When And Where Did Agriculture Start?

There is limited evidence of grain-grinding and perhaps crop-sowing before 10,000 BC in Abu Hureyra (modern Syria), as well as in about 10,000 BC on parts of the Nile flood plain, North Africa.  Slightly later (9500 BC) evidence is that some selection of seeds for sowing occurred in the Levant Region of the 'Fertile Crescent' which is a strip of land curving from the modern countries of Jordan through Turkey and into Iraq and Iran (see www.mrdowling.com

However, systemic and widespread cultivation of crops appears not to have occurred until about 8500 BC, when it suddenly became widespread in the Fertile Crescent.  This may have been due to both climate and societal changes.  The main crops were relatives of modern wheat (emmer, einkorn), barley, flax, pea, lentil, bitter vetch (a lentil-type crop) and chickpea.  Systematic organised agriculture, including mono-cropping, irrigation and an allocated workforce does not appear to have happened in the region until about 5500 BC.   Farming did not reach north-western Europe until about 4800 BC.

Spontaneous cultivation of new agricultural crops seems to have happened again and again in human history.  Teosinte (the simplest maize plant) was first cultivated in the meso-Americas in about 3500BC, potatoes in South America about 5000BC, rice by 5000 BC in China.

It started when a guy planted a carrot. By charmaine