Farming began in at least eleven separate cradles
Agriculture arose independently across the Old and New Worlds in at least eleven centers. About twelve thousand years ago, some humans left nomadic foraging for settled fields. Wild grains were eaten more than a hundred thousand years earlier, but true domestication came much later.
By around 9500 BCE the Levant was growing the classic Neolithic founder package: two early wheats (emmer and einkorn), hulled barley, four pulses (peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chickpeas), and flax. Small-scale grass tending appears at Ohalo II near the Sea of Galilee around 21,000 BCE. Pigs were domesticated in Mesopotamia about eleven thousand years ago; cattle from aurochs in Anatolia and India around 8500 BCE; sheep earlier still. Rice was domesticated in China by 6200 BCE, with clear cultivation by 5700 BCE, and again independently in West Africa by 1000 BCE.
Africa added sorghum by 3000 BCE, pearl millet by 2000 BCE, and Ethiopian teff and coffee by 3000 BCE. In the Andes, potatoes arrived between 8000 and 5000 BCE alongside llamas and guinea pigs; cassava was in the Amazon by 7000 BCE; maize descended from Mexican teosinte about 7000 BCE. New Guinea domesticated sugarcane and hybridized bananas around 7000 BCE. Australia’s Budj Bim eel traps date to 6600 BCE. Favored explanations for Levantine origins stress post–ice-age dry seasons after about 11,000 BCE that favored storable annual seeds and early villages.
Later ages intensified the craft: Bronze Age states from Sumer to China scaled irrigation; medieval Islamic and European networks moved sugar, rice, cotton, and citrus; after 1492 the Columbian exchange swapped maize and potatoes eastward for wheat, livestock, and more westward. The British Agricultural Revolution and, after 1900, mechanization, synthetic fertilizers via Haber–Bosch, pesticides, and breeding raised yields while raising environmental and political debates that spurred organic alternatives.
Source: History of agriculture
