History of agriculture

• 1. Introduction

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  Wild grains were collected and eaten by humans from at least 104,000 years ago, yet for most of that vast span nobody planted a single seed. The history of agriculture begins not with a field but with a habit of gathering. Around 21,000 BC, the Ohalo II people on the shores of the Sea of Galilee left the earliest evidence of small-scale cultivation of edible grasses. Domestication came far later still. About 12,000 years ago, the way humans lived changed completely. People abandoned nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles for permanent settlements and farming. What pushed them to do it? Why did this happen independently in at least eleven separate regions of the Old and New World? And how did a scattering of wild stands become emmer wheat, rice, the potato, and maize? The answers stretch across every inhabited continent and tens of thousands of years.

• 2. Eleven Cradles

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  At least eleven separate regions became independent centers of origin for agriculture, each with its own diverse range of taxa. By around 9500 BC, the eight Neolithic founder crops appeared in the Levant: emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chickpeas, and flax. Wheat may have been the first grown and harvested on a significant scale, and these crops occur more or less simultaneously on Pre-Pottery Neolithic B sites. Rye occurs in small quantities at some Neolithic sites in Turkey, such as Can Hasan III near Catalhoyuk, but its spread from Southwest Asia to the Atlantic was independent of the founder crop package. Claims of much earlier rye cultivation at Tell Abu Hureyra in the Euphrates valley of northern Syria remain controversial, with critics pointing to inconsistencies in radiocarbon dates. Rice was domesticated in China by 6200 BC, with earliest known cultivation from 5700 BC, followed by mung, soy, and azuki beans. Some of the earliest known domestications were of animals. Wild boar were first domesticated about 10,500 years ago, sheep in Mesopotamia between 11,000 BC and 9000 BC, and cattle from the wild aurochs in the areas of modern Turkey and India around 8500 BC. Camels were domesticated relatively late, perhaps around 3000 BC, a reminder that taming the herd took millennia longer than taming the grain.

• 3. Why It Began

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  Localised climate change is the favoured explanation for the origins of agriculture in the Levant. When major climate change took place after the last ice age, around 11,000 BC, much of the earth became subject to long dry seasons. These conditions favoured annual plants, which die off in the long dry season and leave behind a dormant seed or tuber. An abundance of readily storable wild grains and pulses let hunter-gatherers in some areas form the first settled villages. Studies of the transition show an antecedent period of intensification and increasing sedentism, with the Natufian culture in the Levant and the Early Chinese Neolithic as examples. Current models indicate that wild stands harvested previously started to be planted, but were not immediately domesticated. The cereals just after the Younger Dryas, about 9500 BC, show a semi-tough rachis and larger seeds. These monophyletic characteristics were attained without any human intervention. That detail implies the apparent domestication of the cereal rachis could have occurred quite naturally, blurring the line between what people chose and what the climate did for them. Across Western Eurasia it was not until approximately 4000 BC that farming societies completely replaced hunter-gatherers, who held out longest in the most densely forested areas.

• 4. A Different New World

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  Agricultural history took a different path in the Americas, which lacked large-seeded, easily domesticated grains like wheat and barley, and lacked large domestic animals that could be used for agricultural labor. Rather than sowing a field with a single crop, prehistoric American agriculture usually cultivated many crops close together using only hand labor. The land also had a north-south pattern, with a variety of climatic zones in close proximity, which fostered the domestication of many different plants. In the Andes, the potato was domesticated between 8000 BC and 5000 BC, along with coca, the peanut, tomato, tobacco, and pineapple. Cotton was domesticated in Peru by 4200 BC, and animals including llamas, alpacas, and guinea pigs were tamed there too. The people of the Inca Empire grew large surpluses of food, which they stored in buildings called Qullqas. Cassava was domesticated in the Amazon Basin before 7000 BCE, likely in the Rondonia and Mato Grosso states of Brazil. In Mesoamerica, wild teosinte was transformed through human selection into the ancestor of modern maize, about 7000 BC. Due to several thousand years of selective breeding, maize produced two and one-half times more calories per acre than wheat and barley. The Aztecs developed chinampas, artificial islands also known as floating gardens, while the Maya between 400 BC and 900 AD used extensive canal and raised field systems on the Yucatan Peninsula. A companion planting method called the Three Sisters paired winter squash, maize, and climbing beans, with the maize giving the beans a structure to climb and the beans returning nitrogen to the soil.

• 5. Africa And Oceania

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  Sorghum was domesticated in the Sahel region by 3000 BC in Sudan, and pearl millet by 2500 BC in Mali. Teff and likely finger millet were domesticated in Ethiopia by 3000 BC, along with noog, ensete, and coffee, while Coffea arabica originated in Ethiopia and has served as the main production of modern-day coffee since the late 15th century. The donkey was domesticated in Nubia at approximately 5000 BC. West Africa, often called the Yam Belt for its high yam production, also gave the world black-eyed peas, kola nuts, and the helmeted guineafowl, a poultry bird present in Ancient Greece during the 5th century BC. Plantains were cultivated in Africa by 3000 BC and bananas by 1500 BC. In New Guinea, ancient Papuan peoples began practicing agriculture around 7000 BC, domesticating sugarcane and taro, and banana cultivation including hybridization dates back possibly to 8000 BC in Papua New Guinea. In Australia, the oldest eel traps of Budj Bim date to 6600 BC. Indigenous Australians were predominantly nomadic hunter-gatherers, and under the policy of terra nullius they were regarded as incapable of sustained agriculture. The current consensus disagrees. In two regions of Central Australia, people in permanent settlements of over 200 residents sowed or planted on a large scale and stored the harvest. The Nhanda and Amangu of the central west coast grew yams, while groups in the Corners Region planted bush onions, native millet, and the sporocarp ngardu. Archaeological research in south west Victoria established that the Gunditjmara and other groups had developed sophisticated eel farming systems over nearly 5000 years, leading the historian Bill Gammage to argue that in effect the whole continent was a managed landscape.

• 6. Empires Of The Furrow

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  Sumerian farmers grew barley and wheat, starting to live in villages from about 8000 BC, and given the low rainfall they relied on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Irrigation canals leading from the rivers let cereals grow in quantities large enough to support cities. The first ploughs appear in pictographs from Uruk around 3000 BC, and seed-ploughs that funneled seed into the furrow appear on seals around 2300 BC. The civilization of Ancient Egypt was indebted to the Nile and its dependable seasonal flooding, with basin irrigation making large-scale agriculture possible between around 10,000 BC and 4000 BC. In the Indus Valley at Mehrgarh, two-row and six-row barley were cultivated from the eighth millennium BC, and an animal-drawn plough there dates back to 2500 BC. Records from the Warring States, Qin, and Han dynasties picture early Chinese agriculture from the 5th century BC to the 2nd century AD, including a nationwide granary system and widespread sericulture. An important early Chinese book on agriculture is the Qimin Yaoshu of AD 535, written by Jia Sixie, running over one hundred thousand written Chinese characters and quoting many other books now lost. The Chinese innovated the hydraulic-powered trip hammer by the 1st century BC and the square-pallet chain pump by the 1st century AD. By the end of the Han dynasty in the late 2nd century, heavy ploughs with iron ploughshares and mouldboards had been developed, and these slowly spread west, revolutionizing farming in Northern Europe by the 10th century. Roman farms came in three sizes, with large estates called latifundia running over 500 iugera, and the Romans laid the groundwork for the manorial economic system involving serfdom.

• 7. Crops Crossing The World

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  From the 8th century to the 14th century, the Islamic world underwent a transformation that the historian Andrew Watson described as the Arab agricultural revolution. Muslim trade routes diffused many crops, plants, and farming techniques, introducing major crops to Europe by way of Al-Andalus. Sugar cane, rice, and cotton were transferred, along with citrus and other fruit trees, vegetables such as aubergine, spinach, and chard, and imported spices including cumin, coriander, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Across medieval Europe, by AD 900 developments in iron smelting increased production of ploughs, hand tools, and horse shoes. The carruca heavy plough adopted the Chinese mouldboard to turn over the heavy wet soils of northern Europe, clearing forests and raising population. Some farmers moved from a two-field to a three-field crop rotation, leaving one field of three fallow each year and permitting nitrogen-fixing legumes such as peas, lentils, and beans. After 1492, the Columbian exchange carried maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and manioc from the New World to the Old, while wheat, barley, rice, and turnips traveled the other way. Horses, cattle, sheep, and goats had been completely unknown in the New World before settlers arrived. The potato became a staple throughout Europe by the late 1700s, reducing disease and causing a population boom. That same dependence had a darker edge. Before the potato, reliance on grain caused 17 major famines in England between 1523 and 1623, and the later European Potato Failure killed over one million people in Ireland alone.

• 8. The Machine Age

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  Between the 17th century and the mid-19th century, Britain saw a large increase in agricultural productivity and net output, with the population rising to 5.7 million in 1750. The productivity of wheat went up from 19 bushels per acre in 1720 to around 30 bushels by 1840. The Dutch four-field rotation of wheat, turnips, barley, and clover was popularised by the British agriculturist Charles Townshend in the 18th century, with clover roots replenishing soil nitrates. Robert Bakewell and Thomas Coke introduced selective breeding from the mid-18th century, producing the New Leicester sheep. Machines followed: Jethro Tull's seed drill of 1701, Andrew Meikle's threshing machine of 1784, and the first petrol-driven tractor, built in America by John Froelich in 1892. John Bennet Lawes began the scientific investigation of fertilization at the Rothamsted Experimental Station in 1843. The Haber-Bosch method for synthesizing ammonium nitrate was first patented by German chemist Fritz Haber, and in 1910 Carl Bosch commercialized it while working for BASF. Collective farming, practiced widely from the 1930s in the Soviet Union, produced consequences including the Soviet famine of 1932-33 and, in China, the Great Chinese Famine from 1959 to 1961. The number of people farming in industrial countries fell radically, from 24 percent of the American population to 1.5 percent in 2002. The Green Revolution, led by Norman Borlaug between the 1940s and the late 1970s, is credited with saving over a billion people from starvation through high-yielding cereal varieties. Yet the gains have limits. The yield potential for rice has not increased since 1966, and against chemical farming Lord Northbourne presented his manifesto of organic farming in 1940, a movement now practiced in many countries.