The emergence of agriculture occurred through an unintentional process. My source of information is this book:
The text is not available on the internet but I will provide page scans.
Morris views historical progress through the Heinlein principle:
Morris has expanded the principle to read:
“Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things. And they rarely know what they are doing.”
Around 12,700 BC, a period of global warming caused cereal grains in certain parts of the world (referred to as “The Hilly Flanks”) to grow larger and higher in calories. This made it desirable to forage these grains as a primary food source.
Foraging grain allowed populations to remain in one location, rather than wandering from place to place. People began to concentrate in larger numbers.
Some people (probably women) realized they could save effort by planting the grain seeds in a suitable location and tending to them.
Over time, the practice of planting seeds led to the development of plants that could not reseed themselves. They became domesticated and required human intervention to propagate.
If agriculture is an undesirable development, you can blame women. 😁
It would seem that harvesting grain, at least at the outset, was indeed the best way for the populations of the “lucky latitudes” to feed themselves.
Agriculture emerged independently, rather than by spreading, in at least two other locations. It emerged in the Yellow River Valley in China about two thousand years later than in the Hilly Flanks. A few thousand years after that, it emerged in Mesoamerica.
Its independent emergence in at least three different instances suggests that when populations experience similar circumstances, in this case, global warming and the attendant change in food availability, similar solutions emerge.
This is consistent with another of Ian Morris’s principles:
You have described a circumstance whereby humans lived in an egalitarian paradise for a couple of hundred thousand years. They lived in peace and harmony. All their needs were fulfilled. Their days filled with joy. They committed the ultimate original sin of agriculture and were suddenly cast out of paradise into a miserable patriarchy where they toiled relentlessly hoping to barely subsist.
That is an ancient story. It is found early in the book of Genesis. The author of Genesis was even aware that woman was to blame for the original sin.
You are on a quest to return humanity to paradise. I wish you success.
