The Agricultural Transition
Learn how agriculture began independently in at least seven regions worldwide, transforming humanity from mobile foragers to settled farmers.
The agricultural transition was not one event but many. Beginning around 10,000 BCE in the Fertile Crescent, and independently in China, Mesoamerica, the Sahel, the Andes, New Guinea, and eastern North America, humans figured out how to cultivate plants and manage animals. Each origin point domesticated different species — wheat and barley in the Near East, rice in China, maize in Mexico — but the consequences were strikingly similar everywhere.
The transition was neither instant nor universal. In the Fertile Crescent, it took roughly 2,000 years to move from experimental cultivation to full dependence on farming. Many communities practiced mixed economies for centuries, combining farming with hunting and gathering. Some regions, like Australia and much of the Americas, maintained foraging economies successfully for thousands of years after agriculture appeared elsewhere.
The agricultural transition's most profound effect was demographic. Farming could support far more people per square mile than foraging. Populations grew, settlements became permanent, and the organizational demands of managing land, water, and labor gave rise to social hierarchies, specialized occupations, and eventually the first states. Every civilization in human history traces its origins to this transformation.