paleoanthropology6: When and where did farming originate and how did it spread? (v1.0)

 Key reference is prof John Hawks of university of Wisconsin, Madison. 

The origin of farming is a recent event in human history and originated only about 10,000 years ago after the end of the last ice age. But farming is a fundamental shift in human subsistence pattern. These induced many changes in the way of life and also human biology.

• 1.      Humans became more sedentary.
• 2.     They were far less mobile and lived in one place. They defended their territories.
• 3.     They learnt to store food.
• 4.     There are many others changes too.

Where did farming originate and how did it spread throughout the rest of the world? Did it spread through migration of farmers or through diffusion where neighbors learnt about it?

In the Danube valley spreading up into Germany there was a culture called Linear Bandkeramik (LBK) that was one of the earliest farming cultures in Europe about 5000 years ago (Neolithic era – new stone age). It was also a dairy culture. Agriculture took hold in Mesopotamia (Iraq) much earlier (10,000 years ago). Did agriculture come to this culture through migration or diffusion?

One way to examine that is through language. There is similarity between Romanian, Italian, Portuguese, French and Spanish because they all derive from Latin. Latin was a written language.  These are called romance languages.  English, German and Dutch are also related and are called Germanic languages. Scandinavian languages are also Germanic. If you go back even further in time, most of the languages in Europe can be traced back to a distant ancestor language. An interesting research finding is that Latin and Greek had some similarities in linguistic structures to ancient Sanskrit – a language of ancient India. Sanskrit has similarities to ancient Persian spoken in Iran. So, all the languages from Europe to western Russia, to the middle east to Iran and middle Asia to India are related in some way and are called Indo-European languages. Today an hypothesis is the spread and connections of the Indo-European languages is related to farming. The hypothesis is that people who spoke the language grew their populations and some of them dispersed across the Indo-European geography. Farming is a catalyst and imperative that is strong enough for the population to grow and cause some to move and establish themselves in new places.  

Genetics is a great tool to investigate this hypothesis. The Y chromosome is more variable in Eastern Europe than western Europe. The variability gets lower and lower as we go further west and north. This is also true of other genetic markers too. If you plot this variation over geography, the greatest degree of variation is in Iraq (Mesopotamia), and least is western Scandinavian countries. This is another clue that farmers were dispersing from Mesopotamia to Europe. So, likely a mixture of migration and diffusion was responsible for the spread of agriculture into Europe.

This pattern is also decipherable in other parts of the world where farming migrated through migration and diffusion. In southeast asea, there was a movement of people who originated in south China, who were agricultural, 8000 years ago. They moved to Java, Borneo, Philippines, New Guinea, and Melanesia. These islands already had hunter gatherers from 30,000 years ago on. These migrants brought with them a whole package of farming knowledge. About 6000 years ago it also spread to Polynesia (including all the way to Hawaii).  It also moved to south America.

In summary, farming likely started about 10,000 years ago in west Asia, and it is likely farming spread with both migration and diffusion.