Why Did Early Humans Transition From Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture Around 12,000 Years Ago? — Here’s What Scientists Found

For approximately 2 million years, and the vast majority of human history, humans were hunter-gatherers. This means that rather than growing their food using farming and domestication techniques, they gathered edible plants and hunted meat from animals in the wild.

However, about 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, something changed. The modern human species, Homo sapiens, which had already become widespread on the planet as the other hominins were already extinct by this time, began to grow its own food. But why then? For millions of years, they were hunting and gathering resources, so what made them transition into agriculture? Let’s explore these questions and the theories that could answer them in this article.

A Warmer World & New Environments

One of the prerequisites of farming and agriculture was the right climate. Before the 12,000-year mark, the planet was suffering from ice ages and harsh glacial periods that brought cooler and drier conditions to different places across the world. This phenomenon would have made farming nearly impossible, even if humans had the intelligence and social structures to be able to start it.

Around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago saw the period where the environment became warmer. The ice sheets melted, rainfall patterns changed, and more land that could be farmed became habitable. The territories where humans gathered edible plant sources became more abundant, allowing humans to have the opportunity to be more sedentary and domesticate some crops.

The climate is becoming more stable and predictable, especially in wetter and warmer key regions, making the yearly wild crops like wheat more favorable to survive. These types of circumstances made specific groups of humans, like the Natufian culture in the Levant, settle down even before farming was discovered and practiced. In other words, the climate and environment becoming more favorable is one of the most significant factors that led to farming, but there are a few more.

Read more: National Geographic

Domestication of Plants & Animals

The Neolithic Revolution: Transitioning from Hunters to Farmers | History & Anthropology

One of the other factors that led to the agricultural revolution was the domestication of plants and animals. Before farming, we were already gathering plants, and even had sedentary lifestyles, where some cultures settled down due to the abundance of select crops. Early humans collected wild grains, tubers, fruits, and nuts, and also began taming animals like goats, pigs, and sheep years before.

Humans selected, watered, protected, and sometimes planted, even unintentionally, these plant species. Over time, they could have grown to become dependent on our care, and then these plants and animals gradually changed and coevolved with humans. Moreover, our ancestors favored seeds that were larger and easier to harvest. These choices and adaptations set the stage for the actual jump towards farming, which is a gradual process.

Growing Populations & Food Demand

When the climate and environment became more favorable, and the resources became abundant, humans naturally grew in number. However, this population growth would soon add more pressure to be able to grow one’s food sources instead of relying on yearly wild crops and plants. It is because their abundant resources coming from domestication and predictable climates could only go so far, and will not last to support the whole new, bigger group.

When too many people compete for the same resources, scarcity could follow, as the natural resources would not be able to grow fast enough on their own if it is repeatedly collected. Farming allowed people to produce more food faster and more efficiently per area than letting them grow naturally.

So, rather than continuing to move when the resources became depleted, early humans could have focused on what they currently had, which was the domesticated seeds, plants, animals, and eventually, over time, they learned how to grow their own food systematically.

So the logical sequence of events based on this theory and specific factor would have followed this path: the predictable and stable climate and environment lead to an abundance of resources, triggering the growth of the population of humans, which eventually would surpass the supporting capacity of wild food sources. Then it created the pressure to intensify food production from already domesticated resources, until they arrived at systematic farming and agricultural practices over a long period of time.

Read more: Oregon State University

Social, Cultural, and Safety Incentives

The Agricultural Revolution: Crash Course World History #1

Agriculture and farming did not just bring more food to the table; they also provided several social and cultural benefits that have eventually led to who we are today. First, the increase in predictable and stable food supply allowed humans to stay in one place, build permanent homes, and settle down for the rest of their lives.

This change in lifestyle meant that our ancestors did not need to constantly move anymore, which is a lot more dangerous than agriculture because of the uncertainty of the hunting and gathering survival strategy. The constant migration to a new environment when the last one got depleted also meant that they needed to face threatening challenges, especially during the move, like predators and competition with other human groups.

However, with farming, more children survive into adulthood because there are more people in the group in general, the sedentary lifestyle allows for more births and security for the young ones, and the resources could support them. But also because there is just less danger to survival living in the same place, where the group could create a defensive mechanism against threats, and with a stable food supply.

Additionally, with more people surviving and a surplus of resources, it meant that not everyone needs to focus on hunting or gathering food sources anymore. Not everyone also needed to farm, so this led to an abundance of time and the development of a new social structure. The responsibilities have been divided and new jobs or work appeared, such as being artisans, who created pots to preserve the food, caretakers, who take care of the elderly and children, and leaders who manage the whole group.

With a surplus of resources, the concept of ownership and larger-scale trade also came into place. Different groups of farmers started to exchange their crops with each other. Then, as time passed by, different groups grew larger, traded with one another, and eventually a village was born, laying the foundation for what would become a city and someday a civilization.

Author's Final Thoughts

The transition from hunting and gathering to farming and agriculture is one of the most significant milestones of humans in recent history. It allowed us to increase our numbers at a more rapid pace, with more individuals surviving longer, and it protected us from the dangers and threats of constantly moving around to find resources.

It also gave birth to having different types of jobs aside from producing food, such as artisans and builders, which could have increased the pace of progress of arts and culture. Over a long period of time and many generations, this shift in our lifestyle is what sets us on the path of reaching the modern-day civilizations, starting from a simple village, then a city, a kingdom, an empire, and eventually a nation.

Read next: Why Did Denisovans and Homo sapiens Meet Around 50,000 Years Ago? — Here’s What Researchers Discovered Happened Next

References & Further Reading

Richerson, P. J., Boyd, R., & Bettinger, R. L. (2001). Was agriculture impossible during the Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene? A climate change hypothesis. American Antiquity. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/article/was-agriculture-impossible-during-the-pleistocene-but-mandatory-during-the-holocene-a-climate-change-hypothesis/246B240BFFFBE904B1AC31296AD72949

Bocquet-Appel, J.-P. (2011). When the world’s population took off: The springboard of the Neolithic Demographic Transition. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1208880

Asouti, E., & Fuller, D. Q. (2013). A contextual approach to the emergence of agriculture in Southwest Asia: Reconstructing Early Neolithic plant-food production. Current Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1086/670679

Zeder, M. A. (2015). Core questions in domestication research. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1501711112

Bar-Yosef, O. (2011). Climatic fluctuations and early farming in West and East Asia. Current Anthropology. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/659784

Kohler, T. A., et al. (2014). The Neolithic demographic transition in the U.S. Southwest: Evidence and drivers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4104847/