The Origins of Agriculture
At one time, researchers believed there was a clear “wave of advance”of agriculture through Europe between 8,000 and 6,000 years ago. And it may seem easy to explain such a sudden and thorough transition from foraging (depending primarily on wild foods) to agriculture by human societies. Processes of collective learning ensured that human communities would continue to explore ways of extracting resources from their environment, and eventually they were bound to stumble on agriculture. Besides, agriculture was so much more productive than most foraging lifestyles that it is tempting to suppose that once it had been “invented.” it was bound to spread fast. The earliest attempts to explain the Neolithic Revolution (the transition from foraging to settled agricultural societies)did indeed make these assumptions. These explanations saw agriculture as an invention that spread from a single center because of its inherent superiority to all other human adaptations.
However, research in the twentieth century revealed two significant problems with such explanations First, agriculture did not in fact spread from a single center. Instead, it appeared, apparently independently in many different regions of the world. How can we explain the near-simultaneity of these changes in parts of the world that seem to have had no contact with each other? As anthropologist Mark Cohen has stressed, “The most striking fact about early agriculture .. is precisely that it is such a universal event.
Second, we can no longer assume that communities of foragers were bound to adopt agriculture once they learned about it. Indeed, we are no longer so confident that the appearance of agriculture can automatically be regarded as a sign of progress. To be sure, agriculture can support larger populations than foraging lifestyles, and thus in the long run agricultural communities are likely to outcompete foraging communities when the two lifestyles come into conflict. But it is also clear that many foraging communities have resisted adopting agricultural practices even when they knew about them. As members of a foraging community in the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa told a modern researcher, why would one want to work as a farmer when there are so many mongongo nuts to eat? Foragers saw agriculture as an option, but not an inevitability.
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