Tropical farming in Africa required the domestication of a whole new set of plants, involving different techniques in cultivation. Millet farming seems not to have spread beyond northern China. Rice, which can grow in the tropics, spread into South East Asia, and later to India and it also became acclimatized to cooler climates in Korea and Japan. There it met a barrier: where the topical zone starts, temperate crops cannot grow. From the Middle East, wheat farming spread west into and across Europe and North Africa, eastward into India, and southward down the Nile Valley. The spread of farmingĪgriculture was able to support a denser population than hunter-gathering could do, so the farming populations began to expand and spread out across Eurasia. Crop cultivation also arose in New Guinea at an early date, but it remained confined to the interior of the island. In the Yellow River Valley to the north, millet farming developed. Chickens and water buffalo were also domesticated. This was based on rice, which grows wild here. Cattle, especially oxen, were soon used to draw early plows, which made preparing fields quicker, easier and more effective.įarming and related technologies also emerged separately in the Yangtze Valley in China, sometime between 60 BCE. They also provided their dung as fertilizer for the fields. These provided a range of useful resources: meat, milk, skins and wool. ![]() Sometime later, people in the Middle East began to domesticate animals, at first sheep, goats and pigs, and later cattle (dogs had already been domesticated thousands of years before). These were the easiest plants to domesticate. It first took place in the Middle East, where a range of edible grasses – wheat, emmer, barley – grow wild. This development was almost certainly linked to climate changes after the end of the last Ice Age. Early farmingįrom about 8,000 BCE, some groups started growing their own food. In a few favored places, particularly on sea coasts where large stocks of marine foods were to be had, such as on the coasts of China, larger and more stable communities were able to develop. They owned only what they could easily carry on their backs, which meant erecting shelters from branches and stones at a new site. They lived in small bands, following a mobile lifestyle as they followed animal herds and moved to where more plants could be found. ![]() Up until about 12,000 years ago, all humans were hunter-gatherers: that is, they lived by hunting wild game, fishing, and gathering fruits and berries.
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