01 The beginnings of agriculture

None of the things that we take today as marks of our civilization—our great cities, our art, music and literature, our commerce and industry, our scientific and technological achievements—would be possible without agriculture.

It was only after we human beings learned how to farm that we could produce sufficient food surpluses to allow some of us to follow pursuits other than hunting and gathering. With some people specializing in food production, others could become full-time priests or soldiers or artisans or scribes or scholars. Thus more complex, and less egalitarian, societies began to emerge. But these developments only came very late in the story of humankind.

The dawn of humanity The earliest of our ancestors that we might recognize as human emerged some 4 million years ago. Over the ages a variety of human species evolved—Homo habilis, Homo erectus, the Neanderthals—but it was not until around 100,000 years ago that modern humans began to spread out of Africa and started to colonize the rest of the world.

Humans had started to use stone tools around 2 million years previously, but the rate of technological progress was extremely slow. Gradually tools and weapons—of wood, stone, bone and antler—became more refined, and humans learned how to use fire. People sustained themselves by fishing, hunting and gathering fruits, seeds, nuts and berries—a way of life that can support small groups, but which requires that the hunter-gatherers must move on once the resources of one area are temporarily exhausted.

Then around 8000 BC something extraordinary happened in the Fertile Crescent, an area of the Middle East that extends from the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers westward through Syria and then south through the Levant. It was here that people first began to cultivate crops, kick-starting a global revolution in the way that humans live. The Fertile Crescent was the first but not the only area to experience an agricultural revolution: farming independently began in various other parts of the world, including Mesoamerica, the Andean region of South America, China, southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

“And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.”

Genesis, 4:2, on the sons of Adam and Eve

The first crops It is probably no coincidence that the beginnings of agriculture 10,000 years ago coincided with the end of the last Ice Age. As the earth warmed, the ice sheets covering much of northern Eurasia and North America melted, releasing vast amounts of fresh water. In these conditions, the sparse tundra gave way to lusher vegetation—grasslands and forests—which provided hunter-gatherers with much richer pickings. In some places, the environment was so productive that groups that knew how to exploit it could stay put rather than having to move on constantly. With greater quantities of food available, populations grew, and this in turn meant that people had to devise ways of surviving through leaner periods, by learning how to store food. One of the easiest foods to store, because they do not decay when kept dry, are cereals—the seeds of various grasses.

It was no doubt a gradual process by which certain groups learned to look after the wild plants that they found most useful as food sources. Keeping off pests and clearing away weeds was a start, and at some point people made the connection between sowing seed and harvesting the resulting crop. In the Fertile Crescent, wheat and barley were the key cereals; in the Americas it was maize, in sub-Saharan Africa sorghum, in northern China millet, while in southern China and southeast Asia it was rice. Other crops were also important in various parts of the world, for example beans, yams, potatoes, gourds and peppers.

A hidden danger

Reliance on a diet of cereals contained a hidden danger. Many skeletons from the ancient world show evidence of appalling abscesses in the jaw, a result of teeth shattering when biting on fragments of rock from the stones used to grind the grain.

Domesticating wild animals The first animal to be domesticated was the dog, which is a direct descendant of the wolf. Dogs were used in hunting and as guards long before people became settled farmers—the feral dingo of Australia, for example, is a descendant of the dogs that the first humans brought to the continent some 50,000 years ago.

But it was not until after arable farming began in the Middle East that livestock farming—the rearing of animals for food and other products such as leather—began. The first animals to be tamed were cattle, sheep, pigs and horses, which in their domesticated form spread from the Middle East across Asia. Cattle and donkeys began to be used to pull plows, sleds and eventually wheeled wagons. In South America, the llama was bred as a pack animal, while guinea pigs were reared for food.

What agriculture has done for us Food production based on agriculture continues to provide the bedrock of modern civilization. But the coming of agriculture was not an unmixed blessing. Comparison of the skeletons of earlier hunter-gatherers with those of later farming peoples shows that on the whole the former were better built and healthier, reflecting their more varied diet. The first farmers—and this is still the case with hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers around the world—had a very plain diet, largelyconsisting of a staple carbohydrate crop. Protein, in the form of meat or dairy products, was very much a rarity.

Milk drinkers and milk haters

Originally, no humans could digest milk once they had been weaned from their mother’s breast. Then around 7,500 years ago a new gene arose amongst a tribe of cattle herders living between the Balkans and central Europe. This gene enabled them to continue digesting lactose—the sugar found in milk—through adulthood, so giving rise to the addition to the diet of such items as butter, cheese and yogurt. However, this gene, which is commonest in people of northern European origin, is absent in half the world’s population, who continue to be intolerant of lactose.

Before the coming of farming there was some division of labor. In hunter-gatherer societies the women usually did most of the gathering and the men most of the hunting, while certain individuals, sometimes with some form of disability, became shamans. But generally speaking, the development of occupational specializations and social hierarchies, with kings and priests at the top and slaves at the bottom, came only after the establishment of sedentary farming communities. Settled communities, food surpluses and the manufacture of artifacts such as pottery or ceremonial stone axes also gave rise to trade over considerable distances—amber from the Baltic, for example, has been found in Neolithic sites across Europe.

By 6000 BC some of these communities—such as those at Jericho in the Jordan valley and at Çatal Höyük in Anatolia—had grown into small towns. The emergence of urban civilization in the form of the first city-states and empires was only a matter of time.

the condensed idea

Agriculture fundamentally changed the way we live