The Origins and Spread of Agriculture

The origin of agriculture dates back to 1000 years ago because this was the time when agriculture developed and humans began to domesticate plants and animals. So, by setting up domesticity, families and huge groups built communities and came out from a nomadic hunter-collector life that was reliant on foraging and hunting for their sustenance.

Talking about how the Nile floods help farmers grow crops from the Fertile Crescent. Well! There was a time when two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, regularly flooded the region, and the Nile river runs via a part of it, which made the land fertile all across it. Thus, the fertile soil because of these rivers led to the development of Irrigation and the spread of agriculture.

On this page, we will understand more about the history of id farming started and spread all across the world. Also, we get to learn the facts on how agriculture contributed to the rise of civilization and in changing the life of a primitive man.

How did Farming Start and How It Spread?

A question arises that how did early humans begin to grow food. Well! Farming started around 12,000 years ago when our hunter-gatherer ancestors started trying their hand at farming.

Initially, they grew wild varieties of crops like:

• Peas, 

• Lentils, and 

• Barley, 

while they herded wild animals like goats and wild oxen.

However, centuries later, they switched to full-time farming, breeding both animals and plants, producing new varieties and breeds. Ultimately, they migrated outside, spreading farming in various parts of Europe and Asia.

Early Study

During the earliest times when farming started, farmers used to live in the Fertile Crescent, a region in the Middle East incorporating modern-day places such as:

• Iraq, 

• Jordan, 

• Syria, 

• Israel, 

• Palestine, 

• Southeastern Turkey, and 

• Western Iran. 

Additionally, scientists had long back assumed that these early farmers were a similar group that traded and intermixed, swapping farming tools and tricks along with their genes. In simple words, farming was entirely believed to have been initiated by one group of ancestral humans, which was then spread to various parts of the world (that are Europe and Asia).

New Study

Though the farming started by our farming ancestors is an early study, however, a new study is said to have flipped our old knowledge. It stated that instead of one, there were multiple groups of people of different genes in the Fertile Crescent who started agriculture. 

"These groups lived more or less in a similar area, but they stay highly isolated from each other, i.e., they never intermingled with each other, at least for a few thousand years," as said by Joachim Burger, an anthropologist at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, in Germany, and co-author of the new study.

Now, let us gain more insight into how early humans began to grow food and do they really belong to single or multiple groups at that time.

Examination on Fertile Crescent 

Burger and an international crew of scientists examined ancient DNA from the remains of 4 individuals who lived about 10,000 years ago at the Japanese edges of the Fertile Crescent - the Zagros Mountains on the border between Iraq and Iran. 

They compared the DNA of these people with that of skeletons that were a couple of thousand years younger and were found a way on the other end of the Fertile Crescent, an area that comprises modern-day Turkey.

But the two groups couldn't be more genetically different, says Burger.

"We would not always expect massive genetic differences from one end of Fertile Crescent to another," says evolutionary biologist Mark Thomas of University College, London, additionally a creator of the new study. But in fact, the genetic signatures propose that the Anatolians and the Zagros populations diverged from a common ancestor a few 46,000 to 77,000 years in the past - long before the advent of farming. "That's a marvel. That's the actual big surprise of the study," Thomas says.

Perhaps no one was more amazed than Burger. Just the remaining month, he published a study that observed that late Stone Age farmers from the Turkey area had migrated north into Europe and added farming there. So understandably, he had anticipated being able to trace European agriculture all the way again to the Japanese Fertile Crescent.

But it truly is not what the DNA said. The new examination makes it clear that these earliest farmers of the Japanese Fertile Crescent did not migrate westward — and in order that they were not liable for spreading agriculture to Western Europe. No wonder, then, that the crew additionally did not find any genetic similarity among these historic farmers and modern-day Europeans.

Farming Techniques Resembling Present-Day Countries: Thomas

On the other hand, the early farmers of Zagros appear to have a striking genetic resemblance to present-day humans in South Asia, in particular Pakistan and Afghanistan. That suggests that the descendants of the early farmers from Zagros possibly migrated east, taking their farming techniques to that part of the world. That makes sense, says Thomas, because previous work by other researchers has proven "clear evidence of movement of crops and animals into Iran and northwestern parts of the Indian subcontinent."

An unpublished examination by a crew at Harvard Medical School confirms the genetic closeness of the early Zagros farmers with South Asians and additionally suggests that the early farmers of the Southern Levant (modern Syria and Palestine) moved to Africa, taking their farming traditions south with them. Clearly, the different populations in different parts of the Middle East migrated in distinctive directions.

Conclusion of the Study By Thomas and His Team

The concept that farming commenced in a single population came from preliminary archaeological discoveries in one part of the Mideast - the Southern Levant, says Melinda Zeder, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, who wasn't worried in the study. But more recent excavations have proven that there was an "explosion of people" tinkering with farming everywhere in the Fertile Crescent.

These findings and the modern study portray a complicated picture of the early days of agriculture, says Zeder. "There are no clear signs of trade throughout the entire Fertile Crescent," she says. For instance, there may be proof that human beings exchanged tools. "We are seeing that people are in communication with one another. ... But it is of less relevance."

Now, let us understand how the Nile river's flooding affects farming and how it helped a primitive man.

How did The Nile Floods Help Farmers Grow Crops?

The flooding of the Nile formed the narrow strip of land (that was extremely fertile) on both sides of the river. Intensive agriculture was practised by the maximum of the peasant population. As the floodwaters subsided in October, farmers were left with well-watered and fertile soil in which sowing and plowing could begin, using primitive wooden plows.

Therefore, the soil left by the flooding is called silt that was brought from Ethiopian Highlands by the Nile.

Thus, evidence for the harvesting of wild cereal grasses dates to around 10,000 BCE in the Middle East, and the primary flint sickles to were found probably came from this period. There is no proof of cultivation of the soil at that time, however, by 9000 BCE the crucial breakthrough had happened in Palestine and southern Turkey (consistent with our modern-day knowledge), where cereals consisting of wild emmer and barley, which flourished in the region, were deliberately grown and bred. So, the spread of agriculture brought about various facts that we understand now.

Facts and Information on Agriculture 

• Seeing the exponential rise in population, farmers need to produce 70% more food than today to feed the world's growing demands by 2050. 

• Agriculture is the biggest employer in the world, as 40 % of the world’s population is involved in agri-business management.

• India is the world’s second-largest producer of pulses, rice, milk, jute, and cotton. Currently, India can fulfill the needs of Indian people and export to all over the world.

Conclusion

Thus, in the article, we got a basic understanding of the different studies behind the origin of agriculture. In simple words, we can say that agriculture didn't have simple origins. It was also not consistent at all the places. We only can say that agriculture was only possible in the beginning when early man started knowing about crops and thought of a settled lifestyle which led to adoption of agriculture.