Prehistoric hunter-gatherers ate fruit, berries and nuts, so how did early farmers decide to cultivate grain?
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Prehistoric hunter-gatherers made use of every kind of plant in their environment, including cereal grasses if they were available. We know that hunter-gatherers living in Europe ground grain into flour [as far back as 32,000 years ago](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/09/14/440292003/paleo-people-were-making-flour-32-000-years-ago). We know that hunter-gatherers in Australia regularly gathered grains to make flour even though they didn’t farm. Grains would have been an especially valuable food source to hunter-gatherers because they were storable, and could be processed into a wide variety of foods (including beer). In fact, granaries have been found that predate agriculture, which means wild grains were being harvested and stored long before farming. There is evidence of small-scale farming [as far back as 23,000 years ago in Israel](https://www.sci.news/archaeology/science-farming-ohalo-ii-israel-03052.html)
Anthropologists today don’t really like the term hunter-gatherer very much. They prefer to refer to a *foraging spectrum*. This includes a range of getting food from both wild and cultivated food sources. So the question really is why they moved on the spectrum from mostly wild food sources to mostly domesticated. The answer is much debated, but it certainly has to do with a combination of climate and increasing population. Studies of modern-day hunter-gatherers have shown they know how to grow crops, they just have no incentive since they can procure everything they need directly from nature because their numbers are so small.
There were probably several experiments in growing food in previous eras, but the climate was too variable, cool and arid for cultivation of cereals–or anything else–to be viable for very long. That previous climate period, known as the *Pleistocene*, meant that we couldn’t have started farming earlier even if we wanted to. That all changed once we entered the current climate period, known as the *Holocene*. This has led [some researchers](http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/AgOrigins_2_12_01.pdf) to speculate that farming was “impossible during the Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene.”
The first agricultural technique was probably something called *flood retreat* agriculture. In this technique, seeds are sown on the ground that has been naturally disturbed by flooding. This is one reason why the first agrarian civilizations developed in river valleys all over the world. These societies were able to support more people, and over thousands of years these larger populations pushed all other lifeways (including modern hunter-gatherers) aside.
Increasing populations then became dependent on cereal grains and their associated products (bread, porridge, gruel, beer) to survive and keep large numbers of people alive. Because they ripen above ground at the same time, they made taxation easier. It’s also a tempting target for other societies to raid, including nomadic pastoralists. And because farming is so laborious, it provided an incentive for slavery, which is a negative for most hunter-gatherer groups (since you have to gather enough food to feed yourself and your slaves.) Hence the subsequent rise of states and cities, and everything else.
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