The Origins of Agriculture

The present explanation — ‘it just happened’ — is no longer good enough

The only people in the world today that are both successful and use pre-agricultural methods are the Sámi reindeer-herders of Sweden and Finland. So it does not seem unreasonable to look to them for clues about the vexed question of how agriculture came about. It may not have been the Sámi and it may not have been reindeer, but if we shift the Sámi model back to c. 40,000 BP, before domestication of either plants or animals, what are our prospects out there on the Eurasian steppe?

Left to our own devices, we are not well suited to grasslands. We cannot eat the grass and there are few alternatives ripe for the picking. Nor are we designed to catch animals designed not to be caught by the many and varied predators already there. What to do?

There is one abundant food source we can ‘keep up with’ — the vast slow-moving herds always to be found on grassland plains. They may be wildebeest, they may be bison, but let us assume for these purposes they are reindeer.

These toothsome beasts may be fearfully difficult to catch and kill on an individual basis, but a whole herd of them may welcome a spot of symbiosis if everyone plays their cards right. For instance, human beings can keep predators away or, if they can’t, warn the reindeer they’re coming. Herbivores have more to fear from four-legged predators than lumbering two-legged ones. Looked at from the reindeer’s POV, this…