When did agriculture begin?
Agrarian society
Agrarian society were preceded by hunter and gatherer and horticultural societies and transition into industrial society. The transition to agriculture, called the Neolithic Revolution, has taken place independently multiple times. Horticulture and agriculture as types of subsistence developed among humans somewhere between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East. The reasons for the development of agriculture are debated but may have included climate change, and the accumulation of food surplus for competitive gift-giving. Most certainly there was a gradual transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural economies after a lengthy period when some crops were deliberately planted and other foods were gathered from the wild. In addition to the emergence of farming in the Fertile Crescent, agriculture appeared in: by at least 6,800 B.C.E. in East Asia (rice) and, later, in Central and South America (maize and squash). Small-scale agriculture also likely arose independently in early Neolithic contexts in India (rice) and Southeast Asia (taro). However, full dependency on domestic crops and animals, when wild resources contributed a nutritionally insignificant component to the diet, did not occur until the Bronze Age.
Agriculture in ancient Rome
In the 5th century BC, farms in Rome were small and family-owned. The Greeks of this period, however, had started using crop rotation and had large estates. Rome's contact with Carthage, Greece, and the Hellenistic East in the 3rd and 2nd centuries improved Rome's agricultural methods. Roman agriculture reached its height in productivity and efficiency during the late Republic and early Empire.
Agriculture in the Middle Ages
The medieval system of agriculture began to break down in the 14th century with the development of more intensive agricultural methods in the Low Countries and after the population losses of the Black Death in 1347-1351 made more land available to a diminished number of farmers. Medieval farming practices, however, continued with little change in the Slavic regions and some other areas until the mid-19th century.
Mechanised agriculture
Since the beginning of agriculture threshing was done by hand with a flail, requiring a great deal of labour. The threshing machine, which was invented in 1794 but not widely used for several more decades, simplified the operation and allowed the use of animal power. Before the invention of the grain cradle (ca. 1790) an able bodied labourer could reap about one quarter acre of wheat in a day using a sickle. It was estimated that for each of Cyrus McCormick's horse-pulled reapers (ca. 1830s) freed up five men for military service in the US Civil War. Later innovations included raking and binding machines. By 1890 two men and two horses could cut, rake and bind 20 acres of wheat per day.
Franchthi Cave
The cave also contains some of the earliest evidence for agriculture in Greece. Around 7,000 BCE the remains of domesticated plants and animals are found among the usual wild plant and animal species hunted and gathered during the Mesolithic, suggesting that either the inhabitants of Franchthi had begun to practice agriculture or were trading for seeds and meat with the Neolithic people who had recently arrived from the Near East. There has been some debate about whether agriculture developed locally in Greece, or was introduced by colonists. It is now generally believed that emigrants from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B cultures of the Near East arrived by boat at the beginning of the seventh millennium BCE to settle Greece(c.6,900 BCE), introducing agriculture. For some time the evidence from Franchthi was used as an example in support of locally developed agriculture, but more detailed study of the remains has demonstrated that the evidence supports the foreign introduction of domesticated plants and animals. The Mesolithic hunter gatherers of Greece rapidly adopted the methods introduced to them by Neolithic colonists, including at Franchthi Cave. During the Neolithic main occupancy of the cave shifted to an area outside the entrance, called the Paralia (the seaside), where terracing walls for growing crops were built. It is believed the inhabitants also occupied a village below the Paralia, which is now submerged beneath the sea. Several anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurines have been recovered at Franchthi from the Neolithic era, and it has been suggested that the site may have served as a workshop for making cockle-shell beads to trade with inland communities during the Early Neolithic. The cave and the Paralia were abandoned around 3,000 BCE.
Vegetable farming
Originally, vegetables were collected from the wild by hunter-gatherers and entered cultivation in several parts of the world, probably during the period 10,000 BC to 7,000 BC, when a new agricultural way of life developed. At first, plants which grew locally would have been cultivated, but as time went on, trade brought exotic crops from elsewhere to add to domestic types. Nowadays, most vegetables are grown all over the world as climate permits.
History of agriculture
Guaitecas Archipelago in Patagonia made up the southern limit of Pre-Hispanic agriculture as noted by the mention of the cultivation of Chiloé potatoes by a Spanish expedition in 1557. The presence of maize in Guaitecas Archipelago is also mentioned by early Spanish explorers, albeit the Spanish may had missidentified the plant.
Agriculture in China
The development of farming over the course of China's history has played a key role in supporting the growth of what is now the largest population in the world. Analysis of stone tools by Professor Liu Li and others has shown that the origins of Chinese agriculture is rooted in the pre-agricultural Paleolithic. During this time, hunter-gatherers harvested wild plants with the same tools that would later be used for millet and rice.
History of agriculture
The Bronze Age, from c. 3300 BC, witnessed the intensification of agriculture in civilizations such as Mesopotamian Sumer, ancient Egypt, the Indus Valley Civilisation of South Asia, ancient China, and ancient Greece. During the Iron Age and era of classical antiquity, the expansion of ancient Rome, both the Republic and then the Empire, throughout the ancient Mediterranean and Western Europe built upon existing systems of agriculture while also establishing the manorial system that became a bedrock of medieval agriculture. In the Middle Ages, both in the Islamic world and in Europe, agriculture was transformed with improved techniques and the diffusion of crop plants, including the introduction of sugar, rice, cotton and fruit trees such as the orange to Europe by way of Al-Andalus. After the voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1492, the Columbian exchange brought New World crops such as maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and manioc to Europe, and Old World crops such as wheat, barley, rice, and turnips, and livestock including horses, cattle, sheep, and goats to the Americas.
Timeline of plant evolution
The Cenozoic is just as much the age of savannas, or the age of co-dependent flowering plants and insects. At 35 Ma, grasses evolved from among the angiosperms.
About ten thousand years ago, humans in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East develop agriculture. Plant domestication begins with cultivation of Neolithic founder crops. This process of food production, coupled later with the domestication of animals caused a massive increase in human population that has continued to the present. In Jericho (modern Israel), there is a settlement with about 19,000 people. At the same time, Sahara is green with rivers, lakes, cattle, crocodiles and monsoons.
At 8 ka, Common (Bread) wheat ("Triticum aestivum") originates in southwest Asia due to hybridisation of emmer wheat with a goat-grass, "Aegilops tauschii".
At 6.5 ka, two rice species are domesticated: Asian rice, "Oryza sativa", and African rice "Oryza glaberrima".
Agroscope
For agriculture, the 18th Century, means the dawn of a new, better era. Young country gentlemen took the management of their estates into their own hands and sought to agriculture, especially livestock raising and promote. The chains of the three-field technique were broken. They began with the stall-feeding, careful storage of manure, and built on the former fields potatoes and clover. The common land was parceled out and divided among the peasants. A new goal came to the fore, namely, to keep enough cattle to supply their own country with enough manure. In the midst of these developments, the French Revolution broke out. The world was open for innovations.
Agriculture
The development of agriculture enabled the human population to grow many times larger than could be sustained by hunting and gathering. Agriculture began independently in different parts of the globe, and included a diverse range of taxa. At least 11 separate regions of the Old and New World were involved as independent centers of origin. Wild grains were collected and eaten from at least 105,000 years ago. From around 11,500 years ago, the eight Neolithic founder crops, emmer and einkorn wheat, hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chick peas and flax were cultivated in the Levant. Rice was domesticated in China between 11,500 and 6,200 BC with earliest known cultivation from 5,700 BC, followed by mung, soy and azuki beans. Sheep were domesticated in Mesopotamia between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago. Cattle were domesticated from the wild aurochs in the areas of modern Turkey and Pakistan some 10,500 years ago. Domestic pigs had multiple centres of origin in Eurasia, including Europe, East Asia and Southwest Asia, where wild boar were first domesticated about 10,500 years ago. In the Andes of South America, the potato was domesticated between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago, along with beans, coca, llamas, alpacas, and guinea pigs. Sugarcane and some root vegetables were domesticated in New Guinea around 9,000 years ago. Sorghum was domesticated in the Sahel region of Africa by 7,000 years ago. Cotton was domesticated in Peru by 5,600 years ago, and was independently domesticated in Eurasia. In Mesoamerica, wild teosinte was domesticated to maize by 6,000 years ago.
Scholars have developed a number of hypotheses to explain the historical origins of agriculture. Studies of the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies indicate an initial period of intensification and increasing sedentism; examples are the Natufian culture in the Levant, and the Early Chinese Neolithic in China. Then, wild stands that had previously been harvested started to be planted, and gradually came to be domesticated.
History of the world
The Neolithic Revolution, beginning around 10,000 BCE, saw the development of agriculture, which fundamentally changed the human lifestyle. Farming developed around 10,000 BCE in the Middle East, around 7000 BCE in what is now China, about 6000 BCE in the Indus Valley and Europe, and about 4000 BCE in the Americas. Cultivation of cereal crops and the domestication of animals occurred around 8500 BCE in the Middle East, where wheat and barley were the first crops and sheep and goats were domesticated. In the Indus Valley, crops were cultivated by 6000 BCE, along with domesticated cattle. The Yellow River valley in China cultivated millet and other cereal crops by about 7000 BCE, but the Yangtze River valley domesticated rice earlier, by at least 8000 BCE. In the Americas, sunflowers were cultivated by about 4000 BCE, and corn and beans were domesticated in Central America by 3500 BCE. Potatoes were first cultivated in the Andes Mountains of South America, where the llama was also domesticated. Metal-working, starting with copper around 6000 BCE, was first used for tools and ornaments. Gold soon followed, with its main use being for ornaments. The need for metal ores stimulated trade, as many of the areas of early human settlement were lacking in ores. Bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, is first known from about 2500 BCE, but did not become widely used until much later.
Though early "cities" appeared at Jericho and Catal Huyuk around 6000 BCE, the first civilizations did not emerge until around 3000 BCE in Egypt and Mesopotamia. These cultures gave birth to the invention of the wheel, mathematics, bronze-working, sailing boats, the pottery wheel, woven cloth, construction of monumental buildings, and writing. Writing developed independently and at different times in five areas of the world: Egypt (c. 3200 BCE), India (c. 3200 BCE), Mesopotamia (c. 3000 BCE), China (c. 1600 BCE), and Mesoamerica (c. 600 BCE).
Early Middle Ages
The Romans had practiced two-field agriculture, with a crop grown in one field and the other left fallow and ploughed under to eliminate weeds. Systematic agriculture largely disappeared and yields declined. It is estimated that the Plague of Justinian which began in 541 and recurred periodically for 150 years thereafter killed as many as 100 million people across the world. Some historians such as Josiah C. Russell (1958) have suggested a total European population loss of 50 to 60 per cent between 541 and 700. After the year 750, major epidemic diseases did not appear again in Europe until the Black Death of the 14th century. The disease Smallpox, which was eradicated in the late 20th century, did not definitively enter Western Europe until about 581 when Bishop Gregory of Tours provided an eyewitness account that describes the characteristic findings of smallpox. Waves of epidemics wiped out large rural populations. Most of the details about the epidemics are lost, probably due to the scarcity of surviving written records.
Agriculture in the Middle Ages
Agriculture in the Middle Ages describes the farming practices, crops, technology, and agricultural society and economy of Europe from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE to approximately 1500 CE. The Middle Ages are sometimes called the Medieval Age or Period. The Middle Ages are also divided into the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages. The early modern period followed the Middle Ages.
Farmer
Farming has been dated back as far as the Neolithic era. By the Bronze Age, the Sumerians had an agriculture specialized labor force by 5000–4000 BCE, and heavily depended on irrigation to grow crops. They relied on three-person teams when harvesting in the spring. The Ancient Egypt farmers farmed and relied and irrigated their water from the Nile.
History of South America
The first evidence for the existence of agricultural practices in South America dates back to circa 6500 BCE, when potatoes, chilies and beans began to be cultivated for food in the Amazon Basin. Pottery evidence suggests that manioc, which remains a staple foodstuff today, was being cultivated as early as 2000 BCE.
History of organic farming
Consciously organic agriculture (as opposed to traditional agricultural methods from before the inorganic options existed, which always employed only organic means) began more or less simultaneously in Central Europe and India. The British botanist Sir Albert Howard is often referred to as the father of modern organic agriculture, because he was the first to apply modern scientific knowledge and methods to traditional agriculture. From 1905 to 1924, he and his wife Gabrielle, herself a plant physiologist, worked as agricultural advisers in Pusa, Bengal, where they documented traditional Indian farming practices and came to regard them as superior to their conventional agriculture science. Their research and further development of these methods is recorded in his writings, notably, his 1940 book, "An Agricultural Testament", which influenced many scientists and farmers of the day.
Agriculture
Agriculture is the science and art of cultivation on soil and the rearing of livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people to live in cities. The study of agriculture is known as agricultural science. The history of agriculture dates back thousands of years; people gathered wild grains at least 105,000 years ago and began to plant them around 11,500 years ago before they became domesticated. Pigs, sheep, and cattle were domesticated over 10,000 years ago. Crops originate from at least 11 regions of the world. Industrial agriculture based on large-scale monoculture has in the past century come to dominate agricultural output, though about 2 billion people worldwide still depend on subsistence agriculture.
Neolithic
Domestication of sheep and goats reached Egypt from the Near East possibly as early as 6000 BC. Graeme Barker states "The first indisputable evidence for domestic plants and animals in the Nile valley is not until the early fifth millennium BC in northern Egypt and a thousand years later further south, in both cases as part of strategies that still relied heavily on fishing, hunting, and the gathering of wild plants" and suggests that these subsistence changes were not due to farmers migrating from the Near East but was an indigenous development, with cereals either indigenous or obtained through exchange. Other scholars argue that the primary stimulus for agriculture and domesticated animals (as well as mud-brick architecture and other Neolithic cultural features) in Egypt was from the Middle East.
History of agriculture
The history of agriculture records the domestication of plants and animals and the development and dissemination of techniques for raising them productively. Agriculture began independently in different parts of the globe, and included a diverse range of taxa. At least eleven separate regions of the Old and New World were involved as independent centers of origin.
Uruk period
In the agricultural sphere, several important innovations were made between the end of the Ubayd period and the Uruk period, which have been referred to in total as the 'Second Agricultural Revolution' (the first being the Neolithic Revolution). A first group of developments took place in the field of cereal cultivation, followed by the invention of the ard—a wooden plough pulled by an animal (ass or ox)—towards the end of the 4th millennium BC, which enabled the production of long furrows in the earth. This made the agricultural work in the sowing season much simpler than previously, when this work had to be done by hand with tools like the hoe. The harvest was made easier after the Ubayd period by the widespread adoption of terracotta sickles. Irrigation techniques also seem to have improved in the Uruk period. These different inventions allowed the progressive development of a new agricultural landscape, characteristic of ancient Lower Mesopotamia. It consisted of long rectangular fields suited for being worked in furrows, each bordered by a little irrigation channel. According to M. Liverani, these replaced the earlier basins irrigated laboriously by hand. After the end of the 5th millennium, tree crops were also developed in the whole Middle East; in Lower Mesopotamia, the date palm began to be cultivated and gardens and orchards containing them became a characteristic element of Mesopotamian architecture. This system which progressively developed over two thousand years enabled higher yields, leaving more surplus than previously for workers, whose rations mainly consisted of barley. The human, material, and technical resources were now available for agriculture based on paid labour, although family-based farming remained the base unit. All of this undoubtedly led to population increase and thus urbanisation and the development of state structures.
History of agriculture
Jujube was domesticated in the Indian subcontinent by 9000 BC. Barley and wheat cultivation – along with the domestication of cattle, primarily sheep and goats – followed in Mehrgarh culture by 8000–6000 BC. This period also saw the first domestication of the elephant. Pastoral farming in India included threshing, planting crops in rows – either of two or of six – and storing grain in granaries. Cotton was cultivated by the 5th–4th millennium BC. By the 5th millennium BC, agricultural communities became widespread in Kashmir. Irrigation was developed in the Indus Valley Civilization by around 4500 BC. The size and prosperity of the Indus civilization grew as a result of this innovation, leading to more thoroughly planned settlements which used drainage and sewers. Archeological evidence of an animal-drawn plough dates back to 2500 BC in the Indus Valley Civilization.
History of agriculture
The civilization of Ancient Egypt was indebted to the Nile River and its dependable seasonal flooding. The river's predictability and the fertile soil allowed the Egyptians to build an empire on the basis of great agricultural wealth. Egyptians were among the first peoples to practice agriculture on a large scale, starting in the pre-dynastic period from the end of the Paleolithic into the Neolithic, between around 10,000 BC and 4000 BC. This was made possible with the development of basin irrigation. Their staple food crops were grains such as wheat and barley, alongside industrial crops such as flax and papyrus.
Agriculture in ancient Greece
In the nearly four centuries that passed between Hesiod and Xenophon, no improvements can be found in agriculture. Tools remained mediocre and there were no inventions to lighten the work of either man or animal. It was not until the rise of Romans that the water mill came into wide use, employing hydraulic power to augment muscle power. It took until the Middle Ages for true plows which turned the earth to be widely adopted. Neither irrigation, nor soil improvements, nor animal husbandry saw notable advances. Only the very richest of land, such as that of Messinia was capable of supporting two crops per year.
Sedentism
The Jōmon culture in Japan, which was primarily a coastal culture, was sedentary from c. 12000 to 10000 BC, before the cultivation of rice at some sites in northern Kyushu. In northernmost Scandinavia, there are several early sedentary sites without evidence of agriculture or cattle breeding. They appeared from c. 5300-4500 BC and are all located optimally in the landscape for extraction of major ecosystem resources, e.g. the Lillberget Stone Age village site (c. 3900 BC), the Nyelv site (c. 5300 BC), and the Lake Inari site (c. 4500 BC). In northern Sweden the earliest indication of agriculture occurs at previously sedentary sites, and one example is the Bjurselet site used during the period c. 2700-1700 BC, famous for its large caches of long distance traded flint axes from Denmark and Scania (some 1300 km). The evidence of small-scale agriculture at that site can be seen from c. 2300 BC (burnt cereals of barley).
Three Sisters (agriculture)
Corn, squash and beans were planted ca. 800 AD in the largest Native American city north of the Rio Grande known as Cahokia, in what is now known as the US state of Illinois, across the river from St Louis, Missouri. The Three Sisters crops were responsible for the surplus food that created an expanded population throughout the extended Mississippi River valley and tributaries, creating the Mississippian and Mvskoke cultures that flourished from ca. 800 ce to ca. 1600 when physical contact with spanish explorers brought european disease, death and cultural collapse.
Carl Henrik Langebaek
Carl Henrik Langebaek has stated that agriculture and the hunter-gatherer society are not mutually exclusive and while the access to agriculture is there, the society can continue living off hunter-gathering techniques. The potato and maize are not originally from Colombia, yet from Peru and Mexico respectively and were cultivated on the Altiplano Cundiboyacense during the Herrera Period, around 3000 BP (1000 BCE).
Natufian culture
According to one theory, it was a sudden change in climate, the Younger Dryas event (c. 10,800 to 9500 BC), that inspired the development of agriculture. The Younger Dryas was a 1,000-year-long interruption in the higher temperatures prevailing since the Last Glacial Maximum, which produced a sudden drought in the Levant. This would have endangered the wild cereals, which could no longer compete with dryland scrub, but upon which the population had become dependent to sustain a relatively large sedentary population. By artificially clearing scrub and planting seeds obtained from elsewhere, they began to practice agriculture. However, this theory of the origin of agriculture is controversial in the scientific community.
Tell Aswad
Understanding of the role of Tell Aswad in the beginnings of farming has been complicated by changes in dating. Originally it was thought to be an example of one of the oldest sites of agriculture with domesticated emmer wheat dated by Willem van Zeist and his assistant Johanna Bakker-Heeres to the PPNA at 7600-7300 uncal BC (about 9000 cal BC). The claim is based on the discovery of enlarged grains, absences of wild grains and on the presumption that the site was beyond the usual habitat of the wild variety of emmer wheat. Flax seeds were present, and fruit, figs and pistachios, were found in large quantities. Stationary containers of mud and stone were found with carbonized grain found on the interior of one designating them as silos. Finally, reeds were widely used, especially as reinforcement in the architecture, but also for mats and baskets and perhaps as bedding or fodder. Despite the (apparently) early date of domesticated plants, Jacques Cauvin considered that Aswad was not the center for the origin of agriculture, stating that its first inhabitants "arrived, perhaps from the neighboring Anti-Lebanon, already equipped with the seeds for planting, for their practice of agriculture from the inception of the settlement is not in doubt. Thus it was not in the oasis itself that they carried out their first experiments in farming."
Herrera Period
Agriculture started around 5000 years before present which led to the development of more complex societies, of which the Herrera Period is one of many in the Andean civilizations. Early evidence of inhabitation has been found in Zipacón and is dated at 3270 BCE. From the Herrera Period ceramic has been found. The oldest ceramic evidence found dates to 2500 BP (500 BCE), except for one piece found near Tocarema and dated at 2750 BP.
Vegetable
Before the advent of agriculture, humans were hunter-gatherers. They foraged for edible fruit, nuts, stems, leaves, corms, and tubers, scavenged for dead animals and hunted living ones for food. Forest gardening in a tropical jungle clearing is thought to be the first example of agriculture; useful plant species were identified and encouraged to grow while undesirable species were removed. Plant breeding through the selection of strains with desirable traits such as large fruit and vigorous growth soon followed. While the first evidence for the domestication of grasses such as wheat and barley has been found in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, it is likely that various peoples around the world started growing crops in the period 10,000 BC to 7,000 BC. Subsistence agriculture continues to this day, with many rural farmers in Africa, Asia, South America, and elsewhere using their plots of land to produce enough food for their families, while any surplus produce is used for exchange for other goods.
Agriculture
In Eurasia, the Sumerians started to live in villages from about 8,000 BC, relying on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and a canal system for irrigation. Ploughs appear in pictographs around 3,000 BC; seed-ploughs around 2,300 BC. Farmers grew wheat, barley, vegetables such as lentils and onions, and fruits including dates, grapes, and figs. Ancient Egyptian agriculture relied on the Nile River and its seasonal flooding. Farming started in the predynastic period at the end of the Paleolithic, after 10,000 BC. Staple food crops were grains such as wheat and barley, alongside industrial crops such as flax and papyrus. In India, wheat, barley, and jujube were domesticated by 9,000 BC, soon followed by sheep and goats. Cattle, sheep and goats were domesticated in Mehrgarh culture by 8,000–6,000 BC. Cotton was cultivated by the 5th-4th millennium BC. There is archeological evidence of an animal-drawn plough from 2,500 BC in the Indus Valley Civilization.
In China, from the 5th century BC there was a nationwide granary system and widespread silk farming. Water-powered grain mills were in use by the 1st century BC, followed by irrigation. By the late 2nd century, heavy ploughs had been developed with iron ploughshares and mouldboards. These slowly spread westwards across Eurasia. Asian rice was domesticated 8,200–13,500 years ago – depending on the molecular clock estimate that is used – on the Pearl River in southern China with a single genetic origin from the wild rice "Oryza rufipogon". In ancient Greece and Rome, the major cereals were wheat, emmer, and barley, alongside vegetables including peas, beans, and olives. Sheep and goats were kept mainly for dairy products.
History of botany
It is also from the Neolithic, in about 3000 BC, that we glimpse the first known illustrations of plants and read descriptions of impressive gardens in Egypt. However protobotany, the first pre-scientific written record of plants, did not begin with food; it was born out of the medicinal literature of Egypt, China, Mesopotamia and India. Botanical historian Alan Morton notes that agriculture was the occupation of the poor and uneducated, while medicine was the realm of socially influential shamans, priests, apothecaries, magicians and physicians, who were more likely to record their knowledge for posterity.
History of agriculture in the Indian subcontinent
Wild rice cultivation appeared in the Belan and Ganges valley regions of northern India as early as 4530 BCE and 5440 BCE respectively. Rice was cultivated in the Indus Valley Civilisation. Agricultural activity during the second millennium BC included rice cultivation in the Kashmir and Harrappan regions. Mixed farming was the basis of the Indus valley economy. Denis J. Murphy (2007) details the spread of cultivated rice from India into South-east Asia:
List of food origins
Austronesia is the broad region covering the islands of both the Indian and the Pacific oceans settled by Austronesian peoples originating from Taiwan and southern China, starting at around 3,500 to 2,000 BCE. These regions include Island Southeast Asia, Near Oceania (Melanesia), Remote Oceania (Micronesia and Polynesia), Madagascar, and the Comoros Islands. Contact and cultural exchange with early Papuan agriculture in New Guinea also led to homogenization of the agriculture of the two ethnolinguistic groups. The plants originating from Austronesia and New Guinea include:
The first instances of domestication of plants for agricultural purposes in Africa occurred in the Sahel region circa 5000 BCE, when sorghum and African Rice ("Oryza glaberrima") began to be cultivated. Around this time, and in the same region, Fonio and the small guineafowl were domesticated.
Agriculture in the prehistoric Southwest
Southwestern farmers probably began experimenting with agriculture by facilitating the growth of wild grains such as Amaranth and chenopods and gourds for edible seeds and containers. The earliest maize known to have been grown in the Southwest was a popcorn variety with a cob only about one or two inches long. It was not a very productive crop. More productive varieties were developed by Southwestern farmers or introduced from Mesoamerica. Beans and squash were also introduced from Mesoamerica, although the drought-resistant Tepary bean was native. Cotton, presumably cultivated, is found at archaeological sites dating about 1200 BC in the Tucson basin and evidence of tobacco use, and possibly cultivation, occurs at about the same time. Agave, especially Agave murpheyi, was a major food source of the Hohokam and was grown on dry hillsides where other crops would not grow. The early farmers also consumed and possibly facilitated the growth of cactus fruit, mesquite bean, and species of wild grasses for their edible seeds.
Neolithic Revolution
Finds of large quantities of seeds and a grinding stone at the paleolithic site of Ohalo II in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee, dated to around 19,400 BP, has shown some of the earliest evidence for advanced planning of plants for food consumption and suggests that humans at Ohalo II processed the grain before consumption. Tell Aswad is the oldest site of agriculture, with domesticated emmer wheat dated to 10,800 BP. Soon after came hulled, two-row barley - found domesticated earliest at Jericho in the Jordan valley and at Iraq ed-Dubb in Jordan. Other sites in the Levantine corridor that show early evidence of agriculture include Wadi Faynan 16 and Netiv Hagdud. Jacques Cauvin noted that the settlers of Aswad did not domesticate on site, but ""arrived, perhaps from the neighbouring Anti-Lebanon, already equipped with the seed for planting"". In the Eastern Fertile Crescent, evidence of cultivation of wild plants has been found in Choga Gholan in Iran dated to 12,000 BP, suggesting there were multiple regions in the Fertile Crescent where domestication evolved roughly contemporaneously. The Heavy Neolithic Qaraoun culture has been identified at around fifty sites in Lebanon around the source springs of the River Jordan, but never reliably dated.
Neolithic British Isles
Early signs of these hunter-gatherers beginning to harvest, manipulate and grow various food plants have been identified in the Mesolithic Natufian culture of the Levant, showing signs that would later lead to the actual domestication and farming of crops. Archaeologists believe that the Levantine peoples subsequently developed agriculture between 8000 and 7000 BCE in response to a rise in their population levels which could not be fed by the finite food resources that hunting and gathering could provide. The idea of agriculture subsequently spread from the Levant into Europe, being adopted by hunter-gathering societies in what is now Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, and across the Mediterranean, eventually reaching north-western Europe and the British Isles.
East Africa
The southern part of East Africa was occupied until recent times by Khoisan hunter-gatherers, whereas in the Ethiopian Highlands the donkey and such crop plants as teff allowed the beginning of agriculture around 7,000 B.C. Lowland barriers and diseases carried by the tsetse fly, however, prevented the donkey and agriculture from spreading southwards. Only in quite recent times has agriculture spread to the more humid regions south of the equator, through the spread of cattle, sheep and crops such as millet. Language distributions suggest that this most likely occurred from Sudan into the African Great Lakes region, since the Nilotic languages spoken by these pre-Bantu farmers have their closest relatives in the middle Nile basin.
Common fig
The edible fig is one of the first plants that was cultivated by humans. Nine subfossil figs of a parthenocarpic (and therefore sterile) type dating to about 9400–9200 BC were found in the early Neolithic village Gilgal I (in the Jordan Valley, 13 km north of Jericho). The find precedes the domestication of wheat, barley, and legumes, and may thus be the first known instance of agriculture. It is proposed that this sterile but desirable type was planted and cultivated intentionally, one thousand years before the next crops were domesticated (wheat and rye).
Indigenous peoples in Ecuador
The first evidence of agriculture dates anywhere from the Preboreal Holocene (10,000 years ago) to the Atlantic Holocene (6,000 years ago).
Prehistory
The Mesolithic period began at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, some 10,000 BP, and ended with the introduction of agriculture, the date of which varied by geographic region. In some areas, such as the Near East, agriculture was already underway by the end of the Pleistocene, and there the Mesolithic is short and poorly defined. In areas with limited glacial impact, the term "Epipalaeolithic" is sometimes preferred.
Domestication
Cereal crops were first domesticated around 9000 BCE in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. The first domesticated crops were generally annuals with large seeds or fruits. These included pulses such as peas and grains such as wheat. The Middle East was especially suited to these species; the dry-summer climate was conducive to the evolution of large-seeded annual plants, and the variety of elevations led to a great variety of species. As domestication took place humans began to move from a hunter-gatherer society to a settled agricultural society. This change would eventually lead, some 4000 to 5000 years later, to the first city states and eventually the rise of civilization itself.
Rice
Rice was cultivated in South Asia from as early as 5,000 BC. "Several wild cereals, including rice, grew in the Vindhyan Hills, and rice cultivation, at sites such as Chopani-Mando and Mahagara, may have been underway as early as 7,000 BP. Rice appeared in the Belan and Ganges valley regions of northern India as early as 4530 BC and 5440 BC, respectively, The early domestication process of rice in ancient South Asia was based around the wild species "Oryza nivara". This led to the local development of a mix of 'wetland' and 'dryland' agriculture of local "Oryza sativa" var. "indica" rice agriculture, before the truly 'wetland' rice "Oryza sativa" var. "japonica", arrived around 2000 BC.
History of agriculture
Records from the Warring States, Qin Dynasty, and Han Dynasty provide a picture of early Chinese agriculture from the 5th century to 2nd century which included a nationwide granary system and widespread use of sericulture. An important early Chinese book on agriculture is the Qimin Yaoshu of 535, written by Jia Sixie. Jia's writing style was straightforward and lucid relative to the elaborate and allusive writing typical of the time. Jia's book was also very long, with over one hundred thousand written Chinese characters, and it quoted many other Chinese books that were written previously, but no longer survive. The contents of Jia's 6th century book include sections on land preparation, seeding, cultivation, orchard management, forestry, and animal husbandry. The book also includes peripherally related content covering trade and culinary uses for crops. The work and the style in which it was written proved influential on later Chinese agronomists, such as Wang Zhen and his groundbreaking "Nong Shu" of 1313.
History of agriculture
After its introduction from South America to Spain in the late 1500s, the potato became a staple crop throughout Europe by the late 1700s. The potato allowed farmers to produce more food, and initially added variety to the European diet. The increased supply of food reduced disease, increased births and reduced mortality, causing a population boom throughout the British Empire, the US and Europe. The introduction of the potato also brought about the first intensive use of fertilizer, in the form of guano imported to Europe from Peru, and the first artificial pesticide, in the form of an arsenic compound used to fight Colorado potato beetles. Before the adoption of the potato as a major crop, the dependence on grain had caused repetitive regional and national famines when the crops failed, including 17 major famines in England between 1523 and 1623. The resulting dependence on the potato however caused the European Potato Failure, a disastrous crop failure from disease that resulted in widespread famine and the death of over one million people in Ireland alone.
Tell Abu Hureyra
It is from the early part of the Younger Dryas that the first indirect evidence of agriculture was detected in the excavations at Abu Hureyra, although the cereals themselves were still of the wild variety. It was during the intentional sowing of cereals in more favourable refuges like Mureybet that these first farmers developed domesticated strains during the centuries of drought and cold of the Younger Dryas. When the climate abated about 9500 BCE they spread all over the Middle East with this new bio-technology, and Abu Hureyra grew to a large village eventually with several thousand people. The second occupation grew domesticated varieties of rye, wheat and barley, and kept sheep as livestock. The hunting of gazelle decreased sharply, probably due to overexploitation that eventually left them extinct in the Middle East. At Abu Hureyra they were replaced by meat from domesticated animals. The second occupation lasted for about 2,000 years.
Horticulture
The major areas of Horticulture include:Horticulture has a very long history. The study and science of horticulture dates all the way back to the times of Cyrus the Great of ancient Persia, and has been going on ever since, with present-day horticulturists such as Freeman S. Howlett and Luther Burbank. The practice of horticulture can be retraced for many thousands of years. The cultivation of taro and yam in Papua New Guinea dates back to at least 6950–6440 cal BP. The origins of horticulture lie in the transition of human communities from nomadic hunter-gatherers to sedentary or semi-sedentary horticultural communities, cultivating a variety of crops on a small scale around their dwellings or in specialized plots visited occasionally during migrations from one area to the next (such as the "milpa" or maize field of Mesoamerican cultures). In the Pre-Columbian Amazon Rainforest, natives are believed to have used biochar to enhance soil productivity by smoldering plant waste. European settlers called it "Terra Preta de Indio". In forest areas such horticulture is often carried out in swiddens ("slash and burn" areas). A characteristic of horticultural communities is that useful trees are often to be found planted around communities or specially retained from the natural ecosystem.
Biodynamic Farming &amp; Gardening Association
Biodynamic agriculture was inaugurated in 1924 by Austrian scientist Rudolf Steiner. It is the oldest, non-chemical agricultural movement and pre-dates organic agriculture by some twenty years. The Association was formed in 1938 in New York state with the support of Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, a disciple of Rudolf Steiner, when he immigrated to the U.S. It is organized as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
Agriculture in the Southwestern United States
Around 500 CE, the Pueblos began growing beans and domesticated the turkey and duck. It was around this time that agriculture became as important a part of survival as hunting and fishing, because they had a slightly more diverse agricultural diet. Once agriculture became more prevalent and useful, the Pueblos began to group together in larger numbers, forming groups of many connected houses, with basements full of stored food.
Agriculture in India
Vedic literature provides some of the earliest written record of agriculture in India. Rigveda hymns, for example, describes plowing, fallowing, irrigation, fruit and vegetable cultivation. Other historical evidence suggests rice and cotton were cultivated in the Indus Valley, and plowing patterns from the Bronze Age have been excavated at Kalibangan in Rajasthan. Bhumivargaha, an Indian Sanskrit text, suggested to be 2500 years old, classifies agricultural land into 12 categories: urvara (fertile), ushara (barren), maru (desert), aprahata (fallow), shadvala (grassy), pankikala (muddy), jalaprayah (watery), kachchaha (contiguous to water), sharkara (full of pebbles and pieces of limestone), sharkaravati (sandy), nadimatruka (watered from a river), and devamatruka (rainfed). Some archaeologists believe that rice was a domesticated crop along the banks of the river Ganges in the sixth millennium BC. So were species of winter cereals (barley, oats, and wheat) and legumes (lentil and chickpea) grown in northwest India before the sixth millennium BC. Other crops cultivated in India 3000 to 6000 years ago, include sesame, linseed, safflower, mustards, castor, mung bean, black gram, horse gram, pigeon pea, field pea, grass pea (khesari), fenugreek, cotton, jujube, grapes, dates, jackfruit, mango, mulberry, and black plum. Indians might have domesticated buffalo (the river type) 5000 years ago .
Biodynamic agriculture
Biodynamic agriculture is a form of alternative agriculture very similar to organic farming, but it includes various esoteric concepts drawn from the ideas of Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). Initially developed in 1924, it was the first of the organic agriculture movements. It treats soil fertility, plant growth, and livestock care as ecologically interrelated tasks, emphasizing spiritual and mystical perspectives.
Agricultural astrology
Agricultural astrology is one of the oldest forms of astrology. It was probably the first use humans made of lunar cycles. Evidence of its practice dates back thousands of years to the ancient peoples of the Nile and Euphrates River valleys. Farmers of these civilizations planted by the Moon's phase and its sign in the zodiac. There is a lack of scientific evidence proving the beneficial effects of astrological gardening. A few studies have been conducted, but "none of this has been conclusively proven or disproved by modern science".
History of the Netherlands
Agriculture arrived in the Netherlands somewhere around 5000 BC with the Linear Pottery culture, who were probably central European farmers. Agriculture was practised only on the loess plateau in the very south (southern Limburg), but even there it was not established permanently. Farms did not develop in the rest of the Netherlands.
History of West Africa
In the fifth millennium, as the ancestors of modern West Africans began entering the area, the development of sedentary farming began to take place in West Africa, with evidences of domesticated cattle having been found for this period, along with limited cereal crops. Around 3000 BCE, a major change began to take place in West, with the invention of harpoons and fish-hooks.
Outline of agriculture
History of agriculture – developed at least 10,000 years ago, although some forms of agriculture such as forest gardening and fire-stick farming date back even earlier to prehistoric times.
Hunter-gatherer
Starting at the transition between the Middle to Upper Paleolithic period, some 80,000 to 70,000 years ago, some hunter-gatherers bands began to specialize, concentrating on hunting a smaller selection of (often larger) game and gathering a smaller selection of food. This specialization of work also involved creating specialized tools such as fishing nets, hooks, and bone harpoons. The transition into the subsequent Neolithic period is chiefly defined by the unprecedented development of nascent agricultural practices. Agriculture originated as early as 12,000 years ago in the Middle East, and also independently originated in many other areas including Southeast Asia, parts of Africa, Mesoamerica, and the Andes.
Agriculture in the Southwestern United States
Native Americans have been in the Southwest United States for at least 12,000 years. Although the agricultural practices of ancient Native Americans is largely unknown in the area, it is known that agriculture was widespread by the arrival of the Pueblos by 100 BC at the latest. The Pueblos relied heavily on hunting and fishing for sustenance at first, only growing pumpkins and corn. They stored their food in pits, and lived in either caves or huts made out of wooden poles and clay.
Early anthropocene
The Neolithic revolution or agricultural revolution was a wide-scale demographic transition in the Neolithic. Historically verifiable, many human cultures changed from hunter-gatherers to agriculture and settlement that supported an increase in population.
Archaeological data indicates that various forms of plants and animal domestication evolved in separate locations worldwide, starting in the geological epoch of the Holocene around 12,000 C years ago (12,000–7,000 BP).
Shifting cultivation
The record of humanly induced changes in environments is longer in New Guinea than in most places. Agricultural activities probably began 5,000 to 9,000 years ago. However, the most spectacular changes, in both societies and environments, are believed to have occurred in the central highlands of the island within the last 1,000 years, in association with the introduction of a crop new to New Guinea, the sweet potato (Golson 1982a; 1982b). One of the most striking signals of the relatively recent intensification of agriculture is the sudden increase in sedimentation rates in small lakes.
History of organic farming
Traditional farming (of many particular kinds in different eras and places) was the original type of agriculture, and has been practiced for thousands of years. All traditional farming is now considered to be "organic farming" although at the time there were no known inorganic methods. For example, forest gardening, a fully organic food production system which dates from prehistoric times, is thought to be the world's oldest and most resilient agroecosystem. After the industrial revolution had introduced inorganic methods, most of which were not well developed and had serious side effects. An organic movement began in the 1940s as a reaction to agriculture's growing reliance on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. The history of this modern revival of organic farming dates back to the first half of the 20th century at a time when there was a growing reliance on these new synthetic, non-organic methods.
Incan agriculture
Incan Agriculture was the culmination of thousands of years of farming and herding in the high-elevation Andes mountains of South America, the coastal deserts, and the rainforests of the Amazon basin. These three radically different environments were all part of the Inca Empire (1438-1533 CE) and required different technologies for agriculture. Inca agriculture was also characterized by the variety of crops grown, the lack of a market system and money, and the unique mechanisms by which the Incas organized their society. Andean civilization was "pristine"—one of five civilizations worldwide which were indigenous and not derivative from other civilizations. Most Andean crops and domestic animals were likewise pristine—not known to other civilizations. Potatoes and quinoa were among the unique crops; Camelids (llamas and alpacas) and guinea pigs were the unique domesticated animals.
Ancient history
The 10th millennium BC is the earliest given date for the invention of agriculture and the beginning of the ancient era. Göbekli Tepe was erected by hunter-gatherers in the 10th millennium BC (c. 11,500 years ago), before the advent of sedentism. Together with Nevalı Çori, it has revolutionized understanding of the Eurasian Neolithic. In the 7th millennium BC, Jiahu culture began in China. By the 5th millennium BC, the late Neolithic civilizations saw the invention of the wheel and the spread of proto-writing. In the 4th millennium BC, the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture in the Ukraine-Moldova-Romania region develops. By 3400 BC, "proto-literate" cuneiform is spread in the Middle East. The 30th century BC, referred to as the Early Bronze Age II, saw the beginning of the literate period in Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. Around the 27th century BC, the Old Kingdom of Egypt and the First Dynasty of Uruk are founded, according to the earliest reliable regnal eras.
History of agriculture
Scholars have developed a number of hypotheses to explain the historical origins of agriculture. Studies of the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies indicate an antecedent period of intensification and increasing sedentism; examples are the Natufian culture in the Levant, and the Early Chinese Neolithic in China. Current models indicate that wild stands that had been harvested previously started to be planted, but were not immediately domesticated.
Agriculture
In the Middle Ages, both in the Islamic world and in Europe, agriculture was transformed with improved techniques and the diffusion of crop plants, including the introduction of sugar, rice, cotton and fruit trees such as the orange to Europe by way of Al-Andalus. After 1492, the Columbian exchange brought New World crops such as maize, potatoes, tomatoes, sweet potatoes and manioc to Europe, and Old World crops such as wheat, barley, rice and turnips, and livestock including horses, cattle, sheep and goats to the Americas.
Irrigation, crop rotation, and fertilizers were greatly developed in the past 200 years, starting with the British Agricultural Revolution, allowing global population to rise significantly. Since 1900, agriculture in the developed nations, and to a lesser extent in the developing world, has seen large rises in productivity as human labor has been replaced by mechanization, and assisted by synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and selective breeding. The Haber-Bosch method allowed the synthesis of ammonium nitrate fertilizer on an industrial scale, greatly increasing crop yields and sustaining a further increase in global population. Modern agriculture has raised political issues including water pollution, biofuels, genetically modified organisms, tariffs and farm subsidies, leading to alternative approaches such as the organic movement.
Upper Mesopotamia
Al-Jazirah is extremely important archeologically. This is the area where the earliest signs of agriculture and domestication of animals have been found, and thus the starting point leading to civilization and the modern world. Al-Jazirah includes the mountain Karaca Dağ in southern Turkey, where the closest relative to modern wheat still grows wild. At several sites (e.g. Hallan Çemi, Abu Hureyra, Mureybet) we can see a continuous occupation from a hunter-gathering lifestyle (based on hunting, and gathering and grinding of wild grains) to an economy based mainly on growing (still wild varieties of) wheat, barley and legumes from around 9000 BC (see PPNA). Domestication of goats and sheep followed within a few generations, but didn't become widespread for more than a millennium (see PPNB). Weaving and pottery followed about two thousand years later.
Neolithic
In southeast Europe agrarian societies first appeared in the 7th millennium BC, attested by one of the earliest farming sites of Europe, discovered in Vashtëmi, southeastern Albania and dating back to 6500 BC. In Northwest Europe it is much later, typically lasting just under 3,000 years from c. 4500 BC–1700 BC.
Animal husbandry
Husbandry has a long history, starting with the Neolithic revolution when animals were first domesticated, from around 13,000 BC onwards, antedating farming of the first crops. By the time of early civilisations such as ancient Egypt, cattle, sheep, goats and pigs were being raised on farms.
Cradle of civilization
The earliest evidence of agriculture in the Andean region dates to around 4700 BC at Huaca Prieta and Paredones. The oldest evidence of canal irrigation in South America dates to 4700 to 2500 BC in the Zaña Valley of northern Peru. The earliest urban settlements of the Andes, as well as North and South America, are dated to 3500 BC at Huaricanga, in the Fortaleza area, and Sechin Bajo near the Sechin River.
Eastern Agricultural Complex
The region of this early agriculture is in the middle Mississippi valley, from Memphis north to St. Louis and extending about 300 miles east and west of the river, mostly in Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The oldest archaeological site known in the United States in which Native Americans were growing, rather than gathering, food is Phillips Spring in Missouri. At Phillips Spring, dating from 3,000 BCE, archaeologists found abundant walnuts, hickory nuts, acorns, grapes, elderberries, ragweed, bottle gourd, and the seeds of "Cucurbita pepo", a gourd with edible seeds that is the ancestor of pumpkins and most squashes. The seeds found at Phillips Spring were larger than those of wild "C. pepo". The agency for this change was surely human manipulation. Humans were selecting, planting, and tending seeds from plants that produced larger and tastier seeds. Ultimately, they would manipulate "C. pepo" to produce edible flesh.
History of Africa
In the steppes and savannahs of the Sahara and Sahel in Northern West Africa, the Nilo-Saharan speakers and Mandé peoples started to collect and domesticate wild millet, African rice and sorghum between 8000 and 6000 BC. Later, gourds, watermelons, castor beans, and cotton were also collected and domesticated. The people started capturing wild cattle and holding them in circular thorn hedges, resulting in domestication. They also started making pottery and built stone settlements (see Tichitt and Oualata). Fishing, using bone-tipped harpoons, became a major activity in the numerous streams and lakes formed from the increased rains. Mande peoples have been credited with the independent development of agriculture about 3000–4000 BC.
Agriculture in India
According to some scientists agriculture was widespread in the Indian peninsula, 10000–3000 years ago, well beyond the fertile plains of the north. For example, one study reports 12 sites in the southern Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka providing clear evidence of agriculture of pulses (Vigna radiata and Macrotyloma uniflorum), millet-grasses (Brachiaria ramosa and Setaria verticillata), wheats (Triticum dicoccum, Triticum durum/aestivum), barley (Hordeum vulgare), hyacinth bean (Lablab purpureus), pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum), finger millet (Eleusine coracana), cotton (Gossypium sp.), linseed (Linum sp.), as well as gathered fruits of Ziziphus and two Cucurbitaceae.
Genetic studies on Moroccans
The change from hunting and gathering to agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution was a watershed in world history. The societies that first made the change to agriculture are believed to have lived in North Africa and Middle East around 10,000 BCE. Agriculture was introduced into Europe by migrating farmers from the Middle East. According to the demic diffusion model, these Middle Eastern farmers either replaced or interbred with the local hunter-gather populations that had been living in Europe since the "out of Africa" migration.
Milk
Humans first learned to consume the milk of other mammals regularly following the domestication of animals during the Neolithic Revolution or the development of agriculture. This development occurred independently in several global locations from as early as 9000–7000 BC in Mesopotamia to 3500–3000 BC in the Americas. People first domesticated the most important dairy animals – cattle, sheep and goats – in Southwest Asia, although domestic cattle had been independently derived from wild aurochs populations several times since. Initially animals were kept for meat, and archaeologist Andrew Sherratt has suggested that dairying, along with the exploitation of domestic animals for hair and labor, began much later in a separate secondary products revolution in the fourth millennium BC. Sherratt's model is not supported by recent findings, based on the analysis of lipid residue in prehistoric pottery, that shows that dairying was practiced in the early phases of agriculture in Southwest Asia, by at least the seventh millennium BC.
History of agriculture
In the Sahel region of Africa, local rice and sorghum were domesticated by 5000 BC. Kola nut and coffee were domesticated in Africa. In New Guinea, ancient Papuan peoples began practicing agriculture around 7000 BC, domesticating sugarcane and taro. In the Indus Valley from the eighth millennium BC onwards at Mehrgarh, 2-row and 6-row barley were cultivated, along with einkorn, emmer, and durum wheats, and dates. In the earliest levels of Merhgarh, wild game such as gazelle, swamp deer, blackbuck, chital, wild ass, wild goat, wild sheep, boar, and nilgai were all hunted for food. These are successively replaced by domesticated sheep, goats, and humped zebu cattle by the fifth millennium BC, indicating the gradual transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture.
Irrigation
The earliest agricultural irrigation canal system known in the area of the present-day United States dates to between 1200 B.C. and 800 B.C. and was discovered in Marana, Arizona (adjacent to Tucson) in 2009. The irrigation-canal system predates the Hohokam culture by two thousand years and belongs to an unidentified culture. In North America, the Hohokam were the only culture known to rely on irrigation canals to water their crops, and their irrigation systems supported the largest population in the Southwest by AD 1300. The Hohokam constructed an assortment of simple canals combined with weirs in their various agricultural pursuits. Between the 7th and 14th centuries they built and maintained extensive irrigation networks along the lower Salt and middle Gila Rivers that rivaled the complexity of those used in the ancient Near East, Egypt, and China. These were constructed using relatively simple excavation tools, without the benefit of advanced engineering technologies, and achieved drops of a few feet per mile, balancing erosion and siltation. The Hohokam cultivated varieties of cotton, tobacco, maize, beans and squash, as well as harvesting an assortment of wild plants. Late in the Hohokam Chronological Sequence, they also used extensive dry-farming systems, primarily to grow agave for food and fiber. Their reliance on agricultural strategies based on canal irrigation, vital in their less-than-hospitable desert environment and arid climate, provided the basis for the aggregation of rural populations into stable urban centers.
Costa Rica
Agriculture became evident in the populations that lived in Costa Rica about 5,000 years ago. They mainly grew tubers and roots. For the first and second millennia BCE there were already settled farming communities. These were small and scattered, although the timing of the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture as the main livelihood in the territory is still unknown.
Agriculture on the prehistoric Great Plains
Squash and beans were cultivated in what is now the United States, independent of Mesoamerica. Maize is a tropical crop first cultivated in Mexico which found its way northward to the United States over thousands of years. Maize agriculture began on the Great Plains by AD 900, initiating the Southern Plains villagers period of western Oklahoma and Texas. It probably came about as an extension westward and northward of the Caddoan cultures of eastern Texas. The Plains Village culture consisted of hamlets and semi-permanent villages along major rivers such as the Red, Washita, and Canadian. Subsistence was a combination of agriculture and hunting. A drying climatic trend beginning AD 1000 or 1100 may have tipped the subsistence scale more toward hunting and less toward a dependence upon agriculture. The Antelope Creek Phase of Plains villagers, dated from AD 1200 to 1450 in the Texas panhandle was influenced by the Southwestern Pueblo people of the Rio Grande valley in New Mexico.
The contemporaneous Apishapa culture of southeastern Colorado depended mostly upon hunting. The historic descendants of the Southern Plains villagers are possibly the Wichita and Pawnee Indians.
10th millennium BC
The 10th millennium BC spanned the years 10000 through 9001 BC. It marks the beginning of the Mesolithic and Epipaleolithic periods, which is the first part of the Holocene epoch. Agriculture, based on the cultivation of primitive forms of millet and rice, occurred in Southwest Asia. Although agriculture was being developed in the Fertile Crescent, it would not be widely practiced for another 2,000 years.
History of agriculture in the United States
The U.S. economy was primarily agricultural in the early 19th century. Westward expansion plus the building of canals and the introduction of steamboats opened up new areas for agriculture. Most farming was designed to produce food for the family, and service small local market. In times of rapid economic growth, a farmer could still improve the land for far more than he paid for it, and then move further west to repeat the process.
Human nutrition
Agriculture developed about 10,000 years ago in multiple locations throughout the world, providing grains (such as wheat, rice and maize) and potatoes; and originating staples such as bread and pasta dough, and tortillas. Farming also provided milk and dairy products, and sharply increased the availability of meats and the diversity of vegetables. The importance of food purity was recognized when bulk storage led to infestation and contamination risks. Cooking developed as an often ritualistic activity,
due to efficiency and reliability concerns requiring adherence to strict recipes and procedures, and in response to demands for food purity and consistency.
Neolithic Revolution
Early agriculture is believed to have originated and become widespread in Southwest Asia around 10,000–9,000 BP, though earlier individual sites have been identified. The Fertile Crescent region of Southwest Asia is the centre of domestication for three cereals (einkorn wheat, emmer wheat and barley), for four legumes (lentil, pea, bitter vetch and chickpea), and for flax. Domestication was a slow process involving multiple sites for each crop.
History of phycology
The study of botany goes back into pre-history as plants were the food of people from the beginning of the human race. The first attempts at plant cultivation are believed to have been made shortly before 10,000 BC in Western Asia (Morton, 1981) and the first references to algae are to be found in early Chinese literature. Records as far back as 3000 BC indicate that algae were used by the emperor of China as food (Huisman, 2000 p. 13). The use of "Porphyra" in China dates back to at least A.D. 533–44 (Mumfard and Miura, 1988), there are also references in Roman and Greek literature. The Greek word for algae was "Phycos" whilst in Roman times the name became "Fucus". There are early references to the use of algae for manure. The first coralline algae to be recognized as living organisms were probably "Corallina", by Pliny the Elder in the 1st century AD (Irvine and Chamberlain, 1994 p. 11).
History of agriculture
The Middle Ages saw further improvements in agriculture. Monasteries spread throughout Europe and became important centers for the collection of knowledge related to agriculture and forestry. The manorial system allowed large landowners to control their land and its laborers, in the form of peasants or serfs. During the medieval period, the Arab world was critical in the exchange of crops and technology between the European, Asia and African continents. Besides transporting numerous crops, they introduced the concept of summer irrigation to Europe and developed the beginnings of the plantation system of sugarcane growing through the use of slaves for intensive cultivation.
History of genetic engineering
The first evidence of plant domestication comes from emmer and einkorn wheat found in pre-Pottery Neolithic A villages in Southwest Asia dated about 10,500 to 10,100 BC. The Fertile Crescent of Western Asia, Egypt, and India were sites of the earliest planned sowing and harvesting of plants that had previously been gathered in the wild. Independent development of agriculture occurred in northern and southern China, Africa's Sahel, New Guinea and several regions of the Americas. The eight Neolithic founder crops (emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chick peas and flax) had all appeared by about 7000 BC. Horticulture first appears in the Levant during the Chalcolithic period about 6 800 to 6,300 BC. Due to the soft tissues, archeological evidence for early vegetables is scarce. The earliest vegetable remains have been found in Egyptian caves that date back to the 2nd millennium BC.
Agriculture in Scotland
Mesolithic hunter-gatherer encampments formed the first known settlements in Scotland around 8500 BCE. These were highly mobile boat-using people making tools from bone, stone and antlers. In the Neolithic period, around 6,000 years ago, there is evidence of permanent settlements and farming. Archaeological evidence indicates that the two main sources of food were grain and cow's milk. From the beginning of the Bronze Age, about 2000 BCE, arable land spread at the expense of forest. From the Iron Age, beginning in the seventh century BCE, there is evidence of hill forts in southern Scotland that are associated with cultivation ridges and terraces. Souterrains, small underground constructions, may have been for storing perishable agricultural products. Aerial photography reveals extensive prehistoric field systems that underlie existing boundaries in some Lowland areas, suggesting that the fertile plains were already densely exploited for agriculture. During the period of Roman occupation there was re-growth of birch, oak and hazel for five centuries, suggesting a decline of population and agriculture.
Fiona Marshall
Fiona Marshall works on Pastoral Neolithic sites in eastern Africa. Food production started in southwest Asia about 10,000 years ago, leading to higher populations, cities, and social stratification. This early food production may have led to the current distribution of wealth. The Neolithic in Africa, however, went differently. Instead of people becoming sedentary farmers, many peoples in Africa became mobile herders. But this pastoralism did not spread throughout all of Africa; it was more sporadic around the Sahara. Africa did eventually develop food production in farming, it was just later than the rest of the world at around 4000 BP. Marshall has examined the question of why ancient peoples domesticated wild plants and animals. Cattle were the first domesticates in North Africa around 10,000-8000 BP. The reason that cattle were so useful is because they allow pastoralists to adapt to changing climates. Even though pastoralism took root in Africa, Marshall points out that herding also contributed to the unequal spread of food. Pastoralism is also more labor-intensive and unpredictable than hunting-and-gathering, which is why Marshall believes that it was more patchy throughout Africa rather than taking it all over at once.
Agriculture in India
Some claim Indian agriculture began by 9000 BC as a result of early cultivation of plants, and domestication of crops and animals. Settled life soon followed with implements and techniques being developed for agriculture. Double monsoons led to two harvests being reaped in one year. Indian products soon reached trading networks and foreign crops were introduced. Plants and animals—considered essential to survival by the Indians—came to be worshiped and venerated.
Ireland
Some time before 4000 BC, Neolithic settlers arrived introducing cereal cultivars, domesticated animals such as cattle and sheep, large timber building, and stone monuments. The earliest evidence for farming in Ireland or Great Britain is from Ferriter's Cove, Co.Kerry, where a flint knife, cattle bones and a sheep's tooth were carbon-dated to c. 4350 BC. Field systems were developed in different parts of Ireland, including at the Céide Fields, that has been preserved beneath a blanket of peat in present-day Tyrawley. An extensive field system, arguably the oldest in the world, consisted of small divisions separated by dry-stone walls. The fields were farmed for several centuries between 3500 BC and 3000 BC. Wheat and barley were the principal crops.
Viticulture
The earliest evidence of grape vine cultivation and winemaking dates back 7,000 years. The history of viticulture is closely related to the history of wine, with evidence that humans cultivated wild grapes to make wine as far back as the Neolithic period. Evidence suggests that some of the earliest domestication of "Vitis vinifera" occurred in the area of the modern countries Georgia and Armenia. The oldest-known winery was discovered in the "Areni-1" cave in Vayots Dzor, Armenia. Dated to BC, the site contained a wine press, fermentation vats, jars, and cups. Archaeologists also found "V. vinifera" seeds and vines. Commenting on the importance of the find, McGovern said, "The fact that winemaking was already so well developed in 4000 BC suggests that the technology probably goes back much earlier." There is also evidence of grape domestication in the Near East in the early Bronze Age, around 3200 BC.
Grafton Elliot Smith
Egypt held a fortunate geographical position that made contacts to western Asia and the Mediterranean possible, while being safe from invasions. The fertile soil led to ample leisure, in art and the crafts could be cultivated. Smith believed that agriculture had originated in Egypt and only later spread to Mesopotamia. "The earliest cultivators of the soil in Egypt were in fact laying the foundations not merely of agriculture and irrigation but of all the arts and craft, the social organization and religious beliefs which became an integral part of the civilization that was being built up sixty centuries ago and in later ages was diffused throughout the world." (Smith 1911, 6)
History of agriculture in the Indian subcontinent
By the 5th millennium BCE agricultural communities became widespread in Kashmir. Zaheer Baber (1996) writes that 'the first evidence of cultivation of cotton had already developed'. Cotton was cultivated by the 5th millennium BCE-4th millennium BCE. The Indus cotton industry was well developed and some methods used in cotton spinning and fabrication continued to be practiced till the modern Industrialisation of India.
African admixture in Europe
The change from hunting and gathering to agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution was a watershed in world history. The societies that first made the change to agriculture are believed to have lived in the Middle East around 10,000 BCE. Agriculture was introduced into Europe by migrating farmers from the Middle East. According to the demic diffusion model, these Middle Eastern farmers either replaced or interbred with the local hunter-gather populations that had been living in Europe since the Out of Africa migration.
Mesoamerica
By roughly 6000 BCE, [[hunter-gatherer]]s living in the [[highland (geography)|highlands]] and lowlands of Mesoamerica began to develop agricultural practices with early cultivation of squash and chilli. The earliest example of [[maize]] dates to c. 4000 BCE and comes from [[Guilá Naquitz]], a cave in Oaxaca. Earlier maize samples have been documented at the Los Ladrones cave site in [[Panama]], c. 5500 BCE. Slightly thereafter, semi-[[agrarian community|agrarian communities]] began to cultivate other crops throughout Mesoamerica. Maize was the most common domesticate, but the common bean, tepary bean, scarlet runner bean, [[jicama]], [[tomato]] and squash all became common cultivates by 3500 BCE. At the same time, these communities exploited [[cotton]], [[yucca]], and [[agave]] for fibers and [[textile]] materials. By 2000 BCE, corn was the staple crop in the region, and remained so through modern times. The Ramón or [[Brosimum alicastrum|Breadnut tree]] ("[[Brosimum alicastrum]]") was an occasional substitute for maize in producing flour. Fruit was also important in the daily diet of Mesoamerican cultures. Some of the main ones consumed include [[avocado]], [[papaya]], [[guava]], [[mamey (disambiguation)|mamey]], [[Sapote|zapote]], and [[annona]].
History of agriculture
From the 8th century, the medieval Islamic world underwent a transformation in agricultural practice, described by the historian Andrew Watson as the Arab agricultural revolution. This transformation was driven by a number of factors including the diffusion of many crops and plants along Muslim trade routes, the spread of more advanced farming techniques, and an agricultural-economic system which promoted increased yields and efficiency. The shift in agricultural practice changed the economy, population distribution, vegetation cover, agricultural production, population levels, urban growth, the distribution of the labour force, cooking, diet, and clothing across the Islamic world. Muslim traders covered much of the Old World, and trade enabled the diffusion of many crops, plants and farming techniques across the region, as well as the adaptation of crops, plants and techniques from beyond the Islamic world. This diffusion introduced major crops to Europe by way of Al-Andalus, along with the techniques for their cultivation and cuisine. Sugar cane, rice, and cotton were among the major crops transferred, along with citrus and other fruit trees, nut trees, vegetables such as aubergine, spinach and chard, and the use of spices such as cumin, coriander, nutmeg and cinnamon. Intensive irrigation, crop rotation, and agricultural manuals were widely adopted. Irrigation, partly based on Roman technology, made use of noria water wheels, water mills, dams and reservoirs.
Agriculture in Scotland
Agriculture in Scotland includes all land use for arable, horticultural, pastoral or hunting activity in Scotland, or around its coasts. The first permanent settlements and farming date from the Neolithic period, from around 6,000 years ago. From the beginning of the Bronze Age, about 2000 BCE, arable land spread at the expense of forest. From the Iron Age, beginning in the seventh century BCE, there was use of cultivation ridges and terraces. During the period of Roman occupation there was a reduction in agriculture and the early Middle Ages were a period of climate deterioration resulting in more unproductive land. Most farms had to produce a self-sufficient diet, supplemented by hunter-gathering. More oats and barley were grown than corn, and cattle were the most important domesticated animal. From c. 1150 to 1300, the Medieval Warm Period allowed cultivation at greater heights and made land more productive. The system of infield and outfield agriculture may have been introduced with feudalism from the twelfth century. The rural economy boomed in the thirteenth century, but by the 1360s there was a severe falling off in incomes to be followed by a slow recovery in the fifteenth century.
Human
Until the development of agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago, "Homo sapiens" employed a hunter-gatherer method as their sole means of food collection. This involved combining stationary food sources (such as fruits, grains, tubers, and mushrooms, insect larvae and aquatic mollusks) with wild game, which must be hunted and killed in order to be consumed. It has been proposed that humans have used fire to prepare and cook food since the time of "Homo erectus". Around ten thousand years ago, humans developed agriculture, which substantially altered their diet. This change in diet may also have altered human biology; with the spread of dairy farming providing a new and rich source of food, leading to the evolution of the ability to digest lactose in some adults. Agriculture led to increased populations, the development of cities, and because of increased population density, the wider spread of infectious diseases. The types of food consumed, and the way in which they are prepared, have varied widely by time, location, and culture.
Costa Maya
Around 6500 BC the Native Americans started agricultural activities. The agriculture was of the slash and burn type. Around 3500 BC the agricultural skill had developed as such that they formed permanent villages in the center of Mexico. The Maya are not the first culture to appear in Mexico; they were preceded by the Olmecs near the Gulf coast. The first Maya like culture appeared around 200 BC in the south of Mexico (Chiapas).
Eastern Agricultural Complex
The Eastern Agricultural Complex was one of about 10 independent centers of plant domestication in the pre-historic world. By about 1,800 BCE the Native Americans of North America were cultivating for food several species of plants, thus transitioning from a hunter-gatherer economy to agriculture. After 200 BCE when maize from Mexico was introduced to what is now the eastern United States, the Native Americans of the present-day United States and Canada slowly changed from growing indigenous plants to a maize-based agricultural economy. The cultivation of indigenous plants declined and was eventually abandoned, the formerly domesticated plants reverting to their wild forms.
History of the world
Humanity's written history was preceded by its prehistory, beginning with the Palaeolithic Era ("Early Stone Age"), followed by the Neolithic Era ("New Stone Age"). The Neolithic saw the Agricultural Revolution begin, between 8000 and 5000 BCE, in the Near East's Fertile Crescent. During this period, humans began the systematic husbandry of plants and animals. As agriculture advanced, most humans transitioned from a nomadic to a settled lifestyle as farmers in permanent settlements. The relative security and increased productivity provided by farming allowed communities to expand into increasingly larger units, fostered by advances in transportation.