Origins of agriculture, the active production of useful plants or animals in ecosystems that have been created by people. Agriculture has often been conceptualized narrowly, in terms of specific combinations of activities and organisms—wet-rice production in Asia, wheat farming in Europe, cattle ranching in the Americas, and the like—but a more holistic perspective holds that humans are environmental engineers who disrupt terrestrial habitats in specific ways. Anthropogenic disruptions such as clearing vegetation or tilling the soil cause a variety of localized changes; common effects include an increase in the amount of light reaching ground level and a reduction in the competition among organisms. As a result, an area may produce more of the plants or animals that people desire for food, technology, medicine, and other uses.
Over time, some plants and animals have become domesticated, or dependent on these and other human interventions for their long-term propagation or survival. Domestication is a biological process in which, under human selection, organisms develop characteristics that increase their utility, as when plants provide larger seeds, fruit, or tubers than their wild progenitors. Known as cultigens, domesticated plants come from a wide range of families (groups of closely related genera that share a common ancestor; see genus). The grass (Poaceae), bean (Fabaceae), and nightshade or potato (Solanaceae) families have produced a disproportionately large number of cultigens because they have characteristics that are particularly amenable to domestication.
Research techniques
Agriculture developed independently in many regions of the world. It was the first profound change in the relationship between fully modern humans and the environment: people evolved into their current form some 200,000 years ago (see human evolution), yet they did not begin to engage in agriculture until about 15,000–10,000 years before the present (BP). Because humans began to alter wild habitats in productive ways long before they developed unambiguous writing systems—an event that occurred in Southwest Asia circa 5100 BP and in East Asia circa 3000 BP—archaeology provides most of the data with which to explore the development of agriculture.
Radiocarbon dating provides a chronometric framework for archaeological research. Before the early 1980s, radiocarbon analysis required fairly large quantities of material. The robust size and composition of animal bones have long made them a reliable source of samples for such analysis. Faunal remains have also been routinely subjected to morphological, genetic, and biochemical forms of analysis.
Although one might presume that plant remains are very rarely preserved in the archaeological record, ancient hearths and middens almost always include small quantities of charred remains of plants. Charring preserves this material, which in turn allows identification by genus and sometimes species, as well as other forms of qualitative and quantitative analysis. Archaeologists generally recover plant materials by placing sediments from pits and hearths in water; the plant remains float to the surface, where they may be retrieved. However, because plants generally have smaller, more friable remains than animals, archaeologists were long forced to date them indirectly, via the sediments in which plant remnants were found rather than via the remnants themselves. More-recent radiocarbon techniques have allowed the direct dating of small quantities of material, such as those found in a single seed. By the 21st century the direct dating of plant remains had become the normal practice in serious studies of the origins of agriculture, replacing the indirect methods used in the past.
Other important information regarding plant domestication can be obtained by means of palynology, the study of pollen, and phytolith analysis. Phytoliths are microscopic silica bodies produced by many plants; as a plant grows, an individual phytolith forms in a cell to aid in the physical support of the plant structure. Each phytolith retains the shape of the cell in which it was formed, and these forms may be quite specific to a given type of plant. Starch grains are similarly distinctive and also stay preserved for long periods. They can be recovered from the surfaces of pots and stone tools and are often the only way to identify certain food remains, such as potatoes. By identifying and quantifying the pollen, phytoliths, and starch grains found in archaeological sediments and on artifacts, an archaeologist can glean additional information on the plants growing on or near ancient sites.