New study challenges the story of humanity’s shift from prehistoric hunting to farming
A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has turned traditional thinking on its head by highlighting the role of human interactions during the shift from hunting and gathering to farming—one of the biggest changes in human history—rather than earlier ideas that focused on environmental factors.
The transition from a hunter-gatherer foraging lifestyle, which humanity had followed for hundreds of thousands of years, to a settled farming one about 12,000 years ago has been widely discussed in popular books like “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari.
Researchers from the University of Bath, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, the University of Cambridge, UCL, and others have developed a new mathematical model that challenges the traditional view that this major transition was driven by external factors, such as climate warming, increased rainfall, or the development of fertile river valleys.
This research shows that humans were not just passive participants in this process; they played an active and crucial role in the transition. Factors such as varying population growth rates and mortality rates—driven by competition between hunter-gatherers and farmers—shaped the agricultural development of these regions. [Continue reading…]