The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

In this chapter, the authors investigate the various ways in which farming emerged throughout the world. Subtitled “How farming first hopped, stumbled and bluffed its way around the world,” the chapter illustrates the “far messier, and far less unidirectional” development of farming communities on several continents (251).

While knowledge of the Fertile Crescent is vast, there are other regions, in Europe, Africa, and Oceania, that are now being studied and which reveal new truths: “None followed a linear trajectory from food production to state formation” (252). The authors emphasize farming was not the societally sustaining method of choice: “you only invented it when there was nothing else to be done” (274). Conventional wisdom is, once again, turned on its head.

First, the authors address the idea that agriculture spread uniformly and rapidly from one area to another. While in later periods, seeds could be spread by conquering armies and profit-driven colonizers, in the first days of agricultural experimentation, such rapid dissemination of cultivars was not possible. The authors question the accuracy of the archeological notion of “ecological imperialism,” wherein domesticated plants and animals were readily exchanged between societies and continents—especially in early periods of human settlements.