Agriculture is invented again and again
At least eleven regions domesticate their own crops independently, with no contact between them.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 6.5 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 1 thousand years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Farming is not a single invention that spread. The Fertile Crescent, China's Yangtze and Yellow River basins, New Guinea, Mesoamerica, the Andes, eastern North America, the Sahel, the Ethiopian highlands and parts of South and Southeast Asia each domesticate their own species from local wild plants within a few thousand years of one another. That independent convergence, after 200,000 years of foraging, points at a shared cause — most plausibly the newly stable Holocene climate.