Introduction
Humanity's rich cultural history has quite a few odd points and gray areas due to a lack of archeological evidence. In these cases, mythologists are louder than academics. Though historians may offer suggestions, conversations and debates will undoubtedly continue until evidence is established. (A related concept is the "God of the Gaps", where the creationist powers of religious figureheads, like the Judeo-Christian god, become narrower as a scientific consensus is established). After the European discovery of the New World, another question unfolded: why are there massive pyramids in North Africa and the Americas? Having been built on opposite sides of the world, with no means of communication, one can draw many conclusions from this oddity. Taken at face value, one assumption is that an advanced power guided the early Egyptian and American communities to build their temples as pyramids. This psuedo-historical framework was partly the basis of the Atlantis Theory and hyperdiffusionism. For archeologists, the debate centered arround the question: did humans learn to farm plants and herd animals in one place?
Hyperdiffusionism is the belief that crops, animals, and humanity's early farming practices (agriculture and herding) came from a singular area or civilization at one point in time. As such, the idea discounts both the ingenuity of early human civilization and the climatic conditions that preceeded domestication. It took thousands of years for humans to learn to properly cultivate the land and spread their farming techniques through diffusion. Groups of humans learned to farm independently of other groups; this has been uncovered in multiple parts of the world. In these hearths, they grew crops and raised animals unique to their environment.
Arguments and Evidence
Arguments
The history of domestication shows that humans were not capable of growing crops in the glacial climate of the Pleistocene; they had to remain hunter-gatherers. When the climate stabilized, consistently warm weather allowed humanity to farm cereal grasses such as emmer and einkorn wheat. Human groups domesticated crops and animals that were native to their land, they did so independently of other groups. The diffusion of crops, animals and farming techniques was constricted to a regional and continental basis; it was not a global phenomenon at the time.
Evidence
Before the agricultural revolutions, humans were hunter-gatherers and led nomadic lifestyles. Cultivating plants and domesticating animals allowed these early groups to settle down; they would no longer need to follow the herd. The switch to sedentism, in conjunction with the growth of agriculture, led to group population increases. In some hearths, the change of environmental conditions was likely the primary motivator in adapting sedentary lifestyles. There are two schools of thought in this history: one of determinism and another of opportunism. Deterministic models, namely the Oasis Hypothesis, suggests a declining availability in natural resources pushed humans in Southwest Asia to adapt agricultural practices. Opportunist models point to the changing climate, where periods of warm weather prompted humans to adapt cultivation as a primary mode of sustenance. Where both models are flawed, however, are their large temporal and spatial scales. In Southwest Asia, the transition from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene caused a natural expansion of wild cereals to the Fertile Crescent. When the Younger Dryas stadial period took effect, the spread of wild cereals came to an end; it may have been the primary motivator for humans in the Crescent to harvest and replant them. For the hunter-gatherers, cultivation was experimental and certainly took trial and error. Gradually over the span of a millenia, humans in the Crescent switched to cultivating plants and domesticating animals over the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Different agricultural crops were independently domesticated in varying regions of the world. Instrumental to understanding this begins with the concept of "Vavilov centers", put forward Russian scientist Nikolai Vavilov in 1924. While noticing how particular areas of Earth had a maximum genetic diversity for certain crops, Vavilov believed they also contained the wild relatives of ancestral plant domesticates. Scientists have narrowed the centers of origin to a few locations by studying plant genetics. The major centers of plant and animal domestication were Southwest Asia, China and Mesoamerica. The secondary centers include eastern North America, South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Papua New Guinea. The inhabitants of Southwest Asia domesticated both plants and animals. Goats and sheep were domesticated around 11,000 BP, followed by emmer and einkorn wheat. They were the first to domesticate wheat, barley, peas, lentil and rye. Animals that were domesticated for the first time include cattle, goats, pigs, sheeps and dogs. In China, rice was domesticated around 8,500 BP. The ancestor of rice was Oryza rufipogon. Humans living in Sub-Saharan Africa also independently domesticated rice. Mesoamericans domesticated and cultivated maize soon after 9,000 BP. The ancestor of maize is teosinte, which has a similar shape to corn with much smaller dimensions. Vavilov's theory opened new avenues of cross-discipline research for plant scientists, anthropologists, and archeologists.
Crop and animal domestication did not spread globally; rather, it diffused regionally and across continents. Global diffusion was extraordinarily rare before the Spaniards arrived in Latin America 530 years ago. Between 9,000 BP and 5,500 BP, settlers from the Near East moved north-west across Europe and all the way up to Great Britain and Ireland. This nearly 5,000 year endeavour saw its beginnings with Neolithic farmers, as new settlements were established across the frontier. The Franchthi Cave in the Argolic Gulf suggests that the means of acquiring food changed abruptly when the Neolithic farmers arrived. Though they did not occupy the entire European landscape, they settled in areas with alluvial and loess soils. The spread of rice is a great example of regional diffusion in East Asia. Whereas rice cultivation originated in China, it spread to the Indian subcontinent. From there, rice harvesting moved into Indonesia and Malaysia. In the Americas, maize was brought to what is now the southwestern United States at least 3,000 years ago. Around 750 years ago, the diffusion of maize reached its limits, as it had been discovered in Canada.
Conclusion
- Climatic conditions were ideal for humans when they first grew crops.
- The warm conditions in the Fertile Crescent allowed humans to pursue farming.
- The two different models that explain early domestication in the early Holocene are Determinism and Opportunism.
- The domestication of crops and animals was independent of other groups.
- Major hearths had crops and animals unique to the land.
- The diffusion of farming practices and domesticated crops and animals was regional and continental.
- In many cases, diffusion took thousands of years to spread across continents.