As others pointed out, warm climate was the essential catalyst. Why then didn’t humans develop agriculture in the warm period 130,000 years ago? I don’t know; perhaps H. sapiens was then a scrawny population living on the margins, while the dominant hominid species lacked the prerequisite language capabilities?
Man invented selective breeding inadvertently. By picking the best-looking plants and processing them (for beer?) in a single place, stray seeds would grow to yield superior crops at that selected place. Sheep-herding developed even earlier; simple pottery even earlier still.
But this doesn’t really address the question. Humans 10,000 years ago didn’t need or want to become farmers either. But those that failed to become farmers were overwhelmed by the farmers numerically: farming allowed higher population densities.
I still think that the answer is that the dominant (but non-sapiens) hominids 130,000 years ago lacked some essential Homo sapiens character — probably language capability.
A specific pattern appears to have occurred 10K years ago. Fertile areas surrounded by desert, and population outstripping what the fertility of the land could sustain without resorting to agriculture.
There are locations where you get higher grounds (high rainfall) or rivers (easy irrigation) within spitting distance of dry areas. In those locations, you can get a relatively large diversity of crops grown within distances amounting to a day’s walk or even less, without much infrastructure. Development of different agricultural techniques and transportation techniques allow settling down and getting a varied diet. Being a hunter-gatherer is not much work if you’re in an area with a lot of easily-gatherable food and animals, but as soon as you’ve got someone with mobility problems (such as those pesky third-trimester women, little kids and old people), being able to stay put is a lot easier for the group as a whole.
In the Old World, perhaps. But in South America (and Panama) agriculture seems to have started in dry forest areas surrounded by tropical forest areas. And later, in Mexico and Peru, agriculture began in mountainous areas, and in New Guinea in tropical forest.
That doesn’t explain why, after tens of thousands of years of doing exactly that, 7-9 different groups all decided to try a more settled lifestyle, all independently, all at about the same time.
I think climate change is the best explanation we have to go the the facts as we currently know them. And it may well be right. But I also think there is a lot we don’t know, and who knows what facts may turn up in the next fifty years?
Generally speaking, only true for a) people living in very specific, fertile and naturally renewed zones (like the Mekong banks, the Nile banks, somewhere between Tigris & Euphrates…) b) people who figured out the whole crop rotation thing or c) people with fertilizers or equivalent (e.g. the Aztecs and their chinampas).
Plains Indians or Frankish/Germanic pastoral tribes didn’t move their entire settlements every few years for the hell of it, on account of it’s a bit of a pain in the dick to build an entire village from scratch. They did it when the soil became too poor to keep planting there (also, possibly, when their wood or packed earth dwellings got altogether too manky and maintenance/repairs too annoying)
It’s semi-nomadic. Or semi-sedentary, depending on your opinions re:glasses
ETA : other semi-sedentary practices involve planting stuff in one place ; then following animal migrations during the warm months ; to come back to the crops in time for harvest, storage & wintering. I think some North Am. tribes lived that way.
Climate change was one of the factors which led to the kind of situation where you could grow things that needed water Right Here and things that didn’t Over There.
I wasn’t discussing the “climate change” thing, just pointing (evidently not very well) out that “medieval farms” in a loooooot of Europe didn’t involve irrigation. A lot of Old World areas whose traditional cereals are not rice did not, and do not.
The overkill hypothesis has been totally debunked. It was based upon a coincidence that arrival of humans and the extinctions seemed to be at the same time. However, we now know humans arrived quite a bit earlier and the extinctions occurred over a wider period that was originally thought. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/01/what-killed-great-beasts-north-america
Of course we dont know and humans with the spears could have been a part of it. Or Humans bring pests over, or humans starting huge fires, etc. But now Paleontologists are pretty certain that climate change was the biggest cause.
You’ve been repeatedly informed that the “overkill hypothesis” is just one scenario about how humans may have been involved in megafaunal extinctions. The fact that the overkill hypothesis is no longer considered to be likely doesn’t mean that humans weren’t the deciding factor in these extinctions.
Regarding the study you cite:
Even less can they be applied to elsewhere in the Americas, or to megafaunal extinctions in the Old World, which occurred at very different times. And of course this is a single article and can be challenged as well.
Paleontologists do recognize that a variety of effects caused megafaunal extinctions in different parts of the world, some more important in one area than in others. But the common factor in most cases was the encounter of humans with advanced hunting capabilities with a naive fauna that hadn’t experienced such hunting before.
I’ll try to digest the Wikipedia articles on Agriculture and the Neolithic Revolution before speculating, though global climate change seems a major factor for the synchronicity. No, we can’t credit the Galactic Brotherhood. Humans developed agriculture all alone.
True, but the obvious isn’t *necessarily *obvious. For the longest time it was believed that flies were spontaneously generated by rotting food, because any unpreserved meat or battlefield corpse would soon enough turn into a rancid pile of crawling maggots. They just didn’t understand/perceive that flies laid eggs in there first.
(or rather, and perhaps more fairly, the debate raged about eggs vs. spontaneous generation or an expression of some form of life-force exiting rotting matter in the form of bugs raged on until the 17th century and empirical experiments)
(I’m not disputing your notion, to be clear - just tacking on pointless trivia, as is my wont )
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