Why was agriculture invented in the Holocene Epoch and not before?

[lpetrich]

There is a curious fact about agriculture. All surviving inventions of it date back to earlier in the Holocene Epoch, and not before. Was agriculture not invented before then? Was it invented but could not be sustained? The same may also be true of some Holocene inventions of agriculture.

Let's take a closer look:  Neolithic Revolution and  Vavilov center and  List of food origins and (PDF) Current perspectives and the future of domestication studies

Agriculture was invented in several places, with several different crop plants, and here are the places where the inventions were sustained to recent centuries. I have assembled the dates from several sources.

Where	When (BP)
(Holocene)	11,650 - present
Middle East	12,000
India	8,500
China	11,500
New Guinea	10,000
East Africa	8,000
West Africa	4,500
North America	6,500
Central America	10,000
Andes: South America	10,000
Amazonia: South America	9,000

BP =  Before Present taken to be 1950 Jan 1.

The  Holocene Epoch is defined as the end of the  Younger Dryas cold snap (12,900 to 11,700 BP), a brief return to ice-age conditions at the end of the  Pleistocene Epoch.  Younger Dryas impact hypothesis is a speculation on the cause of that event.

 

[steve_bank]

The path of least resistance?

I is easier for a group to farm than hunt and gather.

 

[Elixir]

The path of least resistance?

It is easier for a group to farm than hunt and gather.

Right. Except during an ice age.
A thousand year long setback in harvests may have taken the shine off the farming option for a while. And the ice probably erased most evidence of crop cultivation prior to 13k bp, if it existed.

 

[bilby]

You can't stay in one spot unless you farm, because your tribe will exhaust the local food supply.

But you can't ferment alcoholic beverages unless you stay in one spot - and ideally that spot should be producing plenty of grain of one kind or another, which again implies farming.

Nomadic people have a far better diet and typically a far better lifestyle than farmers. But they don't have beer.

 

[lpetrich]

The path of least resistance?

It is easier for a group to farm than hunt and gather.

Right. Except during an ice age.
A thousand year long setback in harvests may have taken the shine off the farming option for a while. And the ice probably erased most evidence of crop cultivation prior to 13k bp, if it existed.

Our planet didn't get iced over during the Ice Ages -- not even close. The  Last Glacial Maximum was about 25,000 - 20,000 years ago, and the farthest the ice went was Canada / northern contiguous US and northern Europe. South of this ice was temperate and subtropical and tropical climates.

 

[lpetrich]

Our species is much older than the beginning of the Holocene.

•  Early modern human - anatomical modernity at roughly 200,000 - 300,000 BP
•  Behavioral modernity - at least 100,000 BP (Blombos Cave, South Africa)

Here's a giveaway feature of our present species, one that is easy to recognize in fossils. The chin. In our present species, it sticks out a little, while in predecessor species, it doesn't. So we could rename our species Homo magnimentum ("big chin")

This means that for at least 100,000 years, our ancestors never invented agriculture. But over the last 12,000 years, several populations invented agriculture independently, and did so in places all over the globe.

 

[Elixir]

South, hunting/gathering was still easier than farming.

You can't stay in one spot unless you farm, because your tribe will exhaust the local food supply.

But you can't ferment alcoholic beverages unless you stay in one spot - and ideally that spot should be producing plenty of grain of one kind or another, which again implies farming.

Nomadic people have a far better diet and typically a far better lifestyle than farmers. But they don't have beer.

^that.
Farming has economy of scale that hunting/gathering doesn’t. So as populations increased farming became more and more essential.

 

[Bronzeage]

What does "inventing agriculture look like? Agriculture is the use of long term planning which allows a person to produce a food surplus which can be stored for later use. There are actually very few food plants which suit this criteria.

Although agriculture may have existed all over the planet, there are only two places where it had a real impact on society, which is to say civilization. The first is the Middle East, where the early strains of wheat were developed, and China, which was based on rice. These crops allowed for population expansion, which combined with other factors such as a suitable beast of burden, drove technology development.

 

[bilby]

What does "inventing agriculture look like? Agriculture is the use of long term planning which allows a person to produce a food surplus which can be stored for later use. There are actually very few food plants which suit this criteria.

Although agriculture may have existed all over the planet, there are only two places where it had a real impact on society, which is to say civilization. The first is the Middle East, where the early strains of wheat were developed, and China, which was based on rice. These crops allowed for population expansion, which combined with other factors such as a suitable beast of burden, drove technology development.

Maize underpinned another agricultural civilisation, whose baked goods were allegedly fantastic, though no recipes survived the predations of the Spanish Conquistadors, so bye, bye, Mesoamerican pie...

 

[lpetrich]

What does "inventing agriculture look like? Agriculture is the use of long term planning which allows a person to produce a food surplus which can be stored for later use. There are actually very few food plants which suit this criteria.

How is that? We have oodles of domesticated plants, crop plants, and we eat most parts of crop plants, even if not most parts of each individual one: roots, stems, leaves, flowers, seeds, seed casings. We also use plants' structural materials as raw materials: wood and fibers, both stem fibers and seed fibers. We even raise ornamental plants, like plants raised for their flowers.

Although agriculture may have existed all over the planet, there are only two places where it had a real impact on society, which is to say civilization. The first is the Middle East, where the early strains of wheat were developed, and China, which was based on rice. These crops allowed for population expansion, which combined with other factors such as a suitable beast of burden, drove technology development.

One must add Central America and the Andes are also places where agriculture made possible large-scale societies. However, I don't know how much that can be said about Amazonia or West Africa or East Africa or Central Asia or India or Southeast Asia or New Guinea. The Mediterranean and North America are centers that were influenced by the Middle East and Central America, respectively.

Look at  List of domesticated plants - oodles of them - and  Vavilov center of plant domestication - several of them.

 

[lpetrich]

We currently use crop plants from most of the plant-domestication centers: the Middle East (wheat), the Mediterranean (lettuce, olive), East Africa (coffee), India (cucumber, cinnamon), Central Asia (carrot, apple), China (rice, soybean, orange), Southeast Asia (coconut), New Guinea (banana), Central America (American corn, pumpkin), North America (sunflower), the Andes (potato, Lima bean), Amazonia (peanut, pineapple, cocoa).

 List of domesticated animals is not quite as long as for plants.

The only pre-Holocene (Paleolithic) domestication is of a now-extinct Eurasian wolf (sub)species, around 15,000 BP, giving the domestic dog.

All the others were domesticated in the Holocene, and nearly all at places and times where crop plants were grown. The first one was the goat, domesticated around 12,000 BP, at the beginning of the Holocene in the Middle East.

I've also found  List of domesticated fungi and microorganisms

 

[steve_bank]

There was a show Survivor Man. A guy named Les Shroud dropped himself into remote places and videoed himself survivng.

He did a show living with natives-aborigines in South America. They had some contact with the outside world but were traditional hunter gatherers.

Building and rainmaking arrows, bows, and spears was a daily occupation. When they walked to visit another village they carried bags for game and food taken along the way.

The local group was fully occupied every day with getting enough calories.

To ancient humans farming would have been a logical step, along with domestication.

The show is probably online.

Large scale agriculture requires water and space. Egypt and the Nile.

An ice age? Go south for the winter

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Large scale agriculture probably relied on animal domestication. You cannot plow without them. A few exceptions existed, corn for example. But large scale farming of wheat and barley need plows.

 

[Swammerdami]

The simplest explanation is probably the key. The Holocene was the warmest climate on earth since the Eemian Interglacial, over 100,000 years earlier. If early farming required subtropical plains, the Holocene was the first opportunity since 120,000 BC.

And humans 120,000 years ago did not have the same language and tool-making skills as modern humans have. Yes, H. sapiens could interbreed with Neanderthal man, but the superiority of modern man is demonstrated by the ease and rapidity with which Neanderthals were eradicated.

Our species is much older than the beginning of the Holocene.

•  Early modern human - anatomical modernity at roughly 200,000 - 300,000 BP
•  Behavioral modernity - at least 100,000 BP (Blombos Cave, South Africa)

Here's a giveaway feature of our present species, one that is easy to recognize in fossils. The chin. In our present species, it sticks out a little, while in predecessor species, it doesn't. So we could rename our species Homo magnimentum ("big chin")

The big chin might be a "giveaway feature," but it was linguistic skill which was most important. Modern man had a better vocal tract than Neanderthals, and perhaps specially adapted cerebral features. lpetrich's own cite,  Behavioral modernity, admits its thesis is undertain:

The Late Upper Paleolithic Model, or Upper Paleolithic Revolution, refers to the idea that, though anatomically modern humans first appear around 150,000 years ago (as was once believed), they were not cognitively or behaviorally "modern" until around 50,000 years ago, leading to their expansion out of Africa and into Europe and Asia.[7][18][19] These authors note that traits used as a metric for behavioral modernity do not appear as a package until around 40–50,000 years ago.

 

[lpetrich]

The last 2.5 million years, the  Pleistocene epoch, has had very variable climate, with the continental glaciers coming and going over a timescale of roughly 100 thousand years.  Interglacial and  Glacial period -  Holocene (current interglacial) and  Eemian (previous interglacial). Pre-Holocene interglacials often have several regional names, and often no overall name, like Holocene or Eemian. Also  Last Glacial Period and  Penultimate Glacial Period and Quaternary glaciation and  Marine isotope stages

Interglacial	Begin (Kyr BP)	End (Kyr BP)	Duration (Kyr BP)
MIS 1 - Holocene	11.65	0 (not ended)	11.65 (not ended)
MIS 5e - Eemian	130	115	15
(weak)	220	200	20
MIS 7 - Aveley	242	230	12
MIS 9 - Purfleet	337	300	37
MIS 11 - Hoxnian	424	374	50
MIS 13 - Cromerian	524	474	50

MIS = Marine Isotope Stage

The Eemian interglacial is also called Sangamonian, Ipswichian, Mikulin, Kaydaky, Valdivia, Riss-Würm, penultimate, or the last interglacial.

 Blombos Cave - that's some of the oldest evidence of behavioral modernity, and its artifacts go back to some 70 - 100 Kyr BP. That's a little after the Eemian interglacial.

So if our ancestors could only get agriculture started during an interglacial period, why this one and not the Eemian?

 

[lpetrich]

I'll now look at animal domestication, using  List of domesticated animals and the times for domestication of plant species. Times are kiloyears BP.

The dog is the only species with pre-Holocene domestication.

Place	Plant dom.	Animal dom.	Species
Middle East	12,000	12,000	Goat, pig, sheep, bovine, cat
China	11,500	11,000	Pig, duck, silkmoth
India	8,500	10,000	Bovine, water buffalo
Southeast Asia	8,500	8,000	Chicken, water buffalo
Andes	10,000	7,000	Guinea pig, llama, alpaca
Arabia		6,000	Camel
Western Steppe Zone		5,500	Horse
Mediterranean		5,000	Honeybee, goose, pigeon, rabbit

So animal domestication is more recent than plant domestication with the exception of the dog.

 

[steve_bank]

It ws not just agriculture. Speciazation wnet had in hand with agriculture. With a stable food sipply that did not take the kabor of the entire group some people got good at making shoes, others bows and arrows.

 

[lpetrich]

It ws not just agriculture. Speciazation wnet had in hand with agriculture. With a stable food sipply that did not take the kabor of the entire group some people got good at making shoes, others bows and arrows.

Yes, such specialization was made possible by agriculture. Lots of other technologies are also likely dependent on agriculture, like metalworking and writing.

From  Smelting -

Metal(s)	Place	Discovery Time	Agriculture time
Tin, lead	Çatal Höyük, Turkey	6,500 BCE	7,100 BCE
Copper	Pločnik and Belovode, Serbia	5,500 BCE	6,000 BCE
Iron	Kaman-Kalehöyük, Turkey	2,200 BCE	6,600 BCE

From  Writing -

Place	Invention Time	Agriculture Time
Sumer (Southeastern Iraq)	3,200 BCE	8,300 BCE
Egypt	3,100 BCE	6,000 BCE
China	1,200 BCE	9,500 BCE
Central America	1,000 BCE	8,000 BCE

 

[lpetrich]

Now for the hypotheses.

Was low atmospheric CO2 during the Pleistocene a limiting factor for the origin of agriculture? - SAGE - 1995 - Global Change Biology - Wiley Online Library
Abstract:

Agriculture originated independently in many distinct regions at approximately the same time in human history. This synchrony in agricultural origins indicates that a global factor may have controlled the timing of the transition from foraging to food-producing economies. The global factor may have been a rise in atmospheric CO2 from below 200 to near 270 μol mol−1 which occurred between 15,000 and 12,000 years ago. Atmospheric CO2 directly affects photosynthesis and plant productivity, with the largest proportional responses occurring below the current level of 350 μol mol−1. In the late Pleistocene, CO2 levels near 200 μol mol−1 may have been too low to support the level of productivity required for successful establishment of agriculture. Recent studies demonstrate that atmospheric CO2 increase from 200 to 270 μol mol−1 stimulates photosynthesis and biomass productivity of C3 plants by 25% to 50%, and greatly increases the performance of C3 plants relative to weedy C4 competitors. Rising CO2 also stimulates biological nitrogen fixation and enhances the capacity of plants to obtain limiting resources such as water and mineral nutrients. These results indicate that increases in productivity following the late Pleistocene rise in CO2 may have been substantial enough to have affected human subsistence patterns in ways that promoted the development of agriculture. Increasing CO2 may have simply removed a productivity barrier to successful domestication and cultivation of plants. Through effects on ecosystem productivity, rising CO2 may also have been a catalyst for agricultural origins by promoting population growth, sedentism, and novel social relationships that in turn led to domestication and cultivation of preferred plant resources.

I find that unconvincing, because that is not a very strong effect. At most, it would mean that agriculture could be started and sustained in fewer Pleistocene places.

But there were none, while in the Holocene, there were at least 5 independent inventions of agriculture, in the Middle East, China, Papua New Guinea, Central America, and the Andes.

 

[lpetrich]

Constraints on the Development of Agriculture | Current Anthropology: Vol 50, No 5 - "The development of agriculture was limited by external constraints, mainly climate, before the Holocene and mainly by social institutions after that. Population size and growth was important but ultimately did not determine where and why agriculture evolved."

Climate Change Is Certainly the Major External Constraint

Ice age climates varied at very short timescales (Richerson, Boyd, and Bettinger 2001). Ice core data show that last glacialclimate was highly variable on timescales of centuries to millenia (Anklin et al. 1993; Clark, Alley, and Pollard 1999; Dansgaard et al. 1993; Ditlevsen, Svensmark, and Johnsen 1996). There are sharp millennial-scale excursions in estimated temperature, atmospheric dust, and greenhouse gases, right down to the limits of the high-resolution ice core data. The highest-resolution Greenland ice records show that millennial-scale warming and cooling events often began and ended very abruptly and were often punctuated by quite large spikes of relative warmth and cold with durations of a decade or two (e.g., von Grafenstein et al. 1999). Post-Younger Dryas warming (the Pleistocene to Hoiocene shift) may have occurred in less than a decade (Hughen et al. 2000). In comparison, the Hoiocene after 11,600 BP has been a period of comparatively very stable climate. Recent work shows that, though driven by the same deepwater cycling process, the climatic variability of the last glacial cycle is greater than those of the previous three (Martrat et al. 2007).

The dramatic Pleistocene climate fluctuations captured in polar ice cores also register at lower latitudes (Allen et al. 1999, 2002; Hendy and Kennett 2000; Martrat et al. 2007; Peterson et al. 2000; Schulz, von Rad, and Erlenkeuser 1998). Mediterranean pollen records show that these changes are reflected in approximately century-scale changes in vegetation (Sanchez Goni et al. 2002).

 Dansgaard–Oeschger event - some 25 of them in the last glacial period.

In the Northern Hemisphere, they take the form of rapid warming episodes, typically in a matter of decades, each followed by gradual cooling over a longer period. For example, about 11,500 years ago, averaged annual temperatures on the Greenland ice sheet increased by around 8 °C over 40 years, in three steps of five years (see,[3] Stewart, chapter 13), where a 5 °C change over 30–40 years is more common.

...
The course of a D-O event sees a rapid warming, followed by a cool period lasting a few hundred years.[5] This cold period sees an expansion of the polar front, with ice floating further south across the North Atlantic Ocean.[5]

What causes these events is still not very clear.

The Holocene has similar events -  Bond event - but much weaker ones.