TECHNOLOGY × HUMAN EVOLUTION

Farming Begins

~11,500 years ago

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Holocene · Greenlandian

People in the Fertile Crescent began tending plants and animals that still looked entirely wild: sowing what they had gathered, weeding around it, keeping herds close. The marks of domestication, plumper grains and ears that hold together instead of scattering their seed, took another two thousand years to appear. The same slow shift happened independently in China, Mexico and New Guinea.

Why it matters

Farming turned mobile foragers into settled societies that could store a surplus, and it is the ground on which cities, states, writing and a lasting rise in human numbers were built. What the two-thousand-year lag suggests is that nobody set out to do it: the plants changed under a practice that had been going on for generations before anyone could have seen where it led.

Dating & uncertainty

There is no first year. Domestication is a process, and the evidence for its start, charred seeds and shifting proportions of species on a site, precedes by millennia the anatomical changes that let an archaeologist call a grain domestic. Near Eastern dates cluster around 11,500 years ago for the first tending of wild plants and herds, and around 9,500 for cereals that could no longer sow themselves.

Sources

1. Zeder (2011), Current Anthropology · The origins of agriculture in the Near East
2. Zeder (2008), PNAS · Domestication and early agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin: origins, diffusion, and impact
3. Arranz-Otaegui et al. (2016), PNAS · Regional diversity on the timing for the initial appearance of cereal cultivation and domestication in southwest Asia
4. Larson et al. (2014), PNAS · Current perspectives and the future of domestication studies

Earth history as one day

23:59:59.78219 ms before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day