At a low mound on the Euphrates in northern Syria, in the charred debris of cooking fires that burned for two thousand years, the botanist Gordon Hillman counted seeds. The village was called Abu Hureyra, and its earliest people, who arrived around 13,300 years ago, were not farmers. They were gatherers and hunters of unusual range. From the ground around their houses Hillman’s team recovered the seeds of some two hundred wild plant species, more than a hundred of them edible — small-seeded grasses, wild lentils, the fruits of the terebinth and the wild plum, club-rush tubers, feather grass. Roughly twenty were staples. Once a year the men and women of Abu Hureyra met the gazelle herds that streamed north past the village on their migration and killed them in numbers, whole herds at a time.
It was a broad menu, and that breadth was the whole point. When one food failed, there was always another.
Then, reading upward through the layers, Hillman watched the menu collapse. The wild plant foods began to drop out of the record, and they dropped out in an order that meant something: the species that needed the most water went first, then the next thirstiest, then the next, falling away one by one as if a hand were drawing a line down the list. The drought disrupted the gazelle migration too, and the villagers leaned harder on the animals they could take in any season — onager, hare, fox, birds — the way people hunt when they can no longer count on anything else. The land around the village was drying out.
A cold snap dries the Near East
What dried it was a planetary event. Around 10,900 BC the warming that had been pulling the world out of the last ice age reversed, hard and fast, into a cold dry spell that lasted some twelve hundred years. Geologists call it the Younger Dryas. In the Near East it pulled the rains away and pushed the woodland back from places like Abu Hureyra, stranding the wild stands of cereal and pulse that the gatherers had leaned on.
The people of the Levant in this period are known as the Natufians, and before the drought they had been doing very well. They lived in stone-founded round houses, sometimes for generations in one place — sedentary, or nearly so, which forager societies rarely are. They cut wild grain with flint sickles whose edges still carry the silica gloss of the stems they sawed through, and ground it on stone mortars. They had grown comfortable, and dependent, on the wild cereals that grew thick on the hills.
The drought took those cereals away. And a people who had built their lives around dense wild grain, faced with that grain retreating up the slopes and out of reach, did the thing that would remake the species. They began to plant it themselves — to take seed from the stands that remained and put it in the ground near the village, where they could water and tend and defend it. At Abu Hureyra, Hillman read the first cultivated rye out of the layers just as the wild foods were thinning out — a claim other archaeobotanists still contest, since the grains are hard to tell from their wild forms and no accepted domesticated cereal follows for thousands of years. What is not in dispute is that the drought pushed the old staples out of reach; the argument is over what the villagers did next. Cultivation was not an invention so much as a fallback, a way to hold on to a food that was slipping away.
It worked. And over the long run — not in a generation at Abu Hureyra, where wild foods went on being gathered for centuries, but across the millennia that followed — the crops that could be sown and stored crowded the rest of the plate. Wheat, rice and maize alone now supply something close to half the calories eaten on earth.
The bargain, and what it cost the body
By any measure a civilization counts — population, permanence, surplus, cities, writing, everything that came after — agriculture was the best move humans ever made. There would be no reading this sentence without it. Farming feeds far more people per acre than foraging ever could, and the billions alive today are the proof.
For the individual body that took up the hoe, it was a poor trade, and the skeletons say so plainly.
Across the world, wherever archaeologists can line up the bones of the last foragers against the first farmers in the same place, the same pattern surfaces: people got shorter. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show hunter-gatherers near the end of the ice age standing a healthy 5 feet 9 inches for men, 5 feet 5 for women. By the Early Bronze Age, well into the farming era, the men had lost some four inches and the women a full five. Heights crept back up in classical times, but the ground lost took some five thousand years to recover: only in the modern era have Greek men passed their ice-age ancestors, and Turkish men are still about level with theirs.
The clearest ledger of the cost lies in a set of burial mounds in Illinois called Dickson Mounds, where some eight hundred skeletons span the centuries in which a people who hunted, gathered and grew a few native seed crops came to lean heavily on maize. The anthropologist George Armelagos and his colleagues read the change directly off the bones. Compared with those who came before, the maize farmers were far likelier to carry tooth-enamel defects, the bands that mark a childhood of malnutrition: among adults, close to half the earlier group bore them, against four in five of the farmers. They had four times the iron-deficiency anemia. They carried three times the bone lesions left by infectious disease. Life expectancy at birth fell from about twenty-six years to nineteen.
Abu Hureyra’s own dead carry a different signature of the same bargain. When the physical anthropologist Theya Molleson examined the skeletons from the village’s later farming centuries, she found the work written into them: big toes bent permanently upward, shinbones thickened where the knee had pressed the ground, backs and elbows worn hard. They were the marks of long hours spent kneeling at a grinding stone set flat on the earth, rolling a stone pestle back and forth over grain. The damage was almost all on the women, who did that grinding from adolescence on. Bread had to be paid for in bone.
The reasons are not mysterious. A diet built on one or two starchy grains is a diet missing things — protein, iron, vitamins the broad wild menu had supplied for free. Bodies packed together in permanent villages, alongside their animals and their refuse and their stored grain, traded epidemic diseases that scattered bands had never sustained. Teeth that had ground tough wild forage now bathed in cereal carbohydrate, and rotted. The forager’s insurance — when one food fails, eat another — was gone.
When a dry year became a famine
That last loss may be the deepest one. A band that ate dozens of foods could absorb the failure of any single one; a bad season for acorns was a reason to lean on fish or tubers or game. A field of a single crop offers no such cushion. When the rains failed now, they failed against the one thing the whole village had bet on, and there was nothing behind it.
Foragers went hungry too, and sometimes died of it. But a phenomenon now enters the human story on a scale foraging had never produced: famine. Not a hungry month but mass starvation, a village or a region or a kingdom with empty granaries and no second menu to fall back on. The pattern still shows up in the ethnographic record: across a standard worldwide sample of preindustrial societies, anthropologists have found that hunter-gatherers suffer famine less often than farmers do, even after allowing for the harshness of the country they live in. Diamond’s own comparison is the sharpest version of it — that Bushmen eating seventy-five wild plants could hardly starve the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers did when one crop failed in the 1840s. The same monoculture that fed more people in good years killed them in bad ones, and by then there were far more mouths depending on it.
In 1987 the UCLA physiologist and biogeographer Jared Diamond, weighing the foragers’ broad easy diet against the farmers’ rotting teeth and shrinking bones and recurring famines, gave the transition a verdict that has stuck to it ever since. In taking up farming, he wrote, “we made the worst mistake in human history.” The essay ran under a title that has outlived the sentence: “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.”
It was nothing of the kind, if you mean the species — the species multiplied and built and endured because of it. It was something close to it, if you mean the body that first picked up the seed. Both things are true, and the bones at Abu Hureyra and Dickson Mounds hold both. A people cornered by a drought reached for the only food they could control, planted it, and saved themselves. Their great-grandchildren were shorter, sicker, and for the first time in the history of the human animal, one failed harvest away from starving.