Agriculture begins
People start planting what they used to gather, and every later thing follows from it.
- When
- Known to
- ± 300 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
In the Fertile Crescent from around 9500 BCE, wild cereals and pulses under cultivation begin showing domestication traits — above all seed heads that do not shatter, which is fatal in the wild and essential for a harvester. The shift is gradual, taking a millennium or more, and it is not obviously an improvement: early farmers work longer, eat worse and die younger than the foragers around them. What it does allow is storage, surplus and density, and from those come everything usually called civilisation.