Climate, risk, and the rise of agriculture

Many Minds

It's an enduring puzzle. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors were nomadic, ranging over large territories, hunting and gathering for sustenance. Then, beginning roughly 12,000 years ago, we pivoted. Within a short timeframe—in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas—humans suddenly decided to settle down. We started to store our food. We domesticated plants. We set off, in other words, down a path that would reshape our cultures, our technologies, our social structures, even our minds. Yet no one has yet been able to account for this shift. No one has been able to fully explain why agriculture happened when it happened and where it happened. Unless, that is, someone just did.

My guest today is Dr. Andrea Matranga. Andrea is an economist at the University of Torino, in Italy, with a focus on economic history. In a new paper, he puts forward an ambitious, unifying theory of the rise of agriculture in our species. He argues that the key trigger was a spike in seasonality—with certain parts of the world, particularly parts of the northern hemisphere, suddenly experiencing warmer summers and colder winters. This led risk-averse humans in these places to start to store food and, eventually, to experiment with farming.

In this conversation, Andrea and I talk about how he developed his theory, in steps, over the course of almost 20 years. We consider the weaknesses of earlier explanations of agriculture, including explanations that focused on climate. We discuss how he wrangled vast historical datasets to test his theory. And we talk about some of the downstream effects that agriculture seems to have had. Along the way we touch on: salmon, wheat, taro, and milk; agriculture as a franchise model; Milankovitch Cycles; risk-aversion and consumption-smoothing; interloping in the debates of other disciplines; the possibility of a fig-based civilization; and how we inevitably project our own concerns onto the past.

Alright friends, I hope you enjoy this one. As I said at the top, the origins of agriculture is just one of those irresistible, perennial puzzles—one that cuts across the human sciences. And, I have to say, I find Andrea's solution to this puzzle quite compelling. I'll be curious to hear if you agree. Without further ado, on to my conversation with Andrea Matranga. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

8:00 – Various versions of the fable ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’ are compiled here.

13:00 – One of the last remaining ziggurat complexes is Chogha Zanbil.

16:00 – The classic paper by anthropologist Alain Testart on food storage among hunter-gatherers.

19:30 – An influential study emphasizing that agriculture occurred after the Ice Age due to warming conditions. Other studies have posited that other features of climate may have led to the rise in agriculture (e.g., here).

21:00 – An (illustrated) explanation of Milankovitch Cycles.

27:00 – For Marshall Sahlins’ discussion of ‘The Original Affluent Society,’ see here.

32:00 – Jared Diamond’s popular article, ‘The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.’

33:00 – A paper criticizing the particularistic focus of many archaeological treatments of the origins of agriculture.

36:30 – Dr. Matranga used a variety of data sources to test his theory, including a dataset compiling dates of agricultural adoption.

42:00 – A report detailing evidence of agriculture in Kuk Swamp in New Guinea.

43:00 – The book Cuisine and Empire, by Rachel Laudan.

44:00 – A paper by Luigi Pascali and collaborators on the rise of states and the “appropriability” of cereals.

1:01:00 – A paper about the Natufian culture, which is considered to occupy an intermediate step on the road to agriculture.

Recommendations

What We Did to Father (republished as The Evolution Man), by Roy Lewis

The Living Fields, by Jack Harlan

Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers, by Richard Lee and Irven Devore

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

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