SUBSISTENCE

Farming Began in New Guinea Too

~7,000 years ago

Neolithic · Neolithic · Holocene · Northgrippian

In the highlands of New Guinea, agriculture was invented from scratch, with no grain and no plough: taro on the wetland edge from the early Holocene, mounded gardens by about 7,000 years ago, with bananas already under intensive cultivation, drainage ditches by 4,300. The world's bananas remember it: their domestication began with New Guinea's wild species before spreading, hybrid by hybrid, across Asia and on into West Africa.

Why it matters

Farming was not one Near Eastern idea that diffused; it was independently invented many times, on root crops and fruit as well as grain, and New Guinea's case is among the clearest. That reframes agriculture as something our species does, given the Holocene, rather than a single stroke of genius. And a living trace remains: for millennia those gardens have fed valleys that hold one of the densest concentrations of languages and peoples on Earth.

Dating & uncertainty

At Kuk Swamp, plant use on the wetland edge runs from about 10,200 years ago, mound cultivation from about 7,000, ditch systems from about 4,300; the date shown here marks the mounds, the plainest sign of farming. Domestication arose independently in many parts of the world, and the taro and banana gardens of New Guinea are among the least sung.

Sources

1. Denham et al. (2003), Science · Origins of agriculture at Kuk Swamp in the highlands of New Guineadoi:10.1126/science.1085255
2. Perrier et al. (2011), PNAS · Multidisciplinary perspectives on banana (Musa spp.) domesticationdoi:10.1073/pnas.1102001108
3. Larson et al. (2014), PNAS · Current perspectives and the future of domestication studiesdoi:10.1073/pnas.1323964111

Our species’ history as one day

23:28:0032 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day