Martti Muukkonen (martti.muukkonen (at) joensuu.fi)
University of Joensuu, Finland
The Classical theory of V. Gordon Childe states that agriculture was born due to the
Neolithic revolution that emerged in Near East some 11-10,000 years ago. New
data shows, however, that it was rather a long process than a revolution.
First evidence of utilisation of wild crops comes from Levant some 15.000 years
ago. With the cooling of the climate during the Younger Dryad people returned
to moving hunter-gatherer lifestyle. When the climate again warmed, people
started again utilise wild crops. This started the slow try and error
domestication process when the new skill spread from Jordan Valley to the rest
of the Fertile Crescent. First marks of irrigation agriculture are from the
Samarra culture in Mesopotamia circa 5,000 BC and after thousand years it was
widely utilised.
Theoretically, there is disagreement why this happened. Competing theories
claim for environmental stress, social factors and biological symbiosis. One of
the major problems is that hunter-gatherers were better fed and got their food
easier than agriculturalists. So why to make life more difficult? In this paper
I review existing data on the birth of agriculture and existing theories that
explain this data.