Agriculture and Farming Atlas

How The World Is Fed
Open Questions

Why did agriculture begin at all, after two hundred thousand years of successful foraging?

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Facts
Why Open
Farming arose independently in at least seven world regions within a few thousand years of the last glacial period's end, which demands a general explanation, yet no proposed driver has won the field: end-of-ice-age climate change, population pressure, resource abundance making settlement possible, social competition and feasting, and cultural or religious change all have serious advocates, and early farmers were by skeletal evidence often worse nourished than the foragers they replaced, so the move was not an obvious improvement to those who made it. 1
What Would Resolve
A mechanism that correctly predicts where and when domestication did and did not begin across the independent centers, tested against the archaeological, climatic and genetic records together rather than fitted to one region. 1
Discipline Needed
Archaeology, Agronomy, Paleoclimatology 1
Open Question

Farming arose independently in at least seven world regions within a few thousand years of the last glacial period's end, which demands a general explanation, yet no proposed driver has won the field: end-of-ice-age climate change, population pressure, resource abundance making settlement possible, social competition and feasting, and cultural or religious change all have serious advocates, and early farmers were by skeletal evidence often worse nourished than the foragers they replaced, so the move was not an obvious improvement to those who made it.

What would resolve this A mechanism that correctly predicts where and when domestication did and did not begin across the independent centers, tested against the archaeological, climatic and genetic records together rather than fitted to one region.
OpenArchaeology, Agronomy, PaleoclimatologyNeolithic Revolution (Wikipedia)
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Sources
1. Neolithic Revolution (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationCauses and consequences section; theories about the origin of agricultureView the Source
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