Why did farming begin in the Middle East?
Every meal you eat depends on one invention: farming. For about 300,000 years, humans lived by hunting and gathering. Then, around 11,500 years ago, people in one corner of the Middle East stopped moving and started planting seeds on purpose.
In this video we explore why it happened in the Fertile Crescent first: the world's best wild grasses, a sudden return of the Ice Age, a 23,000-year-old camp found under the Sea of Galilee, and Göbekli Tepe, a giant stone monument built by hunter-gatherers before farming began.
We also look at the strange truth that farming often made life worse at first, and why humanity could never go back.
SOURCES & FURTHER READING
• Diamond, J. (1997). Guns, Germs, and Steel. W. W. Norton.
• Zohary, D., Hopf, M. & Weiss, E. (2012). Domestication of Plants in the Old World. Oxford University Press.
• Cohen, M. N. & Armelagos, G. J. (1984). Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. Academic Press.
• Zeder, M. A. (2011). The origins of agriculture in the Near East. Current Anthropology 52(S4).
• Bar-Yosef, O. (1998). The Natufian culture in the Levant. Evolutionary Anthropology 6(5).
• Moore, A. & Hillman, G. (1992). The impact of the Younger Dryas. American Antiquity 57(3).
• Piperno, D. R. et al. (2004). Processing of wild cereal grains in the Upper Palaeolithic. Nature 430.
• Fuller, D. Q. (2007). Contrasting patterns in crop domestication. Annals of Botany 100.
• Dietrich, O. et al. (2012). The role of cult and feasting in the emergence of Neolithic communities. Antiquity 86.
• Zeder, M. A. & Hesse, B. (2000). The initial domestication of goats in the Zagros Mountains. Science 287.
• Larsen, C. S. (1995). Biological changes in human populations with agriculture. Annual Review of Anthropology 24
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