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The Big History of Civilizations | Origins of Agriculture | Wondrium
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[Music]
in this lecture we explore one of the
most important Revolutions in the
history of humanity and even of our
planet the transition from foraging to
in let me pose three questions to you
that anthropologists and archaeologists
have frankly struggled to answer for
more than a century why would humans
give up foraging a LifeWay that had
successfully sustained them for almost
200,000 years and adopt agriculture did
this happen all over the world at the
same time or did some humans in just a
few places adopt farming and many others
not and what has the impact of the
Agricultural Revolution been on human
lifeways and on the
biosphere we have seen that around
12,000 years ago humans were living on
All Earth's continents except Antarctica
wherever they lived humans survived
through foraging by using collective
learning to invent a range of
Technologies perfectly adapted to
different environments from the icy
world of the Arctic to the deserts of
Australia so collective learning and
technological innovation were clearly
going on but the small size of human
community ities in the Old Stone Age and
The Limited exchanges between them meant
that the pace of change had been slow
for close to 20000 Millennia but then
something changed and it changed quite
quickly by 11,500 years ago new
subsistence Technologies were beginning
to appear in certain regions of the
planet technologies that by enabling
humans to cultivate their own sources of
food over time gave humans access to
more and more resources this meant that
not only did human populations begin to
increase globally but in the new
agricultural zones humans were living in
larger and denser concentrations in new
types of communities such as Villages and
and
towns increased densities like this were
frankly impossible during the
Paleolithic because foragers needed a
huge range of territory to support
themselves roughly 2 square kilm per
person but farming can support many more
people in the same area one example in
Bangladesh today agriculture can sustain
a population density of almost a th000
people per square
kilometer where agriculture was adopted
denser populations appeared and the pace
of historical change began to speed up
putting humans onto a a new historical
pathway that led directly towards the
astonishing world of complex States and
civilizations but where foraging
remained the dominant LifeWay and
populations remained small and Scattered
change was generally slower so this
meant that for the first time in human
history the pace of change began to vary
from region to
region the transition to agriculture was
thus of such profound significance that
it clearly marks the crossing of another
threshold of complexity by our species
and indeed by planet Earth the timing of
the transition was critical agriculture
was adopted early in parts of AF Eurasia
much later in the Americas and the
Pacific and hardly at all in most of
austral Asia and this had significant
implications for the appearance of
civilizations as we shall
see to understand why and where
agriculture appeared when it did let's
consider how foraging and farming differ
we've learned that foragers are very
good at finding new sources of energy by
spreading into new environmental niches
a process that we termed extensification
in contrast Farmers largely stay in one
place so they have to find ways to
extract more energy from the area of
land that they have available a process
we call
intensification foragers live off a wide
variety of animal and plant species that
are products of natural selection
Farmers on the other hand depend upon a
much smaller number of species and have
learned to increase their output through artificial
artificial
selection successful farming also
depends on the establishment of a a
strong relationship between plants
animals and the human farmer an
interaction that evolves into a form of
symbiosis uh a biology term to describe
species codependence symbiosis is common
in the natural world where different
species have evolved to to rely on each
other for food or for protection often
becoming so dependent that they can no
longer survive alone one example along
the Australian Great Barrier Reef the
small cleaner Ras fish survives by
cleaning the gills and the teeth of
other fish some of which would probably
eat the small fish if it was not
performing such a useful task the RAS
lives off the food it picks out of the
mouths of other fish while the latter
depend upon the dentist to keep their
teeth and gills
clean another example of a symbiotic
relationship is that between Honeypot
ants and aphids which are tiny insects
that feed on the sap of plants the ants
domesticate the aphids by herting and
milking them to obtain the Honeydew they
produce but at the same time they
protect the aphids from predators and
help them reproduce doesn't this sound
very similar to farming like Honeypot
ants humans have learned over the course
of 11,000 years to herd and manipulate
useful species like corn and cattle and
how to increase production of our
domesticates to support more of our own
species now humans obviously benefit
from this s itic relationship but so too
do our our domesticated species which we
protect from predators and help
reproduce ensuring their success as a
species note though that the impact of
this relationship has been different for
each partner humans have changed
culturally because of domestication
leading to the invention of new
technologies and new lifeways and the
evolution of our communities from small
foraging bands to complex interdependent
cities states and civilizations
our domesticates have changed
genetically often evolving into an
entirely new species let me give you two
quick examples teosinte the ancestor of
modern corn is in its natural state a
small weedy and not very nutritious
plant although it can survive in the
wild without human
assistance over thousands of generations
American farmers turned tein into
varieties of modern corn a plant that is
much larger and more nutritious but that
can no longer reproduce without human
intervention the domestic sheep is
another example the ancestor of all
domestic sheep was the mufon which still
survives in Wild populations today in
Turkey Iran Sardinia and Corsica the
domestic sheep is a lot less intelligent
more docile and virtually helpless
compared to the muflon but because
humans have protected it and encouraged
its reproduction the modern sheep is
biologically much more numerous than its
Wild ancestors in fact current estimates
are that the planet supports a global
population of over 1 billion sheep
today okay let's get back to the key
questions of where when and why the
transition to agriculture occurred it
appeared that this was not an Abrupt
change the road from Gathering plants in
the wild then cultivating and finally
domesticating them was long and
convoluted geneticists working on plant
genomes have been crucial in unlocking
the the nuances of this transition as
they look for genetic evidence of
physical changes in species as a product
of domestication plant genomes show us
that humans were harvesting and eating
wild cereals for thousands of years
before actual domestication
began a good example of this comes from
the archaeological site of ohalo 2 on
the Southwest Shore of the Sea of
Galilee in Israel which was first
settled 25,000 years ago probably by
nans more than 10,000 years before
farming began archaeologists have found
evidence of up to 90,000 individual
plants that were eaten by the uh
inhabitants but there is no genetic
evidence of any attempted domestication
even though the remains of Wheat and
barley on Stone implements indicate that
the residents were grinding wild grains
to make flour and probably baking dough
in halfs the earliest sites and dates
for actual species domestication
are difficult to determine but there is
little doubt that the first successful
attempt at domesticating a species was
undertaken by Paleolithic forages and
that was the domestication of the
dog the oldest actual remains of a
domesticated dog have been dated to
around 15,000 years ago this date comes
from the 2002 discovery of two dog
skulls found close beside a mammoth bone
Hut in the upper Paleolithic site of
alich 1 in Central Russia in 2013 these
skulls were positively identified by DNA
sequencing as belonging to the canus
lupus familiaris or dog family in 2015
researchers did an analysis of the
complete MOG genome sequences of
555 individual modern and ancient
dogs This research indicated that a
significant increase in the size of the
population had occurred around 23,5 00
before present leading them to conclude
that this might Mark the actual date of
dog domestication the first successful
domestication of any species by humans
as Oxford paleo archaeologist Gregor
Larsson once famously put it the dog was
the first domesticate without dogs you
don't have any other domestication you
civilization the domestication of other
species by early farmers occurred
gradually around the world over long
time periods this began in Southwest
Asia around 11,500 years ago then in
Northeast Africa perhaps a thousand
years later in East Asia at least 9,000
years ago and eventually in New Guinea
in subsaharan Africa in South Asia and
the Americas in the Millennia that
followed so what prompted the
transition now the obvious answer might
be that as with the wheel some creative
individuals simply in invented farming
and it worked so well that everyone else
just copied it but one problem with this
theory is that agriculture appeared
separately in different regions of the
world that had no contact with each
other this isolation is most probably
true of China and New Guinea and
certainly is the case in the Americas a
world Zone that was geographically
isolated from afro Eurasia but where
very similar processes of domestication
occurred we also know that agriculture
was not necessarily seen as a more
attractive LifeWay of foraging as a
better idea because foraging persisted
for Millennia in close proximity to
early farming communities particularly
in Northern Australia agriculture was
more physically demanding than foraging
also more stressful farming was also
less healthy than foraging partly
because Farmers narrowed the range of
their food choices and thus their
nutritional intake and also because the
the repetitive physical motion ions
required of farmers were not as good for
the body as the more generalized
physical activity of hunting and
Gathering skeletal remains also show
that early farmers were not only subject
to Greater levels of stress but also to
new diseases many of which spread from
domesticated animals to humans a problem
we still face today the adoption of
farming actually shortened human
lifespans and increased infant mortality
rates amongst early farming communities
so the idea Theory the appearance of
some Paleolithic farming Einstein to
explain the emergence of Agriculture
simply will not work an alternative
approach more widely accepted today is
to explain the Agricultural Revolution
as a a stepbystep process in which
conscious human decision-making may have
played only a limited
role critical to The evolutionary not
revolutionary model is climate change
and the emergence of environmental
condition s that facilitated the
transition coupled with demographic
pressure as a result of increasing
population densities in some regions now
that the last cycle of the most recent
Ice Age began around 110,000 years ago
and global temperatures plunged to their
coldest level between 21,000 and 17,000
years ago conditions were so cold that
forests disappeared and frigid Tundra
covered much of the planet Spain 177,000
years ago would have looked more like Siberia
Siberia
today under these conditions foraging
was the only survival strategy possible
for humans and this remained the
situation until the beginning of the Hol
scene Epoch around 11,700 years ago when
the earth experienced a rapid global
warming at the end of the last ice
age the hollow seene was not only warmer
and wetter but also more climatically
stable and as different groups
experimented with domestic ation they
increased in size relative to foraging
bands researcher Peter Richardson argues
that this increas in group size led to
Intergroup competition and this more or
less forced communities to adopt farming
now building on the work of Richardson
and many other Specialists big history
offers a fstep model to try and explain
the origins of
Agriculture the first step is actually a
precondition humans already had a lot of
the necessary Knowledge and Skills for
farming remember for almost 200,000
years humans had been endlessly
manipulating other species and
Landscapes to enhance our food supply
and to reduce our exposure to Predators
so our foraging ancestors were already
pre-adapted culturally to manipulate the
natural environment they had an immense
amount of knowledge about plants and
animals and how to protect useful
species through not overexploiting them
and foragers had also demonstrated their
ability to radically transform their
environments through practices like fire
stick farming and the hunting strategies
that led to megap fornal
extinctions step two is another
precondition really some animal and
plant species were also essentially
pre-adapted as potential domesticates
Now by this I mean that some animals and
plants had evolved in a way that made
them more suitable for domestication
than others obviously not all animals
and plants are equal when it comes to
potential domestication for example of
the 150 or so species of land mammals on
the planet Farmers have been able to
domesticate only 14 such species this is
because potential animal domesticates
have to meet some pretty demanding
criteria including Rapid growth regular
birth rates a herd mentality and a good
disposition of the 200,000 higher plants
growing on Earth only about 100 have
proven to be reliable domesticates it
was the domestication in West Asia of
three cereals Emma and in corn wheat and
barley that effectively marked the
beginning of the transition from
foraging to farming Emma wheat in
particular has significant genetic
advantages it can adapt to very diverse
environments it gives good yields from
poor soils it has the ability to rapidly
genetically diversify and its resistance
to certain fungal diseases like stem
rust is also important all of these
advantages coupled with the fact that
Emma has a reputation for baking good
bread explain its Global success as a
domesticate geneticists have identified
several locations in Southeastern turkey
as the most probable places of origin of
wild Emma wheat but the earliest
evidence of domesticated Emma actually
comes from a site near Damascus in Syria
so it was perhaps from the Damascus
Valley or some other adjacent fertile
crant early farming site that
domesticated wheat spread initially
across afro Eurasia and eventually all
around the world in 2012 Farmers
produced 960 million metric tons of
wheat globally providing something like
20% of all the calories consumed by the
more than 7 billion humans alive that
year modern versions of weed such as
Durham and common have today almost
completely eclipse the ancient uncorn
and igrins which today are growing only
in a handful of mountainous regions in
Eurasia there were many such promising
potential domesticated species 11,000
years ago in Southwest Asia the region
had just the right climate fertility and
soils as well as a wide Suite of wild
animal species growing and grazing in
the highlands of the Fertile cresant the
Abundant potential of the Fertile
cresant is one obvious reason why
agriculture began there whereas the the
weedy and generally unut triti nature of
tein the ancestor to Modern corn might
be a reason for the much later
appearance of agriculture in the
Americas teos Cente does not have large
ears of grain like Emma and uncorn wheat
offering little nutritional return for
the early American Farmer instead
teosinte had small nut-like kernels
distributed in small feathery knobs over
the numerous tertiary branches plant
geneticists have been able to identify
the specific genes that had to be
modified by artificial selection to
enable tein to make the transition to
Modern corn but it took early Native
American farmers many many generations
of selective breeding of teos Cente for
these genetic changes to manifest
themselves delaying the widespread
availability of a nutritious and
successful grain crop in the American
step three of the five-step model to
explain the transition to agriculture is
that humans in certain key regions of
the globe were already adopting less
nomadic Lifestyles and becoming at least
part-time sedentary archaeological
evidence shows us that sedentism began
to increase in some parts of the world
from about 11,000 years ago there were
two main reasons for this climate change
and population pressure as climates
became warmer and wetter with the waning
of the last ice age in some areas there
appeared re regions of Natural Abundance
where large numbers of humans
settled it's no coincidence that the
biblical Garden of Eden was probably
located in Southwest Asia in the fertile
Delta regions of the tigress and
Euphrates the people who settled in
these regions were not farming just
living off the Abundant natural fruits
of the land but this increased sedentism
eventually led to
overpopulation because sedentary peoples
do not have the same constraints on
population growth that nomadic peoples
do migration further contributed to the
pressures of overpopulation because many
of these same regions of abundance were
also natural funnels for human migration
Southwest Asia is the only conduit for
people moving between Africa and Eurasia
for example just as migrants moving
between the two large American
continents had to pass through meso
America and this at least partly
explains the large and dense populations
that eventually settled in these regions
certainly by 10,000 years ago there is
archaeological evidence that these
interregional migrations had led to
localized population pressure which
forced people to migrate through and
settle in smaller and smaller
areas now we learned in the context of
the ancient city of Jericho about
communities that as a result of climate
change were able to abandon nomadism and
adopt sedentism while still pursuing
Hunter Gathering lifeways such
communities are termed affluent foragers
foragers who have access to sufficient
resources that they can settle down and become
become
santized evidence of affluent foraging
has also been found in many other parts
of the world including
Australia for example the gundara people
of Southeast Australia abandoned
full-time nism and settle down to build
fish wear to farm eels and to live in
sedentary Villages
nearby but it is intriguing that despite
this affluent foraging LifeWay and the
relative proximity of Northern Australia
to agriculturalist in New Guinea and
nearby Islands Australian aboriginals
never made the transition to agriculture
the most likely explanation for this is
that Australian aboriginals lived in a
Land of relative plenty and with such an
abundance of resources there was simply
no attraction in abandoning a successful
nomatic LifeWay for a more demanding
more stressful LifeWay based on the
cultivation of
domesticates but you will remember that
the most significant affluent foraging
communities of West Asia were the nans
who began occupying the Western fertile
cresant that is present day Israel
Jordan Lebanon and Syria from about
14,000 years ago n archaeological sites
like a malaha in Israel demonstrate that
their dieet consisted mainly of
harvested and prepared Wild cial Grains
uh eaten as barley GRL and wheat
flatbread I'm malaha also demonstrates
that the adoption of sedentism led to
increased population densities its
population of perhaps two to 300 people
small by today standards of course made
it perhaps one of the largest sedentary
communities that had ever existed on the
the planet to that point in time because
of affluent foraging then particularly
in the fertile Cresent population
pressures resulting from sedentism and
continuing migration forced human
communities into smaller and smaller
territories by 13,000 BP foragers were
occupying a wide range of environmental
niches all over the planet and in some
cases these niches could not support
increased populations as Peter
Richardson's Intergroup competition model
model
indicates these groups were forced to
try and feed themselves off rapidly
diminishing Parcels of land and with
further migration not really an option
they found themselves caught in what we
call the Trap of sedentism step four in
this five-step
process remember foraging lifeways are
essentially nomadic in nature requiring
almost constant migration and
sustainably small populations imagine
how difficult it must have been for
migrating bands to support bought too
many babies or elderly group members
with reduced Mobility survival in the
Paleolithic just thus demanded the use
of practices such as natural birth
control infanticide and pilicide one
statistic on this some anthropologists
have argued that perhaps 50% of all
female newborn babies were killed by
their parents during the Paleolithic so
populations of nomadic forages grew very
slowly but once human groups became
sedentary affluent foragers these
constraints on population growth simply
disappeared it was no longer necessary
to leave old folks behind and
communities were able to support more
children so populations grew amongst
affluent foraging groups this led
eventually to the problem of
overpopulation a problem that would have
become even more acute if climate change
made affluent foraging less
sustainable certainly all the nuian
sites provide evidence of antism and
increasingly dense local populations
suggesting that there may eventually
have been too many people to support by
AFU and foraging practices even at the
level of intensification practiced by
the nans faced with increasing
populations many communities were left
with few alternative survival strategies
because of continuing climate change and
the resulting lack of space a return to
a Pneumatic foraging LifeWay was
impossible and after many generations of
affluent for ing the skills of the
nomatic hunter gatherer May well have been
been
lost the alternative was to concentrate
on increasing the productivity of the
crops and animals available to the
community by removing unwanted trees or
plants associated with weeding and
deforestation uh by planting tending and
harvesting desirable plant species
leading to domestication and by tending
and manipulating desirable and useful
animal species hurting in other words
the only viable option available for
affluent foragers faced with
overpopulation pressure and climate
change was to intensify cultivation and
adopt farming and that's exactly what
appears to have happened at sites that
could support large populations such as
Jericho jamoo in northeastern Iraq and
chattle hyok in Turkey the final step in
this model then step five is the
adoption of farming the only remaining
survival strategy available for the
communities this five-step model works
very well in West Asia particularly the
fertile Cresent but let's conclude this
lecture by seeing how well it applies to
the emergence of agriculture in other
parts of the world in central China the
arrival of warmer wetter weather
following the the waning of the Ice Age
gave hunter gatherers access to herds of
wild cattle and sheep and to a range of
wild grasses that appeared in great
profusion particularly green foxtail
millet sites such as Shuan and Shu zatan
excavated in the fen River Valley
provide clear evidence that the
residents were pursuing affluent
foraging lifeways still surviving
through hunting and Gathering but becoming
becoming
santized evidence of numerous sedentary
Neolithic farming Villages begins
appearing in the region from about 6,000
BC notably sishan and pagon suggesting
that these communities were largely
surviving through the domestication of
millet 8,000 years ago
in southern China along the middle
reaches of the yansi river a warming
climate soon after 8,000 BCE led to an
expansion of lakes along the river
valley which pH facilitated the spread
of wild rice two sites in particular
have provided evidence of the transition
from foraging to farming a cave at Dion
Hanan indicates that Rice was probably
being collected in the Wild by forages
soon after
13,200 before present but that had
disappeared from the site during the
younger dry ass coal snap when the plant
itself may have been forced to retreat
to the South just to
survive wild rice then returned to the
valley as the climate warmed again and
was apparently being domesticated by the
residents by at least 6,000 BC so D Tong
Hanan along with the second major cave
site at Shan Rong provides indisputable
evidence of the increasing availability
of a domesticable crop species because
of climate change and of the adoption of
sedentary lifeways by affluent forages
which led inevitably to population
increases and the eventual domestication
of rice in the Neolithic
era in North Central and South America
the same general trend is found in the
archaeological record a climate related
increase in the availability of
different food sources led to increased
sedentism and subsequent population
pressure which in turn trapped humans
into having to adopt more labor
intensive cultiv practices and
eventually full-scale agriculture the
earliest crop species in the Americas
were squash followed later by Common
beans and the chili pepper the Mexican
sites of zapilko and San Andreas appear
to have been occupied long term by
afluent foragers who eventually made the
transition to farming although the dates
for this transition and for the first
evidence of domestication remain
difficult to pin
down in South America the TR Ventanas
caves in the Cal Highlands of Peru
provide the earliest evidence of potato
G and sweet potato in the diets diets of
affu and forers living there the
appearance of the domesticated potato
has been dated to roughly 5,500 BC
although its domestication status is
unclear because these species were also
growing in the wild in this beneficial
environmental Niche once the shift from
afflu and foraging to fullscale
agriculture was made virtually every
South American American Site indicates
the rapid development of complex
sedentary societies and increased
population densities particularly along
the Pacific
coast so the five-step model a process
driven by the critical Prime movers of
climate change and population pressure
generally works well in explaining the
transition from foraging to farming
although there are some exceptions to
the model once humans were settled in
communities with increasing populations
the only VI option open to them to feed
themselves was intensified food
production from the land available and
once these communities completed this
complex transition from foraging to
farming human history suddenly found
itself spiraling along an entirely new trajectory
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