We didn’t! “Agriculture” was developed slowly, over a period of thousands of years, independently in different regions, and progressing at different rates depending on the natural resources that were available to be exploited. The relativity of it being so long ago means that we can often feel like, for example, 8000 years ago and 5000 years ago were “roughly the same time”, when they were as far apart from each other as we are today from the Trojan war.
To be honest, the idea of collecting seeds from your favorite edible plants to deliberately plant, and to optimize the planting (because people tend to do that) just seems not that hard to discover. Lots of people groups also invented spears. That doesn’t seem mysterious; that seems inevitable. Same with agriculture.
Prolly the same reason we exist on earth.
Religious types think it’s a miracle that we were placed here by God in the Goldilocks zone of our star on a planet perfectly suited to our needs.
Reality is that the conditions were right for us to exist and so we do. And we would exist in any similar environment.
Conditions were prolly right for humanity to progress when it did and it was always going to happen when those conditions were met
Agriculture needs a few conditions to be right before it will become a viable way of feeding a population. First, there have to be suitable wild plants that can be farmed viably. Second, there needs to be a suitable climate and land conditions to actually farm. Third, the human population needs to be static, not nomadic, as there need to be people working the land for much of the year, so if they move around, they can’t tend to their crops.
If an area of land can produce more food by being left wild and hunting/gathering on it, there is no benefit to farming. If an area of land can not support the population needed to actually run a farm on it, then it can not be farmed.
Another point to consider is that there was a long transition from hunting and gathering wild food to farming. People didn’t just stop hunting and gathering and start farming, rather they would have done a little bit of farming to supplement what they could hunt and gather from the wild, where suitable conditions existed. Think of it like a modern person having a vegetable garden at home, but still going to the supermarket for most of their food.
The transition to agricultural societies happened when the local conditions for all of the above factors led to farming being a more productive strategy than hunting and gathering. The most important factor that led to the adoption of agriculture in the places and times it did happen was the warming of the climate at the end of the last ice age. In the places where good wild ancestors of productive farm crops existed, the conditions to allow populations to survive primarily by agriculture came about at around the time that the evidence shows farming cultures emerging.
One last point is that a distinction should be made between the discovery/invention of agriculture and the spread of agriculture. Agriculture can only start from scratch if there are suitable wild plants that can be domesticated. There are areas where agriculture works well, but the natural environment there does not contain good candidate plants due to evolutionary pressure causing plants that are not suited for farming to dominate. Humans are quite capable of modifying the landscape, though, and bringing in seeds from other places. For example much of Western Europe is very productive farmland today, but could only become so by clearing the forests and importing seeds from elsewhere.
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