3 ms·

On top of that, the creation of agriculture was almost certainly extremely granular. There is a spectrum of foraging to farming. You go out in the forest and ta

On top of that, the creation of agriculture was almost certainly extremely granular. There is a spectrum of foraging to farming. You go out in the forest and take some fruits back. Some of the discarded fruit seeds end up growing trees near your settlement. Someone eventually realizes that having fruit trees close by is really convenient, and they start planting seeds intentionally. This was probably done for a very, very long time without it being the dominant source of food.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
It's actually not clear at all that this is the case in Western Europe. Agriculture came with sweeping genetic and archaeological changes. There's quite a bit of evidence for population replacement in large parts of Europe as agriculture moved in, rather than existing hunter gatherers adopting farming. If you look at the more recent history of the agricultural settlement of other parts of the world, it's not too different. North America the most recent, but parts of Africa as well. Hunter gatherers have low population densities over often very large territories, and are sensitive to disruptions in animal migrations; but when they're able to forage and hunt reliably their diets are actually often much better than agricultural populations and involve less overall labour. So they don't necessarily just give it up because somehow agriculture is better. ... and even the proto-Indo-European pastoralists of the steppe continued to forage wild grains and plants (rather than plant wheat like their neighbours to the west) for almost a millennia after domesticating horses and cattle. David Anthony gets into this in "Horse, Wheel, Language". And it wasn't because they didn't know how, they just preferred not to. Settling down to plant crops has trade-offs. (I say this as a person with a pile of pre-winter garden chores I'm procrastinating...)

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

It's actually not clear at all that this is the case in Western Europe. Agriculture came with sweeping genetic and archaeological changes. There's quite a bit of evidence for population replacement in large parts of Europe as agriculture moved in, rather than existing hunter gatherers adopting farming. If you look at the more recent history of the agricultural settlement of other parts of the world, it's not too different. North America the most recent, but parts of Africa as well. Hunter gatherers have low population densities over often very large territories, and are sensitive to disruptions in animal migrations; but when they're able to forage and hunt reliably their diets are actually often much better than agricultural populations and involve less overall labour. So they don't necessarily just give it up because somehow agriculture is better. ... and even the proto-Indo-European pastoralists of the steppe continued to forage wild grains and plants (rather than plant wheat like their neighbours to the west) for almost a millennia after domesticating horses and cattle. David Anthony gets into this in "Horse, Wheel, Language". And it wasn't because they didn't know how, they just preferred not to. Settling down to plant crops has trade-offs. (I say this as a person with a pile of pre-winter garden chores I'm procrastinating...)