Agriculture from its beginning

Agriculture is a human activity. From the beginning till today, the main function of agriculture is to produce food to avoid hunger. But this simple sentence is an enormous challenge for man-kind and has created the deepest cultures (Tauger 2020).

The transition from gathering wild plant crops and hunting game towards cropping and animal husbandry marked a significant milestone in human history, leading to the emergence of agricul-ture as a deliberate practice. Not humans followed the food, the food followed the humans (Bellwood 2005).

This transition from gathering to cropping likely began with the accidental cultivation of wild crops near human settlements. As these plants grew, ripened, and became edible, early humans may have recognized their potential as food sources and intentionally cultivated them. This ini-tial experimentation with cultivation eventually evolved into deliberate agricultural practices aimed at producing reliable food supplies (Harari 2011).

Photo: Stone paintings from neolithic times showing nomads and their livestock. 

The climate change - end of the ice age - made the vast savannahs of the Sahara a desert. In this savannah environment, pastoralism, particularly bovine husbandry, was a viable way of life for many communities, alongside hunting of wild game such as elephants, giraffes, and antelopes. How-ever, as the climate shifted and the central Sahara transformed into desert, these traditional prac-tices became unsustainable. The desertification of the region meant that both animal husbandry and wild game hunting became increasingly difficult, if not impossible, due to the scarcity of water and vegetation.

One of the first steps of the transition from hunting wild game towards livestock keeping was nomadism. People had own stock and roamed with them throughout the vast grasslands for feed. The lived a mobile life, eat the livestock products, and purchased or gathered plant food. This was possible if enough fodder from natural grassland was available. But the Sahara dried out. Nomadism died out. The case of neolithic nomadism in Algeria shows this with cave/stone paintings.

Moreover, agriculture extended beyond food crops to include the cultivation of non-food prod-ucts like cotton for textiles or flowers for aesthetic purposes. This shift from gathering to culti-vation not only transformed human societies but also laid the foundation for the development of complex civilizations and economies (Figure).

Photo: Around 10,000 years BCE, people in the Levant region (Fertile Crescent) of the Near East began transitioning to sedentary lifestyles and increasingly engaging in animal husbandry and agriculture. For instance, at Tell es-Sultan, a suburb of Jericho (Palestine), one of the oldest cities on Earth (9,000 years BCE), people started cultivating mainly wheat and rais-ing sheep and goats. 

Agriculture began initially in the Fertile Crescent (Figure), but historically, it wasn't the only region. In other parts of the world, independent of the Levant, agriculture also emerged from hunting and gathering societies, albeit thousands of years later during the global migrations of nomads. The Russian scientist Nikolai Vavilov (1940, 1987) defined 1924 first time the Centers of Origin of crop cultivation (Figure). For example, around 7,000 years BCE, rice cultivation began along the Janktsekiang river in China

Photo: Agriculture began in Mesopotamia, e.g. in Iraq, together with settlement and the first writing with letters. Cuneiform  developed around 3200 BCE in ancient Mesopotamia - mod-ern-day Iraq, near today’s Baghdad - was one of the world’s first writing systems. Originally created to record agricultural transactions, it played a key role in managing the fertile lands be-tween the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Clay tablets document harvests, land ownership, and irrigation systems, showing how writing supported the organization of large-scale farming and administration. Cuneiform thus became essential for the growth of Mesopotamian civilization, linking literacy directly to the development of agriculture and urban life.

Photo: In the director’s office of CREA (Italian Research Centre for the Soil-Plant System, es-tablished in Rome 1871 as Stazione Agraria Sperimentale, close to the Collosseum) are living documents of 1,800 years of agriculture. The 1800 years old statue of Ops (Ops consivia:  the female Roman god of harvest and fertility, with the horn of plenty) was found on the compound.