Why did people start to farm? For almost 200,000 years, during most of human history, people lived as hunters and gatherers. Then, from about 11,000 years ago, people in different parts of the world started to farm. The dates are relatively suddenly over the course of a few thousand years and it is so independent from each other. Moreover, the dates are despite the effects that for most people farming was a bad idea. Many early farmers probably had to work a lot harder than hunters and gathers needed to do to obtain enough food. And skeletal remain show, that they are much less healthy than their hunter-gatherer predecessors. All of these raises the tantalizing question, what convinced people all around the world to adapt such a rough lifestyle, more or less simultaneously? Many causes have been proposed for the origin of farming, and I will discuss a few of the major ones. It has been argued that during the last tens of thousands of years, a symbiotic relationship has developed between humans and what would become their crop and livestock. In this relationship, plants and animals provide food for people, whereas people make sure selected plants and animals survive and reproduce. Much like certain plants provide food for certain insects, and insects make sure pollen gets distributed. As a result, humans and the plants and animals they domesticated became dependent on each other for their own survival. This didn't happen each time people tried to domesticate a species. Some attempts at domestication failed. For instance, when people in the Middle East try to domesticate gazelles, the animals simply proved to be a bit too fast to tame. People did manage to tame other species though, most notably plants and animals that seem pre-adapted for domestication. Such plants and animals included social animals, in which a person could replace the group's alpha male. And they also included social plants that grow fast and in large numbers to prevent every single plant from being eaten at any given time. Examples of such plants, by the way, are grasses like rice, wheat, and corn, that have become staple crops throughout the world because they are so easy to grow. So, this seems like a good explanation for the origin of farming, that fits well within a broader evolutionary pattern. However, even though quite a lot of evidence exists for people slowly developing a symbiotic relationship with certain plants and animals over the past tens of thousands of years. That relationship clearly intensified around 11,000 years ago when people and their plants and animals started to live closely together in agricultural villages. So what happened at that particular point in time? Well, almost 12,000 years ago, the last Ice Age ended and our world entered this current inter glacial, the Holocene. All over the world, temperatures rose. This led some people in the early 20th century to hypothesize that as some parts of the world turned into deserts, the people, plants, and animals in those parts of the world had to learn to live together in the remaining oases. This was argued, led to the invention of plants and animal husbandry and eventually to the formation of rapidly multiplying villages. However, since this idea was first proposed it has been discovered that the climate generally became wetter instead of drier during the advent of Holocene. Could such wetter conditions also have stimulated the development of farming? In subtropical mountainous regions that became wetter in the early Holocene, many different species thrived. The abundance of variety of available foods in such regions may have led some people to settle down more permanently and become sedentary. Such people may have started to experiment with ways to keep certain edible plants and animals nearby. Also, in sedentary societies, populations may have grown more quickly than in hunter-gather societies. Probably because children may have been less of a burden in societies that did not constantly move around. Going population pressures may have made it necessary to increase food supplies and thus, to intensify experiments to keep edible plants and animals nearby and eventually develop farming. However, even though this model explains the origin of farming quite neatly, reality was probably a bit messier. For instance, there are quite a few examples in which sedentary hunter and gatherer societies did not bother to invent agriculture or animal husbandry at all. And whereas population pressure may have led to the emergence of farming in some regions, it may have been the consequence of farming in others. So apparently, in some situations, sedentism and population pressure are not enough to cause the emergence of plant and animal husbandry. Something else may have been needed as well, but what? This brings me to the last major and arguably most contested cause for the origin of farming, changes in a way people thought about the world and their place on it. This is contested partly because we can only guess what early hunters, gatherers and farmers thought based on for instance their burial practices and the artistic expressions they left behind. One of the most remarkable of such expressions is the more than 11,000 year old ritual Gobekli Tepe, in Turkey. Where huge structures were erected by what must have been a very large group of hunters and gatherers. It has been argued by some that the gatherings necessary to build the center required the development of a social organization that eventually proved critical for the development of farming societies. Then again, most others disagree. They claim that in most regions, evidence for the first attempts at domesticating plants and animals precedes hints at changing world views. Therefore changes in the way people thought about the world and their place in it cannot be seen as farming's ultimate cause. And as we have seen, neither can the development of a symbiotic relationship between certain species, or climate change, sedentism and population pressure. So what, if anything, can? Most likely a combination of factors is required to explain the origin of farming. And for that reason many scholars have created their own personal recipe for explaining this process. Most of these recipes include one or a few of the ideas I discussed earlier and some scholars add a couple of other ideas as well. Such additions include, for instance, big parties and alcohol. And while the latter may sound like a bit of a joke, the idea that people like to grow grain because it allowed them to brew beer is not as crazy as it sounds. Given the fact that in many sedentary or early agricultural societies beer quickly became one of the few beverages that was not teeming with bacteria, and therefore safe to drink. Another interesting addition, to any farming recipe, may be energy. This concept may help to tie the suggested causes discussed in this video into one coherent whole and I will tell you more about that in the next video.
