
Farming Invented Twice in the Middle East, Genomes Study Reveals - benbreen
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/farming-invented-twice-in-the-middle-east-genomes-study-reveals/
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vivekd
I studied anthropology as my college minor and the consensus in my classes
seemed to be that farming was never really a new discovery that was
'invented.' Rather it seems likely that ancient people had known about the
possibility of raising crops for a while but had simply forgone that in favor
of less labor intensive hunting and foraging. Later, as the large game that
early humans relied on began to die out, we resorted to the much more labor
intensive lifestyle of farming.

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...](http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-
history-of-the-human-race)

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.

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dualogy
Interesting thoughts. Agriculture (even horticulture or herding) vs.
immediate-return hunter/gathering of course isn't a single invention but a
complex co-operative enterprise necessitating quite an array of disruptive
changes in lifestyle and establishment of social structures such as hierarchy,
property, trades (constructing, protecting grain storage caches etc), marriage
etc.

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.

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mtrimpe
If you ever interested in this sort of stuff then the book "Guns, Germs and
Steel" [1] explores all these trade-offs in great depth (and places them in
the larger context of the development of human societies in general.)

[1]
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1842.Guns_Germs_and_Stee...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1842.Guns_Germs_and_Steel)

~~~
Phlarp
I thought academic anthropology was moving away from ideas like Diamond's
"Geographic determinism" and towards a more "Historical particularism" view of
civilizations progress?

~~~
woodandsteel
G,G,S is focused on why civilizations arise in the first place, and also why
it is that Eurasian civilizations became so more powerful over the long term
than any others, and for that he has a good explanation. He agrees there are
many other factors involved in particular cases.

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rezashirazian
the article suggests that farmers from different regions domesticated
different animals and farmed different crops and concludes this as a strong
cultural tradition that could not have been communicated.

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.

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gumby
The article mentioned that genetic markers suggest that the two groups did not
mingle (much or at all) which is why they have this hypothesis.

~~~
rezashirazian
For knowledge to be transferred from one group to another, all it takes is one
person. For genetic markers to change it would need at least two, in good
health and enough intermingling for it to be evident.

It's still not strong enough.

~~~
aminok
On the face of it seems highly unlikely to me that two groups had a level of
contact that was enough for farming knowledge to be spread between them but
not enough for genetic flow between them.

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.

