Origins of Agriculture

Scholars have developed a number of hypotheses to explain the historical origins of agriculture. The transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies, based on evidence from south west Asia and China, indicates an antecedent period of intensification and increasing sedentism known as the Natufian in south West Asia and the Early Chinese Neolithic in China. Current models indicate that a range of food resources was being used more intensively. Wild stands that had been harvested previously started to be planted. Evidence is also now emerging that the crops grown initially were wild and not domesticated.[4] Crops such as emmer and einkorn wheat do not appear to have become domesticated until well into the Neolithic and 'ancient cultivated rice' (Oryza sativa) took 3000 years to become domesticated. Localised climate change is the favoured explanation for the origins of agriculture in the Levant. The fact that farming was 'invented' at least three times elsewhere, suggests that social reasons may have been instrumental. When major climate change took place after the last ice age (c. 11,000 BC), much of the earth became subject to long dry seasons.[5] These conditions favoured annual plants which die off in the long dry season, leaving a dormant seed or tuber. These plants tended to put more energy into producing seeds than into woody growth. An abundance of readily storable wild grains and pulses enabled hunter-gatherers in some areas to form the first settled villages at this time.