SUBSISTENCE × SOCIETY

Farming Begins in the Fertile Crescent

~11,500 years ago

Neolithic · Neolithic · Holocene · Greenlandian

As the last glacial period ended, people across the Fertile Crescent began to tend what they had so far only gathered and hunted: sowing wild wheat and barley, penning wild goats and sheep. By at least 11,500 years ago this management was under way for plants and animals at roughly the same time, and it happened in parallel across the whole region rather than spreading from one core village. Cereals that look domesticated, with grains that hold to the stalk, only become common a thousand years later, first in the southern Levant.

Why it matters

Farming rearranged the terms of human life. It fed villages that no longer moved, and villages accumulated what foragers never could: granaries, herds, property, and eventually cities and states. The world population, a few million at the end of the ice age, began the slow climb that has never stopped since. The timeline's own scale makes the sharpest point: our species had already existed for three hundred thousand years before anyone planted a field.

Dating & uncertainty

There is no year zero of agriculture to date. People were managing still-wild plants and animals by at least 11,500 years ago, and the visible marks of domestication, plumper grain and tamer herds, only accumulate over the following millennium or more, at different times in different valleys. Any single date is a convention about where in that process to plant the flag.

Sources

1. Zeder (2011), Current Anthropology · The Origins of Agriculture in the Near Eastdoi:10.1086/659307
2. Arranz-Otaegui et al. (2016), PNAS · Regional diversity on the timing for the initial appearance of cereal cultivation and domestication in southwest Asiadoi:10.1073/pnas.1612797113
3. Fuller, Willcox & Allaby (2011), World Archaeology · Cultivation and domestication had multiple originsdoi:10.1080/00438243.2011.624747

Our species’ history as one day

23:07:2552 min 34 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day