The Origins of Agriculture, Part 2

Agriculture appeared globally across the continents during the Holocene, with major centres located in Southwest Asia, East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Central America, South America, and North America (Price& Feinman, 2005). Some of the most ancient plant domesticates include wheat and barley in Southwest Asia, millet and rice in East Asia, squash and maize in Central America, and arrowroot in South America (recall the map from part 1). Early animal domesticates include dogs, goats, cattle, and pigs in Southwest Asia (Zeder,2011), dogs being the earliest domesticates. 

The earliest beginnings of agriculture are seen in the Fertile Crescent, a crescent-shaped zone of relatively fertile land (as the name clearly suggests). The region has high agricultural productivity, and is thought to have been even more productive in the past when the climate was more moderate than today (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2013).

The Fertile Crescent (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2013)

More specifically, the Levant region, home to the Natufian people, has been extensively studied as the birthplace of agriculture. This region, which borders the Mediterranean Sea, possesses diverse landscapes and a distinct seasonality pattern, the amount of rainfall dictating vegetation patterns. The Levant's Mediterranean vegetation zone was biologically the richest, with large amounts of edible fruits, seeds, leaves, and tubers, as well as fauna including gazelle, wild cattle, roe deer, and wild boar. Around 13,000 years BP, the region experienced climatic improvements, and it is around this time that the Natufian civilisation emerged. A couple millennia later, environmental deterioration occurred due to the Younger Dryas climate crisis (11,000 years BP), and it is in the thousand years following this event that we see the earliest plant and animal domesticates in the region (Bar Yosef, 1998). 

Map of the Near East indicating the territories of the early Natufian homeland, the expansion of the late Natufian culture, and the area of the Harifian culture (Bar Yosef, 1998)

As we saw in part 1 of this post, the cause for the origination of agriculture is still hotly debated among archaeologists, climate scientists, anthropologists and the like. This is where I'll conclude this introduction on the early beginnings of agriculture. Keeping in line with this blog’s intent, I’ll be back to discuss the environmental impacts of the onset of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent.