Early Agriculture
Learn how early agriculture developed — from wild plant management to deliberate cultivation — in the Fertile Crescent, China, and Mesoamerica.
Early agriculture did not begin with a flash of inspiration but with thousands of years of increasingly deliberate plant management. In the Fertile Crescent, communities began tending wild stands of wheat and barley around 10,000 BCE, gradually selecting for traits that made harvesting easier: non-shattering seed heads, larger grains, and more uniform ripening. The process from wild plant management to full domestication took roughly 2,000 years.
The key crops varied by region. The Fertile Crescent produced wheat, barley, lentils, chickpeas, and flax. China domesticated rice in the Yangtze valley and millet along the Yellow River. Mesoamerica transformed teosinte — a scraggly grass — into maize through thousands of years of selective breeding. The Andes produced potatoes and quinoa. The Sahel developed sorghum and pearl millet. Each center of agricultural origin demonstrates that farming was a convergent solution to a common challenge.
Early agriculture was hard work with uncertain rewards. Studies of skeletal remains show that the first farmers were shorter, more disease-prone, and more nutritionally stressed than their foraging contemporaries. What agriculture offered was not individual health but collective power: the ability to feed far more people per unit of land, supporting the population densities that would eventually give rise to cities, states, and civilizations.