is warmer and wetter than in the Near
East. The accepted picture is that millet and rice were domesticated in
China in about 6000 BCE; soybeans did not appear until about 1100
Pigs and poultry were domesticated there. Rice seems to have
been domesticated independently in India and possibly also in
BCE.
Southeast Asia.
People in the Americas developed their own gardens. By 6000 BCE
people in the highlands of Mexico were cultivating up to thirty plants
for food, medicine, and containers. These plants included maize (corn),
chile peppers, tomatoes, five kinds of squash, gourds, avocadoes,
One excavation in particular reveals the process of people turning to
farming as a way of life: the village of Abu Hureyra in modern-day
Syria. This site was first occupied in about 11,500 BCE as a small
village settlement of pit dwellings with reed roofs supported by wooden
uprights. Inhabitants collected and stored wild barley, wheat, and rye.
They hunted Persian gazelles that arrived from the south each spring,
killed them en masse, and stored their meat, preserving it by drying and
salting. Abu Hureyra slowly increased to 300 or 400 people who, in
about 10,000 BCE, when the climate temporarily cooled, abandoned
their village to return to nomadic life—still an option when difficulties
like cooling of the temperature or depletion of the adjacent firewood
arose.
About 500 years later (about 9500 BCE) another village arose on the
same location. At first the village inhabitants hunted gazelles
intensively, but in around 9000 BCE they switched to herding
domesticated sheep and goats and cultivating wheat, chickpeas, and
other cereals. They built rectangular, one-story mud brick homes of
more than one room, joined by lanes and courtyards. The homes had
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