The origins of agriculture started with harvesting small seeds--wheat, barley, millet, lentils, chickpeas. Archaeological evidence today suggests that a fitting metaphor to that process would be "the long and winding road" leading to agriculture.
Up until fairly recently, the development of agriculture was thought to be a rapid process. The process, at whatever speed, goes something like this:
- recognition of the potential for a seed crop and harvesting it
- cultivating a wild stand
- uprooting the stalks and moving them to a different location
- (and) recognition of seeds as the genesis of the plants
- selecting the 'best' producing seeds to replant, leading to
- genetic-level changes in the plant
By the way, archaeologists today think of this as a dual-domestication process, in that not only does the plant change, but the people change their own behaviors to suit the plant's needs.
Origin Theories
In the 1970s, archaeologists like Robert Braidwood and Kent Flannery proposed that the first steps toward agriculture happened after people started living in settlements: the Oasis Theory. Denser populations, goes the theory, forced people to choose less-than-stellar food sources. The first true group settlements were in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, say about 8,000-12,000 years ago.
Flannery, building on what Lewis Binford had discussed, called this shift the Broad Spectrum Revolution and argued that settling down wasn't necessarily first. The BSR theory argues that people broadened their resource base to include small seeds and small animals at the end of the last ice age after the large bodied mammals died out or were exterminated, or both, depending on how you stand with respect to the Megafaunal Extinctions.
More Ancient Origins of Agriculture
But recent evidence at sites such as Ohalo II in Israel and Xiaojingshan in China reveals that harvesting of small seeds was part of a hunter-gatherer form of subsistence as long ago as the late Upper Paleolithic, closer to 16,000 to 20,000 years ago. The evidence for that includes tools like grinding stones and blade sickles; plant residues like phytoliths, pollen and starches; and even charred seeds themselves.
That's what I call the deep origins of agriculture.
More on Origins of Agriculture Theories
Specifics on Crop Domestications
More Reading
These are some of the articles I've been reading to come up with this synthesis. Others may be found in the specific glossary entries listed above.
Abbo, Shahal, et al. 2008 Wild lentil and chickpea harvest in Israel: bearing on the origins of Near Eastern farming. Journal of Archaeological Science 35(12):3172-3177.
Allaby, Robin G., Dorian Q. Fuller, and Terence A. Brown 2008 The genetic expectations of a protracted model for the origins of domesticated crops. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (37):13982-13986.
Hu, Yaowu, et al. 2008 Stable isotope analysis of humans from Xiaojingshan site: implications for understanding the origin of millet agriculture in China. Journal of Archaeological Science 35(11):2960-2965.
Stiner, Mary C. 2001 Thirty years on the "Broad Spectrum Revolution" and paleolithic demography. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98(13):6993-6996.
Comments
Along the lines of your comments, please see “The genetic expectations of a protracted model for the origins of domesticated crops” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105(37):13982-13986.
Thanks so much! I knew there was one more I should add, but couldn’t find it to save my life. Here’s the complete ref and a link to the page:
Allaby, Robin G., Dorian Q. Fuller, and Terence A. Brown 2008 The genetic expectations of a protracted model for the origins of domesticated crops. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (37):13982-13986.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0803780105
This is an excellent summary and a great place to start any investigation into the subject. Good job! Let me just suggest one more reading. Steven Mithen’s book After the Ice:A Global Human History, 20,000-5000 BC, Harvard University Press, 2003, is one the best reads on any archaeological topic I have encountered in a long time. He uses a marvelous literary technique that really brings the subject to life but I will not tell you what it is. At 600 pages it is not for the faint of heart but can be read in manageable segments over a month or so. The problem is that once you pick it up you do not want to put it down. This is one book I wish had written.