Andrea Matranga from the New Economics School discusses the Neolithic Revolution and the invention of agriculture. He explores how climate seasonality led to the adoption of agriculture, with a model showing incentives for the shift. The podcast covers the spread of agriculture globally, the transition to sedentary farming, and the correlation between climate volatility and farming invention. It also delves into the impact of agriculture on human societies, highlighting its role in shaping cultural traditions, political institutions, and the gene pool.
Adoption of agriculture was a response to climatic seasonality, prompting sedentary lifestyle and food storage.
Climate seasonality correlated with the spread of agriculture, influencing human development and societal changes.
Deep dives
Neolithic Revolution Overview
The Neolithic Revolution marks the transition of humans from nomadic hunting and gathering to settled agriculture. This shift involved changing from using stone tools to new stone tools. The revolution initially thought to have occurred only in the fertile crescent, eventually spread independently to at least seven locations worldwide over an 8,000-year period. The transition from nomadic to settled agriculture was a significant change over time, leading to complex cultural advancements.
Alternative Theories on Agricultural Adoption
Initially, there was an assumption that agriculture would greatly improve the lives of hunter-gatherers due to the constant availability of food. However, some researchers, like Marshall Salins, questioned this viewpoint by highlighting that hunter-gatherers often had better nutrition and more leisure time than early farmers. Various theories emerged around the Neolithic Revolution, with interpretations heavily influenced by contemporary political and social contexts.
The Ant and the Grasshopper Theory
The fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper is used to explain the theory behind the adoption of agriculture. The story emphasizes the importance of storing food to survive seasons of scarcity. The theory suggests that sedentary life and agriculture were adopted as a way to cope with seasonal fluctuations in food availability. This association between sedentism and the need for food storage contributed to the development of agriculture in seasonal environments.
Impact of Climate Seasonality on Agricultural Adoption
Research links climate seasonality to the adoption of agriculture, particularly in areas with pronounced changes in seasonal conditions. Populations faced with extreme seasonality were motivated to become sedentary and store food, which eventually led to agricultural practices. The onset of agriculture coincided with a period of increased climate seasonality around 12,000 years ago, shaping the course of human development and societal changes over time.
Andrea Matranga of the New Economics School in Moscow joins the podcast with a fascinating question: Why did humans adopt agriculture in the times and places they did? His research paper, The Ant and the Grasshopper: Seasonality and the Invention of Agriculture, offers a potential solution. Here's the abstract:
During the Neolithic Revolution, seven populations independently invented agriculture. In this paper, I argue that this innovation was a response to a large increase in climatic seasonality. Hunter-gatherers in the most affected regions became sedentary in order to store food and smooth their consumption. I present a model capturing the key incentives for adopting agriculture, and I test the resulting predictions against a global panel dataset of climate conditions and Neolithic adoption dates. I find that invention and adoption were both systematically more likely in places with higher seasonality. The findings of this paper imply that seasonality patterns 10,000 years ago were amongst the major determinants of the present day global distribution of crop productivities, ethnic groups, cultural traditions, and political institutions.
Figure 2 in the paper illustrates the locations and times of the adoption of agriculture:
Andrea looks at both these adoption dates and the rapidity of the spread of agriculture from these locations and compares them to the climatic seasonality of those locations, finding a strong connection between seasonality and adoption of agriculture. He argues that the need to store food caused people to become sedentary as opposed to nomadic, and once they were sedentary the opportunity cost of farming was greatly reduced.
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