43 – Beginning of agricultural communities

Around 12,000 years ago

The human development of agriculture marks a key turning point in food acquisition strategies for our species. Before agriculture, the primary subsistence strategy was hunting and gathering. But with agriculture, humans could collaborate on food production and make the process more efficient. Many argue that by streamlining the food acquisition process through agriculture, humans opened the door to all other technological marvels that we have produced. We know that agriculture developed around 12,000 years ago from pictographic records, farming tools, and stores of seeds that have been discovered. Read about human’s unique capacity to cooperate.

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Epoch

    Pleistocene2.58 million to 11,700 years ago

Environmental and Climate Changes

  • Abrupt cooling of the Earth—Younger Dryas 12,800 to 11,600 Ya
  • Interglacial period 11,000 Ya to Present

Changing Species