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I studied anthropology as my college minor and the consensus in my classes seemed to be that farming was never really a new discovery that was 'invented.' Rath

by vivekd 10y ago

I studied anthropology as my college minor and the consensus in my classes seemed to be that farming was never really a new discovery that was 'invented.' Rather it seems likely that ancient people had known about the possibility of raising crops for a while but had simply forgone that in favor of less labor intensive hunting and foraging. Later, as the large game that early humans relied on began to die out, we resorted to the much more labor intensive lifestyle of farming. Some points of evidence include: 1) The advent of farming coincides roughly with the Late Pleistocene Extinction event which saw many of the large game mammals (human prey) die out 2) Bone samples from the era show that the advent of farming coincides with a decline in human height and greater enamel defects showing malnutrition. This is strong evidence that farming was a step down for our early ancestors not a step up. 3) Tribes like the San Bushman and early Australian aborigines knew full well about farming but chose to forgo it because in their region, food was plentiful enough to be hunted and gathered. This is evidence that farming is not necessarily the result of new innovation (people don't instantly and automatically switch to farming just because they know about it). see: http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in... Based on this it seems like farming was not invented separately in separate places but rather that most early humans were aware of the possibility of farming and that switched to it as conditions deteriorated as a result of climate change at the end of the last ice age.

bbotond 10y ago
> most early humans were aware of the possibility of farming Maybe, but for them to be aware of it, someone had to come up with the idea, right? Farming isn't an obvious idea at all if hunting and gathering is all you've done your whole life.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  It's not hard to imagine things like potatoes or other seeds spontaneously sprouting, or someone seeing how plants grow Maybe not obvious, but almost that
  - bbotond 10y ago
    I disagree. A lot of "simple" ideas we take for granted today evolved over thousands of years. The wheel, for example, took a lot of time to appear, place value is a notion we take for granted today but it became widespread only a couple hundred years ago, also whether zero was a number had been heavily debated around the time of its invention.
    - sonthonax 10y ago
      Making wheels used to be labour intensive and difficult, and even then remained quite inefficient. Wheels suddenly became energy efficient when the ball bearing was invented in the late 18th century.
- simonh 10y ago
  Maybe it is. If you gather seeds, some of them will get spilled or partially spoiled and thrown out. Some of these will grow, so it will be pretty obvious that humans can scatter seeds which will grow and can be gathered. That's farming. The point is there's a huge difference between knowing that manually sowing and harvesting crops is possible, maybe even small scale incidental agriculture such as sowing seeds at a site and returning to harvest it months later, and choosing to settle permanently and thoroughly adapt your lifestyle around it. Maybe they knew it was possible for thousands of years, or even more, but only chose to do it in a systematic way when they ran out of other options.
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  > Maybe, but for them to be aware of it, someone had to come up with the idea, right? Ants were doing it long before us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%E2%80%93fungus_mutualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%E2%80%93fungus_mutualism
dualogy 10y ago
Interesting thoughts. Agriculture (even horticulture or herding) vs. immediate-return hunter/gathering of course isn't a single invention but a complex co-operative enterprise necessitating quite an array of disruptive changes in lifestyle and establishment of social structures such as hierarchy, property, trades (constructing, protecting grain storage caches etc), marriage etc. Anything so complex, you tend to figure out various optimizations (from tooling to timing and beyond) from painful long-term on-the-ground experience. I'd argue "the knowledge of farming" is really that, rather than the simple notion that planting seeds may (or may not) grow new plants. That ancients "kinda sorta knew" that "planting" (or discarding) a plant's seeds someplace may yield a new growth there, I don't doubt. Of course actual farming needs to yield a maximum of kcals per acre/crop, given the massive amount of labour investment and social disruption required. To maximize this yield over the generations under the given local conditions (weather, soil, crops), isn't that the actual "knowledge of farming", only obtainable by doing the actual toil over the decades and indeed centuries? And when they encountered a new crop, a new soil or a new clime, knowledge for maximizing ROI had to be gained from scratch.
- Retric 10y ago
  Farming is only 'hard' in a competitive landscape. If you have redundant food sources such as fishing or small game and a lot of high quality land it's a relatively low effort and low risk activity. It's only after your population booms and you need to subsist completely off of farming that it's risky. Consider, vermin are going to take more of the harvest the longer it's around. But, if your only trying to cover winter months then even fairly small harvests can make a huge benefit which dramatically reduces effort.
  - dualogy 10y ago
    > If you have redundant food sources such as fishing or small game and a lot of high quality land it's a relatively low effort and low risk activity. It's only after your population booms Agreed, farming isn't hard when you do only very little of it on the side because fish and game still abound ;)
aaron695 10y ago
> Tribes like the San Bushman and early Australian aborigines knew full well about farming but chose to forgo it because in their region There is absolutely zero evidence of Australian aborigines farming so where on earth does this statement come from?
- askvictor 10y ago
  http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2003/03/13/806276.htm http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2003/03/13/806276.htm
  - aaron695 10y ago
    Except to my knowledge it's fake, at best fish traps. Which is why I knew there was no evidence, when this came out, and seemed obviously not true I was surprised at the time everyone as saying this was the 'first' evidence of farming. "In the first evidence of a sedentary Aboriginal community, Builth found what she argues is an ancient eel farm in the form of countless channels crisscrossing the landscape at Lake Condah." Makes for a good thesis but she(one person in the whole community) is still arguing the point.
golergka 10y ago
It's really interesting in a sense where a "new" technology was initially inferior to the "old" one. If I'm not mistaken, iron was originally inferior to bronze and was only adapted because of trouble with trade routes; but then new iron smelting technologies were invented which finally allowed higher quality. Wonder how many other such examples are there.

by vivekd 10y ago

bbotond 10y ago

> most early humans were aware of the possibility of farming Maybe, but for them to be aware of it, someone had to come up with the idea, right? Farming isn't an obvious idea at all if hunting and gathering is all you've done your whole life.

raverbashing 10y ago
It's not hard to imagine things like potatoes or other seeds spontaneously sprouting, or someone seeing how plants grow Maybe not obvious, but almost that
- bbotond 10y ago
  I disagree. A lot of "simple" ideas we take for granted today evolved over thousands of years. The wheel, for example, took a lot of time to appear, place value is a notion we take for granted today but it became widespread only a couple hundred years ago, also whether zero was a number had been heavily debated around the time of its invention.
  - sonthonax 10y ago
    Making wheels used to be labour intensive and difficult, and even then remained quite inefficient. Wheels suddenly became energy efficient when the ball bearing was invented in the late 18th century.
simonh 10y ago
Maybe it is. If you gather seeds, some of them will get spilled or partially spoiled and thrown out. Some of these will grow, so it will be pretty obvious that humans can scatter seeds which will grow and can be gathered. That's farming. The point is there's a huge difference between knowing that manually sowing and harvesting crops is possible, maybe even small scale incidental agriculture such as sowing seeds at a site and returning to harvest it months later, and choosing to settle permanently and thoroughly adapt your lifestyle around it. Maybe they knew it was possible for thousands of years, or even more, but only chose to do it in a systematic way when they ran out of other options.
ceejayoz 10y ago
> Maybe, but for them to be aware of it, someone had to come up with the idea, right? Ants were doing it long before us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid#Ant_mutualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%E2%80%93fungus_mutualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%E2%80%93fungus_mutualism

dualogy 10y ago

Interesting thoughts. Agriculture (even horticulture or herding) vs. immediate-return hunter/gathering of course isn't a single invention but a complex co-operative enterprise necessitating quite an array of disruptive changes in lifestyle and establishment of social structures such as hierarchy, property, trades (constructing, protecting grain storage caches etc), marriage etc. Anything so complex, you tend to figure out various optimizations (from tooling to timing and beyond) from painful long-term on-the-ground experience. I'd argue "the knowledge of farming" is really that, rather than the simple notion that planting seeds may (or may not) grow new plants. That ancients "kinda sorta knew" that "planting" (or discarding) a plant's seeds someplace may yield a new growth there, I don't doubt. Of course actual farming needs to yield a maximum of kcals per acre/crop, given the massive amount of labour investment and social disruption required. To maximize this yield over the generations under the given local conditions (weather, soil, crops), isn't that the actual "knowledge of farming", only obtainable by doing the actual toil over the decades and indeed centuries? And when they encountered a new crop, a new soil or a new clime, knowledge for maximizing ROI had to be gained from scratch.

Retric 10y ago
Farming is only 'hard' in a competitive landscape. If you have redundant food sources such as fishing or small game and a lot of high quality land it's a relatively low effort and low risk activity. It's only after your population booms and you need to subsist completely off of farming that it's risky. Consider, vermin are going to take more of the harvest the longer it's around. But, if your only trying to cover winter months then even fairly small harvests can make a huge benefit which dramatically reduces effort.
- dualogy 10y ago
  > If you have redundant food sources such as fishing or small game and a lot of high quality land it's a relatively low effort and low risk activity. It's only after your population booms Agreed, farming isn't hard when you do only very little of it on the side because fish and game still abound ;)

aaron695 10y ago

> Tribes like the San Bushman and early Australian aborigines knew full well about farming but chose to forgo it because in their region There is absolutely zero evidence of Australian aborigines farming so where on earth does this statement come from?

askvictor 10y ago
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2003/03/13/806276.htm http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2003/03/13/806276.htm
- aaron695 10y ago
  Except to my knowledge it's fake, at best fish traps. Which is why I knew there was no evidence, when this came out, and seemed obviously not true I was surprised at the time everyone as saying this was the 'first' evidence of farming. "In the first evidence of a sedentary Aboriginal community, Builth found what she argues is an ancient eel farm in the form of countless channels crisscrossing the landscape at Lake Condah." Makes for a good thesis but she(one person in the whole community) is still arguing the point.

golergka 10y ago

It's really interesting in a sense where a "new" technology was initially inferior to the "old" one. If I'm not mistaken, iron was originally inferior to bronze and was only adapted because of trouble with trade routes; but then new iron smelting technologies were invented which finally allowed higher quality. Wonder how many other such examples are there.