SUBSISTENCE × SOCIETY

Farming Begins in the Fertile Crescent

~11,500 years ago

Neolithic · Neolithic · Holocene · Greenlandian

As the last glacial period ended, people across the Fertile Crescent began to tend what they had until then only gathered and hunted: sowing wild wheat and barley, penning wild goats and sheep. Plants and animals were being managed at roughly the same time, by at least 11,500 years ago, and the shift happened in parallel across the whole region rather than radiating from a single core area. Cereals that look domesticated, with grains that hold to the stalk, only become common a thousand years later, first in the southern and central Levant.

Why it matters

Farming rearranged the terms of human life. It fed villages that no longer moved, and those villages accumulated what mobile foragers could not carry: granaries, herds, property. Cities and states followed. The world population, a few million at the end of the ice age, began the slow climb that has never stopped since. The timeline's own scale makes the sharpest point: our species had already existed for three hundred thousand years before anyone planted a field.

Dating & uncertainty

Agriculture has no year zero. People were managing still-wild plants and animals by at least 11,500 years ago, and the visible marks of domestication, plumper grain and altered bones, only accumulate over the following millennium or more, at different times in different valleys. Any single date is a convention about where in that process to plant the flag.

Sources

1. Zeder (2011), Current Anthropology · The Origins of Agriculture in the Near Eastdoi:10.1086/659307
2. Arranz-Otaegui et al. (2016), PNAS · Regional diversity on the timing for the initial appearance of cereal cultivation and domestication in southwest Asiadoi:10.1073/pnas.1612797113
3. Fuller, Willcox & Allaby (2011), World Archaeology · Cultivation and domestication had multiple originsdoi:10.1080/00438243.2011.624747

Our species’ history as one day

23:07:2552 min 34 s before midnight

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