Prehistoric hunter-gatherers ate fruit, berries and nuts, so how did early farmers decide to cultivate grain?
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Because they didn’t eat *just* fruit, berries, and nuts, they *also* ate tubers, seeds, and grasses as well. Grain cultivation took off because grains are hardier, easier to grow and manage, have high nutritional value, and can be stored for long periods of time. We still cultivated those others, but just not to the same degree.
Because they discovered fermentation and beer.
In fact, the archeological record seems to indicate the reason our ancestors actually settled down and started communities based on intentional agriculture was to produce beer specifically.
First of all, “beer” (meaning fermented grain water, not specifically modern IPAs) occurs naturally, it can be produced by something as simple as a hunter gatherer leaving grain stalks in a puddle while running from a storm, returning a day later and drinking the water.
Our anthological evidence in the middle east indicates the earliest settlements were based around grain agriculture – but what were they making? The same settlements indicate the oven and millstones were still hundreds/thousands of years away (so not bread or oatmeal). But we do find pottery and underground structures that are literally the same arrangements being used for beer production by rural natives in the region today.
So yeah, all we know for sure is that in the Middle East at least people went from hunter-gathering, to settling down and growing grain, before the invention of bread or baking AND with the technology required to ferment simple beers.
Beer. Both beer and domesticated grains appear approximately 10,000 years ago. Everyone needs to tie one off at the end of the day. This is a joke, but history does show that if it can be fermented, then dammit, we’re going to make hootch.
But even before then there’s evidence of them using wild grains going way further back than that. It’s really likely that everyone just started trying to cultivate everything all at once, when they really learned how to farm. It’s more like, *what can’t we do* vs what can we do.
The book “Sapiens” goes into this in more detail, but the gist of it is that grains domesticated humans, and not the other way around.
Hunter gatherers would gather some grains (like wheat) as well. As they carried it around, they would inevitably drop some seeds (the grains) on their most walked paths, which caused grains to grow there. This caused humans to wander less… because grains were now growing where they already were. So humans began to wander less and less and instead built civilizations around those grains.
In the beginning, it was probably a poor choice. Building a diet over a single grain is much less healthy than the hunter gatherer lifestyle. It also required more work to tend to those plants, than to wander around and just pick what was available. But in the long haul, over 10,000-20,000 years, it led to modern civilization.
They also collected grains and brought them home with them, to make a kind of porridge and some flatbread. A few of those grains got lost accidentally around their camp and so the cereals grew up near it, or possibly they’ve intentionally played around with planting the collected grain, we don’t know for sure. Hunter-gatherers are aware of how plants grow from seeds, and there is no reason to assume that they didn’t do some recreational gardening basically for the fun of it, same as modern people do.
Their dependency on farming must have increased gradually: at first farmed grain was just a supplement in case other food sources failed, but over time it occupied more and more of their diet, until it became their staple food, because of the high efficiency of grain cultivation.
Grain was also an early form of money. Some ancient civilizations like Egypt collected taxes in the form of grain. As you can imagine, taxation leads to break throughs in math, communal public works and infrastructure, ‘stock’ exchanges… even time keeping and contract law.
It is very likely that a lot of it started with the need to get the ingredients to make booze.
Getting drunk is a powerful incentive.
Agriculture didn’t just develop in a single place and time and it took different forms in each case. And there wasn’t a hard cutoff between ‘agriculture’ and ‘not agriculture’ – what do you call it when settled people manage vegetation and cull animals according to some predetermined scheme to ensure easy, long-term access to hunting/gathering resources? Lots of different forms of that happened across what is now America. Also ‘hunter gatherer’ societies had many different forms – some groups stayed in one place, some were always nomadic, some moved around and/or changed their way of life seasonally. Pretty much everything that was nutritious and relatively easy to access would have been eaten by some people in some places, whether that’s fish or grass seeds or roots.
Prehistoric hunter gatherers also ate grain. Modern hunter gatherers don’t eat much grain, but that’s because modern hunter gatherers now only live in the areas where farming is difficult, because farming has replaced hunting and gathering everywhere else.
Around the time of the origin of agriculture though, hunter gatherers lived everywhere. Including the parts of the world where wild grains thrived and grew naturally in thick stands. And hunter gatherers in those parts of the world gathered and ate grains, and eventually some wound up domesticating them.
But now, areas where wild grains grow easily are pretty much all farmland where domestic grains are grown, so there’s not much wild grain around for anybody left to eat anymore.
Humans have been around a LONG time, roughly 200,000 years. it fascinates me that 95% of our history there’s no record of and we have to guess. But these humans were as smart as us, just not educated.
A culture like the Natufians noticed a nice cave structure, moved in, and then took notice of the natural growth of wheat in the area. Someone gets creative to increase it.
Unlike most foods of the time, wheat specifically could be stored for long periods of time. So the invention of granaries.
So… hanging around for generations in one place, smart (but uneducated) people looking at the same vegetation year after year, “can we make more of it?”, “oh look we can store it!”, “oh we don’t have to hunt as much when we have these nice surpluses” “I wonder if there’s more stuff we can harvest?”
Not having to spend 24/7 in search of food allowed the development of other professions, which lead to bartering, trade, just yeah… all modern society shit.
Took about 190,000 years to get there though.
Fire’s a similarly huge advancement. That took about 80,000 years for us to figure out (in the same everyone has a cellphone now). But now the world can be navigated 24/7, a source of warmth from the elements, a means to keep predators away and cooked meat was about 60% more calorie nutritious (we could now hunt less with properly cooked food).
At that point humans are pretty much Apex Predator.
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