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Archaeologists often distinguish calibrated from uncalibrated dates by writing the former in upper-case letters and the latter in lower-case letters (for example, 3000 B.C. vs. 3000 b.c., respectively).
But it turns out that ancestral wild chickpeas occur only in southeastern Turkey. The interpretation that chickpeas were actually domesticated there is supported by the fact that the oldest finds of possibly domesticated chickpeas in Neolithic archaeological sites come from southeastern Turkey and nearby northern Syria that date to around 8000 B.C.; not until over 5,000 years later does archaeological evidence of chickpeas appear on the Indian subcontinent.
earliest known cultivated emmer wheat comes from the Fertile Crescent around 8500 B.C. Soon thereafter, the crop appears progressively farther west, reaching Greece around 6500 B.C. and Germany around 5000 B.C.
genetic analyses show that the ancestors of modern Indian and western Eurasian cattle breeds diverged from each other hundreds of thousands of years ago, long before any animals were domesticated anywhere.
Southwest Asia, also known as the Near East or Fertile Crescent; China; Mesoamerica (the term applied to central and southern Mexico and adjacent areas of Central America); the Andes of South America, and possibly the adjacent Amazon Basin as well; and the eastern United States (Figure 5.1).
In addition to these five areas where food production definitely arose de novo, four others—Africa’s Sahel zone, tropical West Africa, Ethiopia, and New Guinea—are candidates for that distinction.
Egyptians then domesticated the sycamore fig and a local vegetable called chufa.
centuries. In the Cape of South Africa the local Khoi hunter-gatherers became herders (but not farmers) by acquiring sheep and cows from farther north in Africa (and ultimately from Southwest Asia).
How can we explain these geographic differences in the times and modes of onset of food production?
Time budget studies show that they may spend more rather than fewer hours per day at work than hunter-gatherers do.
Another misconception is that there is necessarily a sharp divide between nomadic hunter-gatherers and sedentary food producers.
Sedentary groups probably made up a much higher fraction of hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, when all inhabited parts of the world (including the most productive areas) were still occupied by hunter-gatherers, than they do today, when the few remaining hunter-gatherers survive only in unproductive areas where nomadism is the sole option.
Thus, the shift from hunting-gathering to food production did not always coincide with a shift from nomadism to sedentary living.
New Guinea peoples who never domesticated sago palms or mountain pandanus nevertheless increase production of these wild edible plants by clearing away encroaching competing trees, keeping channels in sago swamps clear, and promoting growth of new sago shoots by cutting down mature sago trees.
How does this NOT constitute farming?
In early stages of food production, people simultaneously collected wild foods and raised cultivated ones, and diverse types of collecting activities diminished in importance at different times as reliance on crops increased.
farmers have tended to despise hunter-gatherers as primitive, hunter-gatherers have despised farmers as ignorant, and herders have despised both.
the first farmers on each continent could not have chosen farming consciously, because there were no other nearby farmers for them to observe.
This feels like a very strong assumption.
food-production systems were abandoned in favor of hunting-gathering. For instance, around 3000 B.C. the hunter-gatherers of southern Sweden adopted farming based on Southwest Asian crops, but abandoned it around 2700 B.C. and reverted to hunting-gathering for 400 years before resuming farming.
contributing factor to the rise of animal domestication in the Fertile Crescent was the decline in abundance of the wild gazelles that had previously been a major source of meat for hunter-gatherers in that area.
production. In all parts of the world where adequate evidence is available, archaeologists find evidence of rising densities associated with the appearance of food production.
human population densities were gradually rising throughout the late Pleistocene anyway, thanks to improvements in human technology for collecting and processing wild foods.
adoption of food production exemplifies what is termed an autocatalytic process—one that catalyzes itself in a positive feedback cycle, going faster and faster once it has started.
human population densities rose slightly more steeply than did the availability of food.
Many valuable wild plants yielding food prized by millions of people, such as oaks sought for their edible acorns in many parts of the world, remain untamed even today.
Human latrines, like those of aardvarks, may have been a testing ground of the first unconscious crop breeders.
Already by 8000 B.C. wild almonds show up in excavated archaeological sites in Greece. By 3000 B.C. they were being domesticated in lands of the eastern Mediterranean.
early farmers of both the Americas and the Old World independently selected different species of cotton for long lint.
would be the nonpopping ones left on the plant. Thus, once humans began bringing wild peas home to eat, there was immediate selection for that single-gene mutant.
Occasional mutant individuals among wild plants lacked thick seed coats or other inhibitors of germination. All such mutants promptly sprouted and yielded harvested mutant seeds.
A general problem in crop development is that occasional mutant plant individuals are more useful to humans (for example, because of bigger or less bitter seeds) than are normal individuals.
Thus, farmers selected from among individual plants on the basis not only of perceptible qualities like size and taste, but also of invisible features like seed dispersal mechanisms, germination inhibition, and reproductive biology.
Ancestral cabbage plants, possibly grown originally for their oily seeds, underwent even greater diversification as they became variously selected for leaves (modern cabbage and kale), stems (kohlrabi), buds (brussels sprouts), or flower shoots (cauliflower and broccoli).
Compared with cereals and legumes, they had the drawback of not starting to yield food until at least three years after planting, and not reaching full production until after as much as a decade. Thus, growing these crops was possible only for people already fully committed to the settled village life.
Instead, those trees must be grown by the difficult technique of grafting, developed in China long after the beginnings of agriculture. Not only is grafting hard work even once you know the principle, but the principle itself could have been discovered only through conscious experimentation.
Oaks grow from the occasional acorn that a squirrel forgets to dig up. With billions of squirrels each spreading hundreds of acorns every year to virtually any spot suitable for oak trees to grow, we humans didn’t stand a chance of selecting oaks for the acorns that we wanted.
A mere dozen species account for over 80 percent of the modern world’s annual tonnage of all crops. Those dozen blockbusters are the cereals wheat, corn, rice, barley, and sorghum; the pulse soybean; the roots or tubers potato, manioc, and sweet potato; the sugar sources sugarcane and sugar beet; and the fruit banana.
One advantage of the Fertile Crescent is that it lies within a zone of so-called Mediterranean climate, a climate characterized by mild, wet winters and long, hot, dry summers. That climate selects for plant species able to survive the long dry season and to resume growth rapidly upon the return of the rains.
A second advantage of the Fertile Crescent flora is that the wild ancestors of many Fertile Crescent crops were already abundant and highly productive, occurring in large stands whose value must have been obvious to hunter-gatherers.
Teosinte’s value as food would not have impressed hunter-gatherers: it was less productive in the wild than wild wheat, it produced much less seed than did the corn eventually developed from it, and it enclosed its seeds in inedible hard coverings.
the high percentage of hermaphroditic selfers in the Fertile Crescent flora aided early farmers, because it meant that a high percentage of the wild flora had a reproductive biology convenient for humans.
the cream of nature’s crop:
Furthermore, they are overwhelmingly concentrated in the Fertile Crescent or other parts of western Eurasia’s Mediterranean zone, which offered a huge selection to incipient farmers: about 32 of the world’s 56 prize wild grasses!
Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production.
the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent’s first farmers came to meet humanity’s basic economic needs: carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport.
In the Fertile Crescent the transition from hunting-gathering to food production took place relatively fast: as late as 9000 B.C. people still had no crops and domestic animals and were entirely dependent on wild foods, but by 6000 B.C. some societies were almost completely dependent on crops and domestic animals.
an archaeological site at the edge of the Euphrates Valley in Syria, called Tell Abu Hureyra. Between 10,000 and 9000 B.C. the people living there may already have been residing year-round in villages, but they were still hunter-gatherers;
Archaeological evidence shows that the origins of New Guinea agriculture are ancient, dating to around 7000 B.C. At those early dates all the landmasses surrounding New Guinea were still occupied exclusively by hunter-gatherers, so this ancient agriculture must have developed independently in New Guinea.
Protein starvation is probably also the ultimate reason why cannibalism was widespread in traditional New Guinea highland societies.
in former times New Guinea’s available root crops were limiting for calories as well as for protein, because they do not grow well at the high elevations where many New Guineans live today.
If this was truly the case, then why did humans move to and continue to live in those areas despite the issues with low protein crops, a lack of game, and weather conditions that did not support either a hunter-gatherer or agricultural lifestyle?
Is there a difference in population density between the lowlands and the highlands?
It turns out that the eastern U.S. founder crops were four plants domesticated in the period 2500–1500 B.C., a full 6,000 years after wheat and barley domestication in the Fertile Crescent. A local species of squash provided small containers, as well as yielding edible seeds. The remaining three founders were grown solely for their edible seeds (sunflower, a daisy relative called sumpweed, and a distant relative of spinach called goosefoot).
