The beginning of Agriculture

10,000 Years Ago

GrainS_1FARMING BEGAN in the Middle East, about 10,000 years ago, arriving in Ireland 5,000 years ago. Farming produced food surpluses, freeing up the labour resources required to build elaborate monuments, such as megalithic tombs and stone circles of the Boggeragh and Nagle Mountains. All the major Neolithic monuments are associated with burials, and reverence for the dead. Buildings for the living, on the other hand, were much less substantial and have left little trace. Clearly these people placed an immense importance on religious practice and the supernatural.

The surplus food produced by farming would eventually allow the building of cities and the development of the first states. This happened about 4000 years after farming began and will be the subject of the next station.

 

IT IS NO ACCIDENT that the area of the Middle East where farming began, the so-called ‘Fertile Crescent’, was extremely biologically diverse. It forms a land bridge between Africa, Arabia, Europe and Asia, with a range of high and low ground, accommodating plants and animals requiring a wide variety of climates. This bio-diversity was vital in providing the raw material for domesticating crops and livestock.

The range of major farm plants and animals is really very small and an extraordinary proportion of them were domesticated very early in the Crescent, including wheat, barley, sheep, goats and cattle. Farming arose independently in several places, including Melanesia and the Americas, and yet this suite of species dominates the agriculture of almost the entire planet.

The Crescent was also ideally located for the spread of both farming technique and domesticated species, because it is in the centre of the Eurasian land mass. With no impassable natural or climatic barriers, domesticated plants and animals rapidly spread East and West, to the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards and across North Africa.