Talk:History of agriculture

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Dates
All the dates in this article are much older than reported elsewhere, e.g. "Pigs were domesticated in Mesopotamia around 13,000 BC" (!). Could it be that the dates are actually Before Present (B.P.), and not Before Christ (B.C.) as stated? Arekrishna (talk) 14:28, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
 * The pig date certainly looks 2,000 years too old. I checked several other dates and they seem to be ok, so I doubt there is any systematic issue here and would dispute your "all". I'll fix the pig date now. Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:03, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
 * On the topic of dating irregularities, I notice that the sheep date says "between 11,000 years ago and 9000 BC" which would mean the same date, right? As it is 2000 CE, 11,000 years ago would be 9000 BC(E). Thomas Bartanen (talk) 04:26, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

Do you have a reference for info on pig domestication at 11.000 BC? Or any other animal for that matter? All I've read places animal domestication in the 9th millennium B.C. See f.ex. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0099845 Arekrishna (talk) 20:28, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Eh? Basically, every claim in the article is cited; if you mean the lead section, it just summarizes what is in the rest of the article so we don't introduce new stuff there, or repeat citations given in the body. If you have newer and better sources which contradict a claim, then go right ahead and replace the claim with the new one and the new citation: there's nothing to argue about here, it's all down to the quality of sources. Please format anything you add exactly like the other citations in the article, i.e. use the template. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:37, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

This sentence "In Greece from c. 11,000 BC lentils, vetch, pistachios, and almonds were cultivated, while wild oats and wild barley appear in quantity from c. 7,000 BC alongside einkorn wheat, barley, sheep, goats and pigs,[23][24]" is emphatically unsupported by reference [23]

Reference 23 suggests dates of 6,000 - 5,000 b.c. for the beginnings of agriculture in Greece, not 11,000 - 7,000 bc:

"Early Neolithic (ca. 6000 – 5000 b.c.)

[Renfrew's Introduction of Simple Village Farming]

The beginning of the Neolithic period at Franchthi Cave is characterized by three new features: (1) the appearance of domesticated forms of sheep and goat; (2) the appearance of domesticated forms of wheat, barley, and lentil; (3) the appearance of polished stone tools (e.g. celts, with which to fell trees and thus clear land) and a significant increase in the number of grinding stones (for grinding grain) and sickle elements (flint and obsidian flakes and bladelets with a distinctive {silica gloss} along one or more edges from having been used to cut plants)."  https://web.archive.org/web/20120108141111/http://www.dartmouth.edu/~prehistory/aegean/?page_id=107

The misunderstand may be due to the fact that it suggests a date of 11,000 bc, for first evidence of gathering of wild grain:

"Paleolithic (ca. 20,000 – 8300 b.c.)

[most of Renfrew's Era of Hunting and Gathering]

...Inhabitants of the cave were probably seasonal hunter-gatherers. No certain gathering of plant foods is attested before ca. 11,000 b.c., although large numbers of seeds of the Boraginaceae family may come from plants gathered to furnish soft “bedding” or for the dye which their roots may have supplied. First appearing at ca. 11,000 b.c. are lentils, vetch, pistachios, and almonds. Then ca. 10,500 b.c. and still well within the Upper Paleolithic period appear a few very rare seeds of wild oats and wild barley. Neither wild oats nor wild barley become at all common until ca. 7000 b.c., after which they become a regular and typical feature of the Upper Mesolithic botanical assemblage."

I see nothing at all in reference 23 to support the statement that lentils, vetch, pistachios, and almonds were cultivated ca 11,000 BC. It says they were gathered.

DlronW (talk) 20:39, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
 * In that case (with the later date) the right thing to do is just to remove the material, as it's not specially early. I've removed it. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:55, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

Wow. What a poor article. Early development section
Here is an example:

" Céide Fields in Ireland, consisting of extensive tracts of land enclosed by stone walls, date to 3,500 BC and are the oldest known field systems in the world."

The sources actually state that the Ceide Fields are the first enclosed fields in Europe. This is of course a very different statement than the one in the Wikipedia article. Of course even a passing knowledge of Egypt will cause one to immediately question the bizarre notion in the quote above.2600:1700:6D90:79B0:89D4:DBDB:FDE1:F1B3 (talk) 13:12, 21 May 2018 (UTC)


 * You are welcome to correct this and any other errors in the article. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 13:18, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

The oldest traces of agriculture?
Please correct me if I am wrong but it seems to me that Campbell in his Human Ecology wrote of traces of primitive agriculture on Solomon Islands, 28,000 BP. Perhaps this piece of information should be placed in the article? Can anybody verify it (whether Campbell really wrote this)? But if it is true, what is now with this? I mean, are there newer interpretations of the cited discovery? Even if we were sure today that 28 thousand years ago people in Oceania still did not know anything about agriculture, the information has gone into the world. And this makes that some traces of it should also be placed on Wiki, shouldn’t they? Maybe with a commentary: we do not know if it is true. Or: we do not know what to do with this as it does not fit to our knowledge. Or: that information has been refused and now is understood as false. Depending on the state of the art.

95.160.157.23 (talk) 20:44, 23 August 2018 (UTC)


 * you mean this ?:
 * https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01531421
 * by A Damon · published 1974
 * Human ecology in the Solomon Islands: Biomedical observations among four tribal societies.
 * by A Damon, Cleave, T. L., Campbell, G. D., and Painter, N. S. (1969).
 * There also Genetic studies that suggest much older and gradual transition to agriculture.
 * such as:
 * Published online 2015 Sep 2. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0135980
 * Ancient Humans Influenced the Current Spatial Genetic Structure of Common Walnut Populations in Asia.
 * by: Paola Pollegioni, Keith E. Woeste, Francesca Chiocchini, Stefano Del Lungo, Irene Olimpieri,
 * Virginia Tortolano, Jo Clark, Gabriel E. Hemery, Sergio Mapelli and Maria Emilia Malvolti.
 * I asume the hunter-gatherers, as they gathered to follow seasonal paths.
 * And to observe how their pit's and spills at the places they stayed turned into plants that
 * they could harvest and eat from "again" after a good couple of roundtrips, like reincarnated food.
 * They also took up the puppies of the animals they hunted and fed them for later consumption and services
 * (dog: empathy, hunting guarding skills), and so became pastoralists carrying food + tent on the back of a cow.
 * They would start planting the pits of the fruit they had eaten at beneficial places,
 * thus creating groves and orchards along their seasonal path.
 * And using slash and burn strategies as they observed in nature, and how that renewed lands
 * for grains or pasture for their cattle. It may have taken more than one generation but then
 * they may have created a few oases along their path ready for a more permanent settlement. 85.149.55.250 (talk) 11:10, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

Early farming
Here is an article (re-published from another credible source) about nascent farming that happened much earlier. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150722144709.htm

I believe there might be more sources to be found, so it looks like we need to incorporate this info somehow on the relevant pages. I leave it to more experienced editors, also specializing in agriculture. 2601:1C0:CB01:2660:357A:21B9:B06A:653A (talk) 03:17, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

Domesticated rice in South Asia
I have removed a recent addition regarding rice-domestication in Ganga valley. But a recent paper (Ray, A, et al. 2020) published in a peer-reviewed journal has disputed the claim. The study concludes that the proto-indica model seems to be too pre- mature and lacks sufficient support. ChandlerMinh (talk) 19:09, 5 January 2022 (UTC)

Egypt early agriculture
Currently, the article states that “Egyptians were among the first peoples to practice agriculture on a large scale ... between around 10,000 BC and 4000 BC”, based on the citation of Janick, Jules (2002). "Ancient Egyptian Agriculture and the Origins of Horticulture".

Well, I’ve read Janick's article and it doesn’t really say it. From what I’ve looked up so far, on a large scale, Egyptian agriculture started at the Faiyum oasis.

Britannica says,

https://www.britannica.com/topic/agriculture/The-Nile-valley

“By the first quarter of the 7th millennium BP [around 4750 BC] in Al-Fayyūm, some villages were keeping sheep, goats, and swine and cultivating emmer, barley, cotton, and flax, which was woven into linen.”

And only later agriculture moved to the Nile plain. So we seem to have a problem here. I’ll correct this area if nobody objects. Y-barton (talk) 16:11, 22 April 2022 (UTC)


 * This statement is essentially unverifiable, because what does "large scale" mean? The Egyptian Neolithic, at places like Fayum, is usually described as starting late and being much less reliant on agricultural modes of production than e.g. the Levantine Neolithic. But it's also poorly well understood: partly through lack of research, partly because it's assumed that prehistoric Egyptians also would have preferred to live in the Nile valley, meaning any sites they left behind were probably destroyed by later settlement or buried under metres of alluvium. If we're going to highlight ancient Egypt in this article, surely it should be for its irrigation technology in the dynastic periods, not its comparatively undistinguished Neolithic? –&#8239;Joe (talk) 18:19, 23 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Yes, of course, this issue is bigger than simply what happened in Egypt. And from my previous research, the same or similar issue arises in Mesopotamia, for example. In that area, it’s believed that the floodplains of lower Mesopotamia were settled by agriculturalists later than the areas in Northern Mesopotamia that were more mountainous. Most of the early domestication of crops and animals was done in the small mountain valleys; it’s well documented. I don’t have citations handy for all this right now, but this is widely admitted. Basically, first they had to practice on a smaller scale (like in the Faiyum), and then moved the show to the bigger places like floodplains. Y-barton (talk) 15:22, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

Organic agriculture heading fails to mention Albert Howard and Gabrielle Howard
No mention under the heading organic agriculture of Albert Howard and Gabrielle Howard, about whom the page Organic farming says "[are] the founder[s] and pioneer[s] of the organic movement". Instead all credit is given to "biodynamic agriculture" which is recognised on Wikipedia as pseudoscience. Wallby (talk) 15:08, 29 November 2023 (UTC)