The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

In fact, farming of this particular sort (‘low-level food production’ is the more technical term) has characterized a very wide range of Holocene societies, including the earliest cultivators of the Fertile Crescent and Mesoamerica.48 In Mexico, domestic forms of squash and maize existed by 7000 BC.49 Yet these crops only became staple foods around 5,000 years later. Similarly, in the Eastern Woodlands of North America local seed crops were cultivated by 3000 BC, but there was no ‘serious farming’ until around AD 1000.50 China follows a similar pattern. Millet-farming began on a small scale around 8000 BC, on the northern plains, as a seasonal complement to foraging and dog-assisted hunting. It remained so for 3,000 years, until the introduction of cultivated millets into the basin of the Yellow River. Similarly, on the lower and middle reaches of the Yangtze, fully domesticated rice strains only appear fifteen centuries after the first cultivation of wild rice in paddy fields.