How did farming culture come into being?

The origin process of agricultural civilization:

Human history developed to about 10,000 years ago, that is, at the end of the late Pleistocene in geological history and the end of the last ice age in tectonic history, archaeology During the Mesolithic Age in science, the earth's ecological environment on which humans depended for survival underwent tremendous changes. The rise in global temperatures, the replacement of animals and vegetation, and changes in sea level (mainly manifested as rising) have led to the emergence of a series of new things. The origin of agriculture, the raising of domestic animals, the settlement of life, and even the germination of primitive religion and art. Therefore, it is not an exaggeration to regard the Mesolithic Age as a turning point in human history. Among them, the origin of agriculture is particularly prominent. Its significance is that human economic life completed a qualitative leap from an extractive economy to a productive economy. At the same time, it also profoundly affects the development of other things. Academic research on this topic is also quite active, and there are quite a few questions that need to be answered. For example, Mr. Xu Wang proposed six major issues to be solved in the study of the origins of agriculture: (1) the reasons for the emergence of agriculture; (2) the location of agriculture; (3) the time of agriculture; (4) who originally created agriculture; (5) The way agriculture occurs; (6) The objects of agriculture.

However, few articles have done in-depth research on the evolution mechanism and development process of the origin of agriculture, and most of them are mentioned with words such as "transition" and "transformation". In his article "The Origin of Farming in West Asia", Mr. Kong Lingping proposed a syllogism from the origin of agriculture through primitive agriculture to rural agriculture after the formation of agricultural economy. Starting from the initial opportunity for the germination of agriculture, we deduce the entire process of its fermentation, development, maturity and emergence and its motivations, thereby proposing a general model of the origin of agriculture, which is also divided into three stages.

The first stage

During the long prehistory of mankind, due to the influence of ecological and environmental factors, the economic lifestyle of ancient humans was directly restricted. In the Paleolithic Age, various primitive groups lived relatively dispersedly, with strong mobility and low population density. Nature had enough resources for human beings to enjoy. According to the principle of optimal foraging mode (one of the effective theories usually used to explain the survival style and cultural evolution of prehistoric humans), the economic life of prehistoric humans followed this rule, that is, arranging their activities with the best economic benefits. The production method, in reality, is to strive to obtain the maximum harvest at the minimum cost. Before agricultural production technology was mastered, and with the level of human productivity at that time, hunting was the first choice to obtain more abundant food at a smaller cost. For example, if a small primitive group spent half a day hunting two cows and three wild boars, then these would be enough for more than a dozen people to eat for more than two or three days. However, if they did not hunt animals, but spent a day collecting a large number of wild boar, Fruits or other plant foods (according to the amount they can carry), then these are only enough for them to eat two or three meals at most. Taking into account the length of time to obtain, the difficulty and the amount of food energy, plants are obviously at a disadvantage. On the other hand, large herbivores such as cows and pigs have a large amount of meat per individual, are bulky, are easier to capture, and can fully meet their feeding needs. According to the optimal foraging model, large animals were always at the highest level in ancient human diets. Regardless of their quantity, they were always the favorite food of hunter-gatherers. As for plants, especially those that are time-consuming and laborious to collect and process, no matter how abundant they are, even if their nutritional value is high, their grade in recipes will not be high. Therefore, hunting naturally became the main economic form of humans in the Paleolithic Age. This kind of economy based on hunting can be called a simple hunting economy.

With the end of the last glacial period, the frozen soil, grassland, birch and pine gave way to the deciduous forest represented by oak; large herbivorous animals decreased, and finally there were almost no large mammals except wild boars. animals; rising sea levels also lead to the widening of estuaries and the expansion of lakes and swamps. Many changes, on the one hand, have led to a significant reduction in the foods that humans love, and on the other hand, the types and quantities of lower-grade plants, fish, and shellfish in the diet have become extremely rich. In addition, after millions of years of development, human beings have also reached a considerable number and the population pressure is becoming increasingly serious. All these forced people to give up simply following the best foraging patterns and try a variety of feeding methods, taking a turning step towards the origin of agriculture - a broad spectrum of fishing, hunting and gathering. Economy, or complex fishing, hunting and gathering economy.

Broad-spectrum economy, as the name suggests, refers to the economy of "wide range of recipes", including collecting plant fruits, roots, and seeds, fishing and hunting, and harvesting fish and clams from rivers and lakes, or clams and shellfish from shallow waters on the seashore. . The specific form and content can be diverse and depend on the natural conditions of each place. Of course, hunting is still an important source of food to a certain extent, but it is no longer dominant. This broad-spectrum economic form is simply an unstable adaptation to an unstable ecological environment. Strengthen the development of a few types of resources that regenerate quickly and are abundant in quantity, such as fish, shellfish, seeds or nuts, etc. Although this can relieve temporary worries, it does not solve the fundamental problem. There are still hidden dangers and the risk of resource depletion. Once there is a big fluctuation in the environment, people may face an existential crisis again.

Second Stage

Due to the instability of the environment, fluctuations in resources are inevitable. In particular, high-end food varieties are increasingly depleted and population pressure is increasing. People need to obtain and master them. Some frequently available animals and plants serve as a reserve when food is scarce.

Initially, the harvest was guaranteed and fruitful by concentrating the population, adopting a settled or semi-settled approach, through strict organization, intensifying labor input, and using various technologies to develop, utilize and store food. At the same time, production tools are also becoming smaller and more complex. This is also an adaptation to changes in the ecological environment and economic methods. For example, the world-wide microlithic craftsmanship appeared at this time, adapting to the fact that large animals were exhausted and small animals were abundant. Multi-purpose composite tools adapted to a broad spectrum of economic production methods. With this premise and preparation, during the collection and storage process, people sometimes find that certain plants regularly grow new plants, and sometimes they find buried fruits whose seeds will grow automatically after a period of time. New plants. People then paid special attention to this type of plants or fruit trees, gradually accumulated experience in harvesting, and discovered certain plants (which can only be plants, not animals or plants) that can be eaten repeatedly within a period of time (such as a year). Aquatic products, because of the latter, no matter how strong the regeneration ability is, it is impossible to reproduce several batches of individuals that can be eaten within a year). Therefore, it was natural for people to take a key step towards the origin of agriculture - centralized collection.

In concentrated collection activities, people narrowed the objects of collection from the broad-spectrum stage of messy recipes to some or several plants with strong regeneration ability, which can be eaten many times within a period of time and are easy to store. On the body, this is the earliest object of cultivation and domestication by people. The cultivation objects in different regions are also different. In some areas, they are rhizome plants, and in other areas, they are grass plants. They all vary due to different natural environmental conditions. For example, in South China, the first domesticated plants were probably vegetatively propagated rhizome plants, leading to garden-style agriculture; while in the Yangtze River Basin, rice was probably the first domesticated gramineous plant; in the north, chestnut became the first domesticated plant. The first artificially cultivated plant.

In this stage, broad spectrum still exists, and concentrated collection is only the evolutionary development stage of plant collection activities. Although this branch will lead to the emergence of agriculture in the future, people did not foresee it at the time. Its advantage is that it gradually Revealed. Fishing and hunting activities also coexist. Hunting has not completely disappeared either. Although there are not many large herbivores, there are still some medium and small animals that survive and become the targets of people's hunting. They are small, light and mobile. Adult individuals are difficult to obtain, and those that can be obtained are mostly old and young individuals. Generally, the old ones are slaughtered quickly, while the young ones are kept in captivity (for example, dogs are such small animals, and it is generally believed that dogs are one of the first animals to be domesticated). The centralized collection of plants solves their food source to a certain extent, which is quite similar to the statement that "the origin of agriculture was to provide food sources for livestock raising." But it is not the same. We believe that the origin of agriculture is not simply to provide food for livestock, but only plays this role objectively. Rather, the origins of agriculture coincided with the development of livestock farming.

The third stage

After a period of intensive collection, people gradually became familiar with the growth habits and laws of these plants, and gradually evolved from unconsciousness to consciously leaving some parts when collecting. Carry on simple care for young plants and wait until they are more suitable for eating before harvesting. The significance of this is that people have begun simulated agricultural cultivation without knowing it. Some scholars also call this behavior gathering agriculture. Since the growth of plants is not completely concentrated, but is naturally distributed, people still need to "pick grass by grass" when collecting. In order to avoid such long trips back and forth, people transplant them to grow closer to their residence or in a safer place, which is easy to care for and harvest. In this process, people took care of the plant seedlings they brought back near their homes. After close observation and personal exploration, they gradually learned about the physiological cycles of plants such as flowers blooming and fading, melons ripening and stems falling, seeds falling and taking root, etc., and they also understood From germination to growth, development and maturity of plants, they need to be sown first, then watered and fertilized, and only then can they be harvested. So this substantial step towards agricultural cultivation was taken.

This step was also influenced by livestock breeding. People were inspired by the process of domesticating young animals and realized the vitality of young animals, so they were able to select young individuals when choosing plant objects. During the origin of agriculture, domestic animal raising was closely related to the domestication of wild plants. On the one hand, the centralized collection of wild plants objectively provides a food source for domestic animal raising; on the other hand, the domestication of wild plants is also affected by the raising of domestic animals. In a sense, it can be said that they promote each other and serve as motivation for each other.

This step is not easy. It is actually a quite complicated and long process. When cultivated agriculture first appeared, it still accounted for a small proportion in people's economic life. It was complementary rather than a substitute. In his research on the origin of agriculture in Tehuacan, McNish found that it took 7,000 years for Mesoamerican humans to rely on cultivated crops from 5% to 75%, which shows that there is still a long period of time from the emergence of primitive agriculture to the formation of an agricultural economy. Long way to go. After people began to learn to enclose fields for agricultural cultivation on their own, they continued to accumulate agricultural experience and develop new cultivated varieties, and maximized the effectiveness of land and crops. Only then did agriculture gradually become the dominant economic form.