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The
Origins of Agriculture
TPO21-2
：
The
Origins of Agriculture
How
did
it
come
about
that
farming
developed
independently
in
a
number
of
world
centers
(the
Southeast
Asian
mainland,
Southwest
Asia,
Central
America,
lowland and highland South America, and
equatorial Africa) at more or less the same
time?
Agriculture
developed
slowly
among
populations
that
had
an
extensive
knowledge of
plants and animals. Changing from hunting and
gathering to agriculture
had no
immediate advantages. To start with, it forced the
population to abandon the
nomad's life
and become sedentary, to develop methods of
storage and, often, systems
of
irrigation. While hunter-gatherers always had the
option of moving elsewhere when
the
resources were exhausted, this became more
difficult with farming. Furthermore,
as
the archaeological record shows, the state of
health of agriculturalists was worse
than that of their contemporary hunter-
gatherers.
Traditionally, it was believed that the
transition to agriculture was the result of a
worldwide
population
crisis.
It
was
argued
that
once
hunter-gatherers
had
occupied
the whole world,
the population started to grow everywhere and food
became scarce;
agriculture
would
have
been
a
solution
to
this
problem.
We
know,
however,
that
contemporary hunter-
gatherer societies control their population in a
variety of ways.
The
idea
of
a
world
population
crisis
is
therefore
unlikely,
although
population
pressure might
have arisen in some areas.
Climatic
changes
at
the
end
of
the
glacial
period
13,000
years
ago
have
been
proposed
to
account
for
the
emergence
of
farming.
The
temperature
increased
dramatically
in
a
short
period
of
time
(years
rather
than
centuries),
allowing
for
a
growth of
the hunting-gathering population due to the
abundance of resources. There
were,
however, fluctuations in the climatic conditions,
with the consequences that wet
conditions were followed by dry ones,
so that the availability of plants and animals
oscillated brusquely.
It would appear that the
instability of the climatic conditions led
populations that
had
originally
been
nomadic
to
settle
down
and
develop
a
sedentary
style
of
life,
which led in turn to population growth
and to the need to increase the amount of food
available. Farming originated in these
conditions. Later on, it became very difficult to
change because of the significant
expansion of these populations. It could be
argued,
however, that these conditions
are not sufficient to explain the origins of
agriculture.
Earth
had
experienced
previous
periods
of
climatic
change,
and
yet
agriculture
had
not been developed.
It is archaeologist Steven
Mithen's thesis, brilliantly developed in his book
The
Prehistory of the Mind (1996), that
approximately 40,000 years ago the human mind
developed cognitive fluidity, that is,
the integration of the specializations of the
mind:
technical,
natural
history
(geared
to
understanding
the
behavior
and
distribution
of
natural
resources), social
intelligence,
and the linguistic
capacity. Cognitive fluidity
explains
the
appearance
of
art,
religion,
and
sophisticated
speech.
Once
humans
possessed such a
mind, they were able to find an imaginative
solution to a situation of
severe
economic
crisis
such
as
the
farming
dilemma
described
earlier.
Mithen
proposes
the
existence
of
four
mental
elements
to
account
for
the
emergence
of
farming: (1) the ability to develop
tools that could be used intensively to harvest
and
process plant resources; (2) the
tendency to use plants and animals as the medium
to
acquire social prestige and power;
(3) the tendency to develop
with
animals
structurally
similar
to
those
developed
with
pe
ople
—
specifically,
the
ability
to
think
of
animals
as
people
(anthropomorphism)
and
of
people
as
animals
(totemism); and (4)
the tendency to manipulate plants and animals.
The fact that
some societies domesticated animals and plants,
discovered the use
of metal tools,
became literate, and developed a state should not
make us forget that
others
developed
pastoralism
or
horticulture
(vegetable
gardening)
but
remained
illiterate and at low levels of
productivity; a few entered the modern period as
hunting
and gathering societies. It is
anthropologically important to inquire into the
conditions
that made some societies
adopt agriculture while others remained hunter-
gatherers or
horticulturalists.
However, it should be kept in mind that many
societies that knew of
agriculture
more
or
less
consciously
avoided
it.
Whether
Mithen's
explanation
is