Before the advent of agriculture most human movements can be roughly explained in terms of climate and resources. The story of our transition from nomadic to sedentary life is no exception, and in fact begins around the end of the last ice age.

The cold and dry climate of the Pleistocene Ice Age made resources relatively scarce. With more of the world’s water locked away in glaciers, the river systems that later supported agriculture were not yet the abundant, fertile places we know them to be. Without the pre existing knowledge of agriculture, there simply wasn’t a place bountiful enough in animal and plant life for nomads to settle long-term. They could basically stay in a place until it’s resources were exhausted or their food moved.

By 11,000 the climate was far more conducive to the proliferation of flora and fauna, especially near the equator. The Natufians of the Levant began to experiment with more permanent settlements. I say experiment because they were still a hunter-gatherer society, but the greater availability of resources allowed them to forage and hunt from central, stationary communities. However, for about 1,000 years beginning in 10,800 Earth temporarily endured a cold swing with cold climates reminiscent of the Pleistocene Ice Age. Global glaciation brought on droughts and the Nartufians, who may have been using wild cereals to make bread as early as 12,000, could no longer depend on an abundance of wild crops and animals to sustain them. To defray the loss of natural resources, they began collecting seeds and clearing out scrub land to plant them in.

This question is hotly debated within the scientific community and the above is answer is somewhat controversial depending on how you define sedentary living. It’s not entirely accurate to say that the Nartufians were the first domestic farmers, as simply planting and harvesting does not qualify as “agriculture” in the sense that we think of it in Mesopotamia or the Nile Valley. However, they took an important step towards developing a sustainable model for sedentary living.

To put it more concisely, sedentary communities largely resulted from human response to local climate change. Sedentary life became sustainable when these communities began to experiment with plant domestication, and ultimately became the norm when animal domestication and technological advances gave way to large scale agriculture