Agriculture emerged more or less at the same time on several continents, including populations, cultures and radically different environments and without a means of communication with each other. It is (perhaps) the greatest coincidence of human evolution.
O Homo sapiens (Our species) is about 300,000 years old, but only in the last 10,000 have some groups introduced agriculture. Before, they lived only from hunting.
What is curious is that the various separate groups (with different cultures, living on various continents, in different environments, and without means of communicating with each other) began to practice agriculture in a completely independent way, in the space of few millennia, practically at the same time.
If agriculture had been invented once in a region, and then if it had spread quickly, this phenomenon would not be strange. But, as a note, that’s not what happened.
Since Americas has Oceaniapassing through Euroásia e Africa -With populations who have been isolated from each other for thousands of years -science has proven that agriculture has started at practically at the same time.
A 2023 study in PNAS suggests the existence of up to 24 distinct origins of agriculture independently, all of them in a space of a few thousand years. That said, a big question raises: why did so many distinct populations do the same thing simultaneously, after hundreds of thousands of years of existence?
One of the possibilities that the scientist Michael Marshall points in new scientist are the climate change.
In an article of 2001, Robert Bettingerfrom the University of California, suggested that climate change were crucial to the moment of the origin of agriculture.
“Our hypothesis is that agriculture was impossible in the conditions of the last glacier [entre cerca de 115.000 e 11.700 anos atrás]since the glacier climate was extremely hostile to agriculture – dry, low with atmospheric CO2 and extremely variable in quite short temporal scales. ”
The reality is that the conditions for food cultivation has improved as the global climate warmed.
A 2024 study at Springer Nature made in China concluded that climate warming led to a more exuberant ecosystem, which in turn improved the soil, allowing the local population to start cultivating about 8400 years ago.
In recent years, researchers have begun to explore more sociopolitical reasons for societies to adopt agriculture.
One of the most consensual suggestions is the idea of the adoption of agriculture for the reinforcement of property rights and for the removal of life in community.
In this case, people will have created agriculture because it gave them more direct control over their own food supply and reduced their dependence on communities.
“But the great why it continues to persist,” writes Marshall. “If agriculture was really a sociopolitical choice, not something driven by external factors, why did so many societies make the same choice at the same time?” He asked. It is (perhaps) the greatest coincidence of human evolution.
