Farming Invented Twice in the Middle East, Genomes Study Reveals
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Some points of evidence include:
1) The advent of farming coincides roughly with the Late Pleistocene Extinction event which saw many of the large game mammals (human prey) die out
2) Bone samples from the era show that the advent of farming coincides with a decline in human height and greater enamel defects showing malnutrition. This is strong evidence that farming was a step down for our early ancestors not a step up.
3) Tribes like the San Bushman and early Australian aborigines knew full well about farming but chose to forgo it because in their region, food was plentiful enough to be hunted and gathered. This is evidence that farming is not necessarily the result of new innovation (people don't instantly and automatically switch to farming just because they know about it).
see:
http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in...
Based on this it seems like farming was not invented separately in separate places but rather that most early humans were aware of the possibility of farming and that switched to it as conditions deteriorated as a result of climate change at the end of the last ice age.
Maybe, but for them to be aware of it, someone had to come up with the idea, right? Farming isn't an obvious idea at all if hunting and gathering is all you've done your whole life.
Maybe not obvious, but almost that
The point is there's a huge difference between knowing that manually sowing and harvesting crops is possible, maybe even small scale incidental agriculture such as sowing seeds at a site and returning to harvest it months later, and choosing to settle permanently and thoroughly adapt your lifestyle around it. Maybe they knew it was possible for thousands of years, or even more, but only chose to do it in a systematic way when they ran out of other options.
Ants were doing it long before us.
Anything so complex, you tend to figure out various optimizations (from tooling to timing and beyond) from painful long-term on-the-ground experience. I'd argue "the knowledge of farming" is really that, rather than the simple notion that planting seeds may (or may not) grow new plants.
That ancients "kinda sorta knew" that "planting" (or discarding) a plant's seeds someplace may yield a new growth there, I don't doubt. Of course actual farming needs to yield a maximum of kcals per acre/crop, given the massive amount of labour investment and social disruption required. To maximize this yield over the generations under the given local conditions (weather, soil, crops), isn't that the actual "knowledge of farming", only obtainable by doing the actual toil over the decades and indeed centuries? And when they encountered a new crop, a new soil or a new clime, knowledge for maximizing ROI had to be gained from scratch.
Consider, vermin are going to take more of the harvest the longer it's around. But, if your only trying to cover winter months then even fairly small harvests can make a huge benefit which dramatically reduces effort.
Agreed, farming isn't hard when you do only very little of it on the side because fish and game still abound ;)
If we want to think about early farming something like a medieval peasant that only supported themselves, and had a surplus of high quality land to work with they might have only needed to work 1/5th or less as much.
Don't forget farmers have something to steal in both land and food. A hunter gather only has some tools not much food and are nomadic anyway. But, a village with 1+ years worth of food for 30+ people is a huge and stationary target.
PS: I suspect the tipping point was selective breading producing high yield plant strains which kept lowering the effort of farming. Until a population boom prevented anything else from being viable.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1842.Guns_Germs_and_Stee...
There is absolutely zero evidence of Australian aborigines farming so where on earth does this statement come from?
Which is why I knew there was no evidence, when this came out, and seemed obviously not true I was surprised at the time everyone as saying this was the 'first' evidence of farming.
"In the first evidence of a sedentary Aboriginal community, Builth found what she argues is an ancient eel farm in the form of countless channels crisscrossing the landscape at Lake Condah."
Makes for a good thesis but she(one person in the whole community) is still arguing the point.
I don't agree with this. What these communities were domesticating or farming is indicative of their local geography and would worked best for them in that region, it's not enough to conclude that since they are farming different crops, then they must have come up with idea independently. That's like saying we found group A burning wood and group B burning leaves therefor they must have discovered fire independently.
If you can find tools or instruments that are unique or specific documents that highlights varied farming processes that are unique then you have a better argument, and even then I wouldn't state it as conclusively as the article suggests.
It's still not strong enough.
Farming is not a simple technology. It's a way of life and encompasses a package of technologies.
And the crops and animals raised in the respective origins could be raised in both locations so there's no obvious reason why diffusion of the farming knowledge would not be accompanied by the spread of those crops and animals.
This does not reflect the observed behavior of humans. As noted here, hunter-gatherers generally are not willing to start farming even when a model for that lifestyle is known to them. Moving farmers are extremely reluctant (with good reason!) to just eat what's available in the new area. The Polynesians spread all over the Pacific, and they did it by bringing their pigs, chickens, and roots with them. The part of the Polynesian diet that reflects local geography is: fish. Europeans came to America and they brought their crops and animals with them too. They did copy local crops -- but they copied them from local farmers, not from the wilderness (wild plants are never going to compete with food crops anyway -- they are adapted to radically different circumstances). And to this day we eat more wheat than maize in the US, because that is our cultural tradition. Local geography has nothing to do with that.