From Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture

Archaeological evidence shows that agriculture began 10,000 years ago in the SW Asian ‘Fertile Crescent’, and soon thereafter in China, but independent transitions to agriculture occurred more recently in other regions of the world, and the general replacement of foraging by farming took place very slowly. For most of humanity’s existence, survival depended on hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plants, insects, and other small animals. Archaeological evidence of past hunter-gatherer diets is skewed towards animal foods because bones tend to survive much better than the remains of plants, but ethnographic and historical accounts of hunter-gatherers who survived into modern times indicate that most groups obtained their food from a great variety (commonly 50 or more species) of locally available plants and animals.