The Origins of Agriculture

Agriculture, the subsistence strategy based on domesticated plant foods, began around 12,000 years ago, and scholars do not know exactly why human groups, that were surviving relatively well as hunter-gatherers, switched to an agricultural lifestyle.  The agricultural lifestyle does have benefits, but it is also very costly in several ways.  Agriculture became the predominant subsistence strategy nonetheless, and there are several different hypotheses concerning the origins of agriculture: the Oasis Hypothesis, the Sedentary Hypothesis, the Readiness Hypothesis, the Dump Heap Hypothesis, and the Demographic Hypothesis.  This blog post will explore these hypotheses in depth.

A desert oasis is at the center of the Oasis Hypothesis.

V. Gordon Childe is responsible for coming up with the Oasis Hypothesis.  According to Childe, the end of the Pleistocene Period brought up environmental changes, including a general drying of several areas.  Plant life became concentrated in areas where water was most plentiful, oases, and people congregated to these areas.  The presence of water and plants in a dry, desert like environment provided a favorable setting for a sedentary lifestyle for Neolithic groups.  Neolithic peoples began to manipulate their environment by sowing seeds, weeding, and irrigating the local flora they wanted to exploit, and this process led to agriculture and domestication.  These individuals took advantage of garden hunting, which is the process of hunting creatures that try to eat out of your garden, as a means of supplementing their diets.  These groups eventually were able to domesticate these animals over time. 

According to the Oasis Hypothesis, the rise of agriculture was dependent on environment, but there are some inherent problems with this hypothesis.  The biggest it that this hypothesis is very dependent on the desert environments, thereby rendering not applicable areas around the world where there are not a lot of oases.  This applies to several different areas around the world where agriculture was and continues to be successful, such as in the United States. 

Carl Sauer had a different idea when he proposed that a sedentary lifestyle was the motivation for the rise of agriculture in the Sedentary Hypothesis.  He claimed that as people became sedentary, they were able to watch the maturation and harvesting processes associated with the local plants.  They were able to learn from these natural experiments and utilize the information they collected to successfully manipulate the fertilization process and produce crops.  Sauer also believed that the first agriculturalists would not have gone to oases or lived near water, as these environments are unreliable due to unpredictable flooding, but instead would have settled in the lush woodland environments where they could have fully watched and appreciated the natural environment to gain the knowledge required to begin agricultural development.  He also believed that the first domesticates were most likely not meant for food but instead utilitarian purposes, such as poisons for hunting and fibrous plants for clothing manufacture.  He claimed that Southeast Asia was the birthplace of agriculture based on the criteria of his hypothesis.

The next hypothesis that will be discussed is the Readiness Hypothesis, which was created by Robert Braidwood.  He did not think environment was the causal factor of agricultural development and instead ascribed the origins of agriculture to purely cultural and historical factors.  Braidwood believed that people began to domesticate plants after they had accumulated enough information and knowledge in order to do so.  In other words, people became familiar with the environmental conditions necessary to breed plants, and they mimicked this process through artificial selection (the process by which humans carefully choose the plants or animals that will live and reproduce in order to change them into manageable and preferred species) in the process of domestication.  Eventually these humans became masters of the process and eventually agriculturalists.  Therefore, the key to the Readiness Hypothesis is that people become agriculturalists when they have gained the proper knowledge and information to do so, and this timing will vary by society and geographical region accordingly.

The Dump Heap Hypothesis identifies disturb earth as the source of the agricultural revolution.

Edgar Anderson is a biologist who had his own thoughts regarding the origins of agriculture and came up with the Dump Heap Hypothesis.  According to Anderson, specific plant species began to become commonplace in human camps and wherever human intervention and disruption to the earth was commonplace.  These plants thrived in this environment where the land was continually being unintentionally tilled (from building homes/camps or digging middens), fertilized (from fires and middens), and so on.  As these plants became more plentiful in camps, they came to the attention of the human inhabitants and they began to exploit these plants.  Humans quickly associated their activities with the prevalence of these plants, and they began to disturb the land more often to encourage this growth of more plants around the camp.  In this case, plants were unintentionally artificially selected for and domestication was an inevitable byproduct of human intervention.

The last hypothesis to be discussed herein is the Demographic Hypothesis.  Ester Boserup was an agricultural economist who also had ideas concerning agriculture.  She believed that agriculture takes a great investment in time and energy, and people would have invested these into such an activity unless it ensured their survival.  She believed that population booms (aka an increase in the population sizes) caused humans to turn to new means of survival, and agriculture was the most successful due to the consistent food base.  Lewis Binford in part agreed with Boserup’s hypothesis in that domestication was driven by population growth.  He believed that as populations began to exceed their carrying capacities, the number of organisms a given habitat can support, and humans were forced to turn to the hard work of agriculture in order to survive.  This excess occurred for some populations because the plentiful resources available to them caused them to first become sedentary because the food they needed was there and they no longer had to roam the earth looking for food, and from here, they began to multiply their numbers.  Unfortunately, they began to multiply too fast and the natural environment could not keep up by providing them with enough food.  Therefore humans used their great intelligence to learn how to best manipulate their environment to maximize the amount of food available, which led to agriculture. 

Substantial research into the origins of agriculture has been completed and continues within the discipline of archaeology.  Scholars have not narrowed the origins of agriculture to any one of these particular hypotheses, although many believe that it was a combination of two of these five hypotheses.  Based on what you have read here, what do you think?  Let me know in the comments!

Bibliography

Feder, Kenneth and Park M. Human Antiquity: An Introduction to Physical Anthropology and Archeology, McGraw-Hill.