The Invention of Agriculture | How Farming Really Began

Nobody invented farming in a flash of genius. It was backed into slowly, unevenly, over centuries by people who were just trying to survive a climate that had turned against them. 11,000 years ago, on the banks of the Euphrates, a woman harvests wild rye that grows back every year on its own. Nobody plants anything nobody needs to. Within two thousand years, her descendants will do something no human being has ever done: put seeds in the ground on purpose. In this video we trace how agriculture actually emerged in the Fertile Crescent from the settled, sickle-wielding Natufians living in an age of natural abundance, through the sudden cold snap of the Younger Dryas, to the archaeobotanical evidence at Abu Hureyra that may capture cultivation happening in real time. We look at how domestication is a genetic accident, not a decision how a single non-shattering mutant grain, favored by a sickle instead of the wind, quietly rewired an entire species. And we go beyond the Fertile Crescent to the at least seven places around the world China, Mesoamerica, the Andes, New Guinea, sub-Saharan Africa where totally isolated peoples arrived at the same solution, separately, again and again. It's not a simple story of progress, either. Early farmers were shorter and sicker than the foragers before them. What agriculture offered wasn't a better life it was more calories per acre, and more mouths fed, which is ultimately why farming populations won out. If you enjoyed this, subscribe, and let us know in the comments: which of the seven independent origins of farming surprised you most? Next time, we go back further still to the last humans on Earth who never needed to plant a single seed. 📚 Sources & further reading: Bar-Yosef, O. (1998). "The Natufian culture in the Levant." Evolutionary Anthropology. Unger-Hamilton, R. (1989). "The Epi-Palaeolithic Southern Levant and the origins of cultivation." Current Anthropology. Alley, R.B. (2000). "The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland." Quaternary Science Reviews. Moore, A.M.T. & Hillman, G.C. (1992). "The Pleistocene to Holocene transition and human economy in Southwest Asia." American Antiquity. Hillman, G.C. et al. (2001). "New evidence of Late Glacial cereal cultivation at Abu Hureyra." The Holocene. Colledge, S. & Conolly, J. (2010). "Reassessing the archaeobotanical evidence for the plant domestication process at Abu Hureyra." Environmental Archaeology. Heun, M. et al. (1997). "Site of einkorn wheat domestication identified by DNA fingerprinting." Science. Özkan, H. et al. (2002). "AFLP analysis of a collection of tetraploid wheats." Molecular Biology and Evolution. Diamond, J. (2002). "Evolution, consequences and future of plant and animal domestication." Nature. Denham, T.P. et al. (2003). "Origins of agriculture at Kuk Swamp in the highlands of New Guinea." Science. Mummert, A. et al. (2011). "Stature and robusticity during the agricultural transition." Economics and Human Biology. (Full source list included in the video / pinned comment.) #Agriculture #HumanHistory #Archaeology #Farming #AncientHistory #YoungerDryas #FertileCrescent #Domestication #History #Documentary Suggested tags: invention of agriculture, history of farming, Natufian culture, Fertile Crescent, Younger Dryas, Abu Hureyra, domestication of wheat, origins of farming, ancient history documentary, agricultural revolution