The First Farmers

Seven times, at least, from scratch

For almost all of their history people lived on what they could gather and hunt. Then, within a few thousand years of the end of the last ice age, people on several continents began to sow, herd and select, each without knowing the others existed. Wheat and goats in the Fertile Crescent, rice and millet in China, maize and squash in Mexico, potatoes and llamas in the Andes, taro and bananas in New Guinea, cattle and sorghum in the Sahara and Sahel, sunflowers in the eastern woodlands of North America.

How to read it

• Centres as bands — each independent centre of domestication runs from its first cultivation to the point where this story leaves it

• Sites and crops as events — nested inside their centre, pinned where they were dug up

• Context bands — the Natufian foragers, the Younger Dryas cold snap, the green Sahara, and two sites, Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük, that tell their own story

Threads to follow

• plants — every crop, from einkorn to sunflower

• animals — dogs, goats, sheep, cattle, pigs, llamas

• genetics — what DNA says about where and how often

• fertile crescent, china, americas, pacific, africa — one centre at a time

Dates are calibrated radiocarbon years before present, where “present” is 1950, and carry the uncertainty the dating studies give. Domestication was slow: a crop is called domesticated when its seeds stop shattering or its bones change shape, often a thousand years or more after people first tended the wild plant or herd, so every date here is a first sign, not a moment.