The Biggest Technological Development in Human History Happened All Across the World Around the Same Time, by Groups of [View all]

Mar 16, 9:45 AM EDT by Noor Al-Sibai

The Biggest Technological Development in Human History Happened All Across the World Around the Same Time, by Groups of People With Zero Contact With One Another

A historical mystery for the ages.


Around the world, on separate continents that had no contact with each other, multiple groups of ancient humans invented farming more or less simultaneously — and scientists still don't know how or why.

Known to archaeologists and anthropologists as the Neolithic Revolution, the discovery of this historical head-scratcher is by no means new. Nevertheless, it continues to fascinate folks like Michael Marshall, an author at New Scientist who pondered this phenomenon in a new piece about this quantum leap in human development.

As a 2023 PNAS paper cited by Marshall suggests, the things scientists do know about this incredible happenstance are what make it so captivating.

After the great ice sheets age of the Pleistocene Epoch began to retreat about 11,700 years ago, humans who had gradually migrated to at least four continents — Africa, Eurasia, and North and South America — moved from hunting and gathering to domesticating plants. In as many as 24 separate sites of origin, the paper explained, people began farming within a few thousand years of each other, with no means of contact between them.

Across scientific disciplines, researchers have long been trying to figure out why this leap in evolutionary behavior occurred with so many groups simultaneously. Anthropologist Melinda Zeder, the senior scientist emeritus at the Smithsonian Institute, told PNAS in 2023 that some of her colleagues even argue that humans may have been "tricked into it by plants" — but still, there's nothing near consensus about why, exactly, our ancestors all picked up farming around the same time.

More:
https://futurism.com/human-development-simultaneous-revolution-farming