4 ms·

Like everything on the prehistoric timeline, the dawn of agriculture keeps getting pushed back. I think that's believed to be older than 10k years ago now.

• Tuna-Fish 4y ago
  With the caveat that the intensity of the increasingly older agriculture is increasingly low. There are clearly agricultural societies, where >90% of calories come from cultured plants, and there are clearly hunter-gatherer societies that predate them, where ~0% do. We used to believe in a relatively sharp cutoff between these, where once people learned to grow food, they quickly moved to mostly grow their food. This is no longer thought to be the truth, and there was likely a "transitional period" of many thousands of years as people very slowly hunted and gathered less and planted more. (Why believe in a sharp transition? Because there is a lot of archeological evidence for it, so it clearly happened in lots of places. It's just that this doesn't represent people inventing agriculture, but it spreading to a new area and displacing older lifestyles, either by migrations of people or of ideas.)