When did agriculture begin?
Agriculture began independently in several regions starting around 10,000 BCE. The Fertile Crescent (wheat, barley) was earliest, followed by China (rice, c. 8,000 BCE), Mesoamerica (maize, c. 7,000 BCE), and several other centers. The transition from foraging to full farming took thousands of years.
Agriculture did not have a single beginning but multiple independent origins across the globe. The earliest evidence comes from the Fertile Crescent — the arc of land stretching from modern-day Israel through Turkey to Iraq — where communities began managing wild stands of wheat and barley around 10,000 BCE.
The transition was gradual. For centuries, people combined tending wild plants with traditional hunting and gathering. Fully domesticated crops — recognizable by traits like non-shattering seed heads that result from human selection — appear in the archaeological record around 8500 BCE in the Fertile Crescent.
Other regions developed agriculture independently. In China's Yangtze Valley, rice cultivation began around 8,000 BCE, with millet cultivation along the Yellow River at roughly the same time. In Mesoamerica, the transformation of teosinte into maize began around 7,000 BCE — a process that took thousands of years of selective breeding. The Andes produced potatoes and quinoa, the Sahel developed sorghum and pearl millet, and New Guinea saw early cultivation of taro and yams.
Each agricultural revolution was driven by local conditions — available wild species, climate change at the end of the Ice Age, and population pressure. But the consequences were strikingly similar everywhere: population growth, permanent settlement, social complexity, and eventually the emergence of the first civilizations. By 3000 BCE, agriculture had become the dominant mode of human subsistence across most of Eurasia.