Agricultural Origins

Agriculture (or, more generally, food production) developed with plant and animal domestication in several regions of the world during the past 10,000 years, following the post-ice age establishment of encouraging Holocene climates, mostly in seasonal temperate and tropical latitudes. The entry reviews the various archaeological and biological records that apply to some of the major regions, and discusses some possible causal factors, both environmental and behavioral. Agriculture drove the rise of complex human societies toward chiefdoms and states in later periods of prehistory, and was especially important in generating population increase, sufficient to fuel major migrations of early farmers, with their languages and genes.