How was agriculture invented? Given the low amount of usable food from pre-domestication plants and the long time it takes between planting seeds and harvest, why did the first agricultural society take it up in the first place?

by spikebrennan
EvanRWT

This is a question for /r/AskAnthropology since it predates the historical record by many millenia.

Just to touch upon a few points briefly:

  • Humans were aware of the basics of agriculture (i.e., bury a seed, eventually it becomes a plant and produces seeds of its own; or the connection between rainy/dry seasons and productivity of vegetation; or the competition between useful plants and weeds, etc.) for thousands of years before agriculture started. These are things that people learn very quickly by observation even in non-agricultural societies, spending pretty much all their lives outdoors.

  • People were foragers long before they became farmers, relying on edible plants for large portions of their daily calories. It wasn't uncommon among foraging societies to encourage the growth of useful plants, for example, by distributing inedible seeds in places where they had a chance to grow. It was a worthwhile gamble -- even if you had no role in ensuring those seeds sprouted and matured, there was a chance you could come back next season and find some surviving plants to pay you back for your small effort of the previous year. This kind of "opportunistic" agriculture predates traditional agriculture by several millenia, as we can tell from the genetics of many domesticated plants, because people were actually selecting higher yielding plants even this far back.

  • Real agriculture, involving care of the crop from planting through harvest, probably happened in places where people camped for long periods. If you consider the original domestication sites for some of our major crops, they were located in places that were extraordinarily rich in resources at the time. For example, wheat domestication began in the hills around Sanilurfa in southern Turkey. At the time (10,000 - 12,000) years ago, this region was very very rich in resources, and supported a large hunter/gatherer population year round (large enough to leave the remains at Göbekli Tepe or at Nevali Çori). This makes agriculture a lot easier and less costly - if you're staying put at one spot for the next 6 months anyway, then the marginal cost of planting some seeds and keeping animals at bay while they mature is not very high. You could set a few kids or old people to scaring off birds and foraging herbivores, or the adults could take turns. It's much cheaper than being forced to stay in one place because you have to mind the crops. Again, this was possible because these places were very resource rich to begin with, and could support some significant human populations without the need to keep moving to find new resources.

  • The earliest agriculture was a supplement, not a replacement for hunting/foraging/fishing. It wasn't productive enough to support large populations, but it could have been useful as an extra source of calories on top. Many of the activities we associate with agriculture today - weeding, irrigation, fertilizing the soil - did not exist; they were developed later. So primitive agriculture was not very time consuming, and could well have been carried on as a side activity for the bonus to calories.

  • As agricultural output increased, agriculture became more important. The biggest early improvements would have come simply from selective breeding - using seeds only from those plants which had the highest yields. Indeed, there is evidence of artificial selection in plants going back to before the advent of agriculture, showing that people were deliberately selecting plants even in the early days of opportunistic agriculture. Eventually, other developments improved yields further.

So agriculture began opportunistically in places where the extra effort of basic agriculture was not very costly, and was worth the investment in terms of calories added. It was a supplement to a hunting/foraging lifestyle, not a replacement. Over time as agricultural yields increased, it became more and more important. Conversely, even locations that are extra-rich in natural food resources will get depleted over time, driving more people towards agriculture to support the large populations that have resulted from the times of plenty.