What exactly happened ~10,000 years ago that converted the nomadic existence to the farming?

[md2000]

@Drum_God

Doesn’t agriculture require understanding that plants come from seeds? How did humans figure that out?

It’s not rocket surgery. You carry around a few seeds or nuts in a moist environment, they start to sprout. Pick up fruit that’s a bit too rotten and there’s a root coming out of the seed/nut. Drop it at the edge of camp, a few days later, it sends up a stem and leaves.(We did the germinate bean thing in Grade 6) Remember, early humans had plenty of time to observe the world around them and get familiar with the plants and animals, and no smartphones or TV to distract them. They were pretty conversant with the planets, the phases of the moon and the relation between celestial events and seasons thousands of years ago.

@Kimera757

Most inventions take place over a long time, even things like steam power.

Domesticating wheat appeared to require two mutations - fragile stems and seed timing. For the first, wild wheat stems break easily, which would cause the steams (plus grains) to fall to the ground, which makes farming inconvenient. For the second, wild wheat seeds do not immediately germinate or germinate at a consistent time, instead “randomly” sprouting after they fall to the ground. This is handy if there’s a drought, but inconvenient for farming. Both of these mutations needed to occur for anything like modern farming to develop.

We have evidence that humans roasted wheat grains (which are large and protein-rich, compared to “competitors”) before they really developed farming. Of course, even with the mutation, you would need plows and manuring (requires domesticating animals) and eventually irrigation before you saw anything like medieval farms. You would need mills to grind grain and make beer, or ovens to make that into bread. And metal to slice that bread

There are numerous “champion” foods we could grow. Some fruit require grafting to get anything particularly useful out of them, which would have required years of observation, experimentation (or luck) and duplication/spreading. Different animals were domesticated at different times as well, and only some animals are useful for domestication.

I believe farming spread so quickly because anyone who started farming saw huge population increases, and any other humans who saw this wanted to copy this. Furthermore the farmers either conquered nearby people, or simply “encroached” on their lands and turned that into farmland.

This is an important point. Ancient humans did not find good crops and decide to settle down. Not just optimal wheat plants… Big juicy plums or apples, beans and strawberries, and cabbages growing to the size of your head did not exist - these were developed over hundreds and thousands of years by perhaps semi-nomadic hunter-farmers returning to the same place and picking the best of the plants to replant. (Heck, look up the evolution of corn - the plant has been selected so much it is not viable except with human intervention, and looks nothing like its supposed predecessor) So a climate where the crops cannot be relied upon to grow every year for several hundred years at a stretch is not suitable for agriculture, and crops that can fully substitute for hunting will not be developed.

You kind of wonder how many times the humans returned to their favorite wild wheat patch or apple orchard only to find nothing to eat, before they could be sure they should stop and settle the year round.

[bardos]

@Colibri

By noticing that food plants were sprouting from the rubbish pit where they dumped the seeds.

Really, this is quite obvious. You don’t have to have enormous observational powers or great deductive skills to figure it out.

My point being that humans had hundreds of thousands of years of dedcuing this and take advantage, and then suddenly… 10K years ago…

[MrDibble]

@bardos

My point being that humans had hundreds of thousands of years of dedcuing this and take advantage, and then suddenly… 10K years ago…

I ask again - do you have an alternative hypothesis to climate change?

[bardos]

@MrDibble

I ask again - do you have an alternative hypothesis to climate change?

At the moment, I tend to believe in some type of psychological change… we could debate the causes.

[Acsenray]

@bardos

At the moment, I tend to believe in some type of psychological change… we could debate the causes.

Unlikely. Far more unlikely than experience plus growing knowledge plus economics plus politics plus environmental factors.

Remember this happened in several disparate places between unrelated bands of people and then over time other bands of people took up the practice after experiencing its success, but not everyone.

Nothing magical happened 10,000 years ago to human brains. It just was a building concatenation of circumstances that started tipping the scale in favor of settled agriculture.

Are you suggesting that groups that are still nomadic are subject to some fundamental inherent psychological difference from those that aren’t? Because there isn’t. They simply still live in circumstances in which the change isn’t worth the cost.

[Colibri]

@bardos

At the moment, I tend to believe in some type of psychological change… we could debate the causes.

A psychological change that took place simultaneously in the Fertile Crescent, South America, and elsewhere? I think we can rule that out based on anything that’s scientifically plausible.

[Acsenray]

It seems you want to believe that cultural choices reflect some kind of inherent difference between people rather than just people living in different circumstances making rational choices. That sounds like racialism.

[Colibri]

@Acsenray

It seems you want to believe that cultural choices reflect some kind of inherent difference between people rather than just people living in different circumstances making rational choices. That sounds like racialism.

[Moderating]

I don’t see anything in bardos’ posts that suggest any such thing. Let’s not put words in other poster’s mouths.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

[ftg]

There were some noticeable changes that have occured in humans the last ~200k years or so. So we get the terms anatomically and behaviorally modern humans.

Like all things in this area, there’s a lot of debate. But it seems that there was some noticeable changes that started about ~100k ago and really became significant ~40k years ago. Things like tools, grave goods, etc. plus skeletal changes.

By about 30-40k years ago there were people who were sufficiently like us that all the usual technological advances like large scale agriculture could have happened.

Why the lag is the question.

People have noted climate factors. In regards to the above dates, compare to the range of the most recent (Wisconsin in the US) ice age: 75k to 11k ago. Hmm.

So, that ice age put a lid on some aspects of human development while perhaps pushing other aspects forware (i.e., to modern humans). Then the ice age ends. Climates change. New areas open up. Some areas get less liveable. And those areas are ripe for agriculture to develop thanks to the new aspects of modern humans.

But some things make it complicated. Why didn’t agriculture develop in Australia? There were modern humans there by at least 40k years ago. The climate changed there quite a bit. Etc.

And Göbekli Tepe has caused some rethinking. Not just that the earliest dating is 12k years ago and what were these people eating to support the population? But also how many more of these sites are there to be discovered? It’s just too early.

One thing to keep in mind is agriculture is not a “not there” then “there” thing. Some Native Americans in the PNW maintained camas meadows by selective burning of competing plants, avoiding over harvesting, etc. Pretty darn close to agriculture. (Plus they made a variety of foods with it including loaves of “bread”.)

So people all over no doubt did likewise with local crops for a very long time and maybe even transplanted/seeded suitable other areas without yet getting into serious stuff like selective breeding.

Also animals were all part of this. Horses, cattle, pigs, ovines, llamas, etc. Taking care of such animals might have been a big kick starter to real agriculture.

[bardos]

@Acsenray

Unlikely. Far more unlikely than experience plus growing knowledge plus economics plus politics plus environmental factors.

The very definition of a psychological change.

However, I still think that the causes of the psychological change in humanity, all at the same time, may be other.

[Acsenray]

@bardos

The very definition of a psychological change.

A concatenation if circumstances leading to making one option more attractive is the definition of psychological change?

What the fuck are you talking about?

However, I still think that the causes of the psychological change in humanity, all at the same time, may be other.

Other what? Spit it out. What are you coyly hinting at? I’m dying to find out whether this has been a witnessing thread in disguise.

[bardos]

@Acsenray

A concatenation if circumstances leading to making one option more attractive is the definition of psychological change?

What the fuck are you talking about?

Other what? Spit it out. What are you coyly hinting at? I’m dying to find out whether this has been a witnessing thread in disguise.

I am not hinting at anything. I truly have no idea. I just reject the popular wisdom. However one important psychological change is that these sedentary folks somehow had arrived at the conclusion that owning stuff and having property rights was “good”, “better” or “beneficial”. Nomadic cultures were just the opposite; they did not have the sense of individual private property, cultures which did not recognize individual property. Stuff was shared.

So, to transition from a type of “socialist” society as a psychological state to a “capitalist one”, after having lived untold thousands of years in the former… that’s a big change.

[puzzlegal]

@Kimera757

…
I believe farming spread so quickly because anyone who started farming saw huge population increases, and any other humans who saw this wanted to copy this. Furthermore the farmers either conquered nearby people, or simply “encroached” on their lands and turned that into farmland.

A friend who is an amateur archeologist tells me that agriculture only spread at about the rate that new generations of farmers could develop new fields. That is, he believes that very few hunter-gatherers chose to become farmers, instead, the larger population density of farmers allowed them to take the best land (one generation at a time) from the hunter-getherers.

That doesn’t explain why several groups of humans in different parts of the world all simultaneously started farming. I would agree that climate change is the most plausible explanation for that.

@Colibri

By noticing that food plants were sprouting from the rubbish pit where they dumped the seeds.

Really, this is quite obvious. You don’t have to have enormous observational powers or great deductive skills to figure it out.

@Kobal2

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 )

The different is that fly eggs are quite small and hard to see, and they hatch pretty quickly. I’ve never observed a fly egg hatching, for instance. Whereas many seeds (for instance, wheat, apple, barley, grapes, beans…) are easy to see with the naked eye, and they sprout slowly, so the embryo is easily observable as it grows out of the seed. I have seen thousands of sprouting acorns in my yard, for instance, despite taking zero action to look for them or to sprout them. I have to believe that essentially all humans understood how plants grow out of seeds long before agriculture.

[Banksiaman]

What different people mean by ‘agriculture’ varies enormously, even among archaeologists, which does not help. There is a complete continuum from total reliance on hunting and fishing [high random, high skill] to sedentary intensive surplus-producing mono-cropping [nil random, low task complexity]. Where we choose to put a line and say that beyond that is ‘agriculture’ is largely arbitrary and based on prejudice and expectation as much as science.

I’d call a constellation of practices that relied on vast understanding of how plants and animals worked in nature, and then consciously manipulating that to obtain reliability of yields that otherwise wouldn’t happen agricultural behaviour.

If the arbitrary line is ignored, then there is a lot of agricultural behaviour emerging and evolving as the climate stabilises post-last ice-age and, with it, greater stability in ecology. Climate change is a likely precondition, but probably not causal beyond producing ecological stability. Moving into more intensive cropping requires complex interactions between ecology, population dynamics, sedentism and social structures that all have to work together, which is probably less about climate / ecosystems than social relations supporting different types of power relationships developing within and between groups.

The way we think about agriculture is still strongly influenced by a lot of deeply-embedded 19th century racial thought about the ladder of human evolution somehow mirroring how people get their food. (See the current contentious debate in Australia about Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, where he cites a whole series of agricultural practices that were observed by early European settlers but which they couldn’t call agriculture because that had implications about the sort of society they were busy attempting to dominate.)

[Acsenray]

@bardos

I am not hinting at anything. I truly have no idea. I just reject the popular wisdom. However one important psychological change is that these sedentary folks somehow had arrived at the conclusion that owning stuff and having property rights was “good”, “better” or “beneficial”. Nomadic cultures were just the opposite; they did not have the sense of individual private property, cultures which did not recognize individual property. Stuff was shared.

So, to transition from a type of “socialist” society as a psychological state to a “capitalist one”, after having lived untold thousands of years in the former… that’s a big change.

The difference between nomadic life and settles life is not a difference related to socialism and capitalism. And it certainly doesn’t require a fundamental change in human psychology related to socialism and capitalism. Even in modern times, socialist or capitalist ideologies don’t reflect an evolutionary difference between individuals.

Bands of humans made choices based on their circumstances. The ones who made choices that improved their survivability and competitiveness produced another generation. The ones who didn’t died out. They weren’t choosing between socialism and capitalism.

[bardos]

@Acsenray

The difference between nomadic life and settles life is not a difference related to socialism and capitalism. And it certainly doesn’t require a fundamental change in human psychology related to socialism and capitalism. Even in modern times, socialist or capitalist ideologies don’t reflect an evolutionary difference between individuals.

Bands of humans made choices based on their circumstances. The ones who made choices that improved their survivability and competitiveness produced another generation. The ones who didn’t died out. They weren’t choosing between socialism and capitalism.

I disagree about the lack of psychological difference in the makeup of individuals inclined to different ideologies. I think you postulate the existence of socialist societies on this planet which in my opinion are few and far between, perhaps in the most primitive areas.

Off-topic: In colonial times on the east coast of the US, there were many cases of people who would run off and join various Indian tribes; even the level of “civilization” of the 17th and 18th centuries, without TV and internet, apparently was strangling them. Their relatives, or maybe folks in general, looked on this as an aberration and would organize “rescue parties”. These folks would be kidnapped and brought back to civilization, where ofttimes they would escape again. It got so bad that there were laws put into effect declaring it illegal to run off and join an Indian tribe.

[Acsenray]

@bardos

I disagree about the lack of psychological difference in the makeup of individuals inclined to different ideologies.

So you believe that people are born with capitalist or socialist tendencies … in their genes or something?
That’s an interesting proposition in a world in which almost no one lives in a purely capitalist or socialist system.

I think you postulate the existence of socialist societies on this planet

I said nothing of the kind. 10,000 years ago there was no such thing as capitalist and socialist ideologies driving decisions in human societies.

Given that socialism didn’t even arise as an organized philosophy until well into the Industrial Age in one of the most non-nomadic societies in human history, I question the premise of your proposal.

[RioRico]

@Colibri

A psychological change that took place simultaneously in the Fertile Crescent, South America, and elsewhere? I think we can rule that out based on anything that’s scientifically plausible.

Agriculture | History

Origins
Agriculture began independently in different parts of the globe,[8] and included a diverse range of taxa, in at least 11 separate centres of origin.[5]

Mass psych changes around the world! Blame the ETs!

Wild grains were collected and eaten from at least 105,000 years ago.[9] 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 the earliest known cultivation from 5,700 BC,[10] followed by mung, soy and azuki beans. Sheep were domesticated in Mesopotamia between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago.[11] Cattle were domesticated from the wild aurochs in the areas of modern Turkey and Pakistan some 10,500 years ago.[12] Pig production emerged in Eurasia, including Europe, East Asia and Southwest Asia,[13] where wild boar were first domesticated about 10,500 years ago.[14] 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,[15] and was independently domesticated in Eurasia. In Mesoamerica, wild teosinte was bred into maize by 6,000 years ago.[16]

From that, it looks like global agriculture started ca.10k-11k years ago, then took another ca.5k years to develop much - leading to the birth of empires IIRC. But another article sketches a rather different timescale.

Neolithic Revolution | Agricultural transition

Agricultural transition
Map of the world showing approximate centers of origin of agriculture and its spread in prehistory: the Fertile Crescent (11,000 BP), the Yangtze and Yellow River basins (9,000 BP) and the New Guinea Highlands (9,000–6,000 BP), Central Mexico (5,000–4,000 BP), Northern South America (5,000–4,000 BP), sub-Saharan Africa (5,000–4,000 BP, exact location unknown), eastern North America (4,000–3,000 BP).[11]

From this we see that a synchronous global agricultural revolution DID NOT HAPPEN!

Well sure, 7k-8k years, the distance between Fertile Crescent (11,000 BP) and eastern North America (4,000–3,000 BP), is a gnat-fart of geologic time; but a lot happens in ~400 human generations. Thus, each origin center likely has its own local explanation. That cite lists a number of origin theories. Take your pick.

[DrDeth]

@Colibri

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.

On a global scale, this is absolutely false.

Indeed, but he was posting about North America. And that’s what my post applied to. No doubt in places like New Zealand it was humans. Australia also looks like humans, mostly.

I can give you twenty more articles about North America if you like.

Well, there was extinctions in Africa and the fauna there had more or less evolved along with humans. In North America it appears to be mostly climate change.

That leaves where for “encounter of humans with advanced hunting capabilities with a naive fauna that hadn’t experienced such hunting before.”?

Here’s Africa; Ancient mammal extinctions in Africa caused by climate change rather than humans, study finds | The Independent | The Independent
*
Ancient mammal extinctions in Africa caused by climate change rather than humans, study finds*

And Europe, which says Climate and humans:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Adrian_Lister/publication/264785182_Patterns_of_Late_Quaternary_megafaunal_extinctions_in_Europe_and_northern_Asia/links/53f0e69f0cf2711e0c431517.pdf

[DrDeth]

@ftg

…
But some things make it complicated. Why didn’t agriculture develop in Australia? There were modern humans there by at least 40k years ago. The climate changed there quite a bit. Etc.

And Göbekli Tepe has caused some rethinking. Not just that the earliest dating is 12k years ago and what were these people eating to support the population? But also how many more of these sites are there to be discovered? It’s just too early.

One thing to keep in mind is agriculture is not a “not there” then “there” thing. Some Native Americans in the PNW maintained camas meadows by selective burning of competing plants, avoiding over harvesting, etc. Pretty darn close to agriculture. (Plus they made a variety of foods with it including loaves of “bread”.)…

Australia is a interesting question, here’s a couple of articles about why:

Aboriginal Agriculture

*One of the features of Aboriginal Australia that has been wondered about is that for the whole of their presence in Australia, probably more than 60,000 years, the inhabitants never adopted agriculture or domestication of animals, remaining one of the few places in the world sticking with their traditional hunter-gatherer way of life.

Many reasons have been put forward for the lack of agriculture in Australia, but it is only recently that it was realised that they did in fact practice a form of agriculture, firestick agriculture. They not only used fire to hunt, setting fire to grass to chase out animals to aid in hunting, but regularly burnt limited areas to increase the availability of new grass to feed the animals they hunted, maintaining the populations of their prey species sustainably for many thousands of years. Not only did they maintain their hunting lands in the condition their prey species preferred, they are also thought to be possibly, at least partially, responsible for the spread of dry eucalypt forests after their arrival, because this type of vegetation is fire-resistant.*

https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=201007053;res=IELAPA;type=pdf
https://journals.lib.washington.edu/index.php/BIPPA/article/view/9978