History of agriculture

[14][15] Other plant foods domesticated in Africa include watermelon, okra, tamarind and black eyed peas, along with tree crops such as the kola nut and oil palm.

In Australia, agriculture was invented at a currently unspecified period, with the oldest eel traps of Budj Bim dating to 6,600 BC[23] and the deployment of several crops ranging from yams[24] to bananas.

From 100 BC to 1600 AD, world population continued to grow along with land use, as evidenced by the rapid increase in methane emissions from cattle and the cultivation of rice.

Modern agriculture has raised social, political, and environmental issues including overpopulation, water pollution, biofuels, genetically modified organisms, tariffs and farm subsidies.

Studies of the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies indicate an antecedent period of intensification and increasing sedentism; examples are the Natufian culture in the Levant and the Early Chinese Neolithic in China.

[2] Exact dates are hard to determine, as people collected and ate seeds before domesticating them, and plant characteristics may have changed during this period without human selection.

An example is the semi-tough rachis and larger seeds of cereals from just after the Younger Dryas (about 9500 BC) in the early Holocene in the Levant region of the Fertile Crescent.

[45] Claims of much earlier cultivation of rye, at the Epipalaeolithic site of Tell Abu Hureyra in the Euphrates valley of northern Syria, remain controversial.

In southern China, rice was domesticated in the Yangtze River basin at around 11,500 to 6200 BC, along with the development of wetland agriculture, by early Austronesian and Hmong-Mien-speakers.

Contact with Sri Lanka and Southern India by Austronesian sailors also led to an exchange of food plants which later became the origin of the valuable spice trade.

[72] In the Indus Valley from the eighth millennium BC onwards at Mehrgarh, 2-row and 6-row barley were cultivated, along with einkorn, emmer, and durum wheats, and dates.

These are successively replaced by domesticated sheep, goats, and humped zebu cattle by the fifth millennium BC, indicating the gradual transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture.

[77] Archaeological evidence also suggests that the spread of agriculture in Egypt was facilitated by farming communities associated with the playa lakes of the Sahara some 6,500 years ago.

[89] The contents of Jia's 6th century book include sections on land preparation, seeding, cultivation, orchard management, forestry, and animal husbandry.

[98] The major cereal crops of the ancient Mediterranean region were wheat, emmer, and barley, while common vegetables included peas, beans, fava, and olives, dairy products came mostly from sheep and goats, and meat, which was consumed on rare occasion for most people, usually consisted of pork, beef, and lamb.

[100] In the Greco-Roman world of Classical antiquity, Roman agriculture was built on techniques originally pioneered by the Sumerians, transmitted to them by subsequent cultures, with a specific emphasis on the cultivation of crops for trade and export.

[105] The earliest known areas of possible agriculture in the Americas dating to about 9000 BC are in Colombia, near present-day Pereira, and by the Las Vegas culture in Ecuador on the Santa Elena peninsula.

The plants cultivated (or manipulated by humans) were lerén (Calathea allouia), arrowroot (Maranta arundinacea), squash (Cucurbita species), and bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria).

[116] The Guaitecas Archipelago in modern Chile was the southern limit of Pre-Hispanic agriculture near 44° South latitude,[117] as noted by the mention of the cultivation of Chiloé potatoes by a Spanish expedition in 1557.

[143] In the 1970s and 1980s archaeological research in south west Victoria established that the Gunditjmara and other groups had developed sophisticated eel farming and fish trapping systems over a period of nearly 5,000 years.

Besides transporting numerous crops, they introduced the concept of summer irrigation to Europe and developed the beginnings of the plantation system of sugarcane growing through the use of slaves for intensive cultivation.

[152] Watermills were introduced by the Romans, but were improved throughout the Middle Ages, along with windmills, and used to grind grains into flour, to cut wood and to process flax and wool.

[159] This transformation was driven by a number of factors including the diffusion of many crops and plants along Muslim trade routes, the spread of more advanced farming techniques, and an agricultural-economic system which promoted increased yields and efficiency.

Crops moving in both directions across the Atlantic Ocean caused population growth around the world and a lasting effect on many cultures in the Early Modern period.

[162] Maize and cassava were introduced from Brazil into Africa by Portuguese traders in the 16th century,[163] becoming staple foods, replacing native African crops.

New agricultural practices like enclosure, mechanization, four-field crop rotation to maintain soil nutrients, and selective breeding enabled an unprecedented population growth to 5.7 million in 1750, freeing up a significant percentage of the workforce, and thereby helped drive the Industrial Revolution.

Robert Bakewell and Thomas Coke introduced selective breeding and initiated a process of inbreeding to maximise desirable traits from the mid 18th century, such as the New Leicester sheep.

In the past century agriculture has been characterized by increased productivity, the substitution of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides for labour, water pollution,[180] and farm subsidies.

The initiatives, led by Norman Borlaug and credited with saving over a billion people from starvation, involved the development of high-yielding varieties of cereal grains, expansion of irrigation infrastructure, modernization of management techniques, distribution of hybridized seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides to farmers.

Further, global yield increases were experienced later in the 20th century when high-yield varieties of common staple grains such as rice, wheat, and corn were introduced as a part of the Green Revolution.