The Agricultural Transition

Around 12,000 years ago, in a few scattered regions across the globe, people began doing something no species had done before: growing their own food.

This was the The transition from foraging and hunting to agriculture and settlement, beginning around 10,000 BCE. Despite the name, it was not a single event but a slow, uneven process that occurred independently in at least seven regions over thousands of years. It is arguably the most consequential shift in human history.. The name implies a sudden break, but the reality was achingly slow. Generations lived and died in the grey zone between foraging and farming, never knowing they were part of a shift that would eventually produce cities, empires, writing, and everything else we file under "civilization."

The question that has occupied archaeologists and historians for over a century sounds simple: why? After 200,000 years of successful foraging, why start farming? And why then, why there?