Why Was Agriculture So Important?
About this video
Farming began independently in several regions that were not connected: the Fertile Crescent about 11,000 years ago, then China, Papua New Guinea, West Africa, Mesoamerica and the Andes. The video explains two main reasons, overpopulation and climate change, and uses the Natufians of the Fertile Crescent as an example of how settled foragers became farmers.
You'll be able to
- name several regions where agriculture began independently and a crop grown in each.
- explain how overpopulation and climate change pushed people towards farming.
- describe how the Natufians went from foraging to settling in villages to farming.
Key words
- Fertile Crescent
- Highlands east of the Mediterranean where farming seems to have begun about 11,000 years ago.
- Foraging
- Getting food by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals.
- Paleolithic Era
- The long early period of human history when people lived as foragers.
- Interglacial period
- A warmer period between ice ages; we have been living in one for about 12,000 years.
- Sedentary
- Living in one place for most of the year instead of moving around.
- Natufians
- People who settled in villages in the Fertile Crescent before farming began.
Transcript
[Music] In today's world, with 7 billion humans to feed, foraging couldn't come near to providing enough food. Farming is absolutely essential to the survival of the modern world. [Music] At the moment, it looks as if farming really began about 11,000 years ago in the highlands east of the Mediterranean that we know as the Fertile Crescent. And here they grew wheat. It may also have grown appeared at about the same time in the Nile Valley slightly further south. Then from about 8,000 years ago, we have evidence of rice growing in China. And at about the same time, we have evidence of the growing of taro and yams in the highlands of Papua, New Guinea. Though it took several thousand years for agriculture
to really flourish here. Then, from about 5,000 to 4,000 years ago, agriculture pops up in several different parts of the world. In West Africa, farmers start growing sorghum and millet. And farming also appears in the Americas, right across the Atlantic. In Mesoamerica, where they're growing maize and squash. And also in the Andes, where potatoes are a very important crop.
From these core regions, agriculture then spreads to neighboring regions. But there's a real puzzle here--because none of the core regions seem to have been connected. So what was really going on? [Music] There seemed to be two main reasons One factor is overpopulation The other is climate change. And these factors operated in many different parts of the world. Let's take over population first. During the Paleolithic Era, if populations grew too much you could generally solve the problem by migrating into a new region. But after the settlement of the Americas from about 15,000 years ago, there were no large areas left to migrate into. So, from now on if populations began to grow you had to try to get more resources from a given area. In other words, you had to farm.
Now, that's the first factor. The second, climate change is subtler. Most of the Paleolithic Era was dominated by the ice ages. And during the ice ages, for the most part climates were so cold and so unpredictable, that farming was more or less impossible. Then--from about 18,000 years ago, global climates began to change. They began to get warmer. Glaciers began to retreat. Sea levels began to rise.
And, in area after area, you began to get warmer and wetter climates. Then, from about 12,000 years ago climates became warmer and wetter--and we entered the interglacial period that we're still living in today. Now, as a result of global climate change, humans and animals and plants everywhere in the world had to start changing their behaviors.
[Music] In some areas, such as the Fertile Crescent, east of the Mediterranean, as climates changed resources became more abundant. There were more plants and more animals. And in these regions, these particularly favored regions, some foragers began to settle down because they found they could live in one place for most of the year without traveling around. And they began to form villages. They became sedentary In the Fertile Crescent, archaeologists refer to the people who settled in these villages as Natufians, and they've excavated many of their villages.
As they settled down, their behaviors changed. And in particular, populations began to grow. We're not sure why, but one reason may be that if you're a villager, you don't have to carry children around. So there's less pressure to reduce the number of children. In any case, populations grew and that posed a problem. Within a few generations, they found they didn't have enough resources to feed everyone. In what had once seemed an area of abundance. So what are they to do?
Well, perhaps they could go back to foraging. The problem was, they'd probably forgotten many of the old techniques of foraging. And besides, neighbors probably occupied those lands now. So, what can they do? Well, they can start tending their crops and animals more carefully.
They can start providing the plants they like with with extra water. They can start clearing away weeds. They can start penning particular animals in in enclosures. In fact, they can start farming. Now, something like what happened to the Natufians seems to have happened in many other areas. Agriculture is not just a matter of tastier fruit or fatter cows.
Agriculture unlocked forces much more powerful than that--and they would transform human history. [Music]
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