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

[Judi Lynn]

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

[OAITW r.2.0]

1. IDK, but a few thousand years doesn't sound like "at the same time".

The geological scale is "at the same time", but a few thousand years in human evolution seems like a reasonable timeframe for human civilizations to all acquire the skills to adopt farming techniques.

[stopdiggin]

3. no it really isn't. (and this is big, big, big !!)

with all due respect to your opinion (and certainly your right to offer it), but ....

From around 200,000 (give or take another 50 or 100) - to about 12-15 thousand years ago - sapiens wandered the earth (and populated most of the globe) with little real change other than some new variety of pointed rocks - and perhaps some efforts to wrap ourselves in skins, to counter those nasty updrafts in northern Europe and Siberia. And then, boom! Suddenly (and, as noted, curiously in multiple places and on multiple fronts .. ) - we started changing things up. Real fast.

Simplified, yes. But that the basic outline, and the true meat of the story.

And, as said ... Huge! Regarding who and what we are ... And, no - those couple thousand years when it all happened - is more or less the blink of an eye. (When weighed up against the hundreds that we had been wandering around doing ... ? )

[SheltieLover]

2. 100th monkey effect

[exboyfil]

4. I often wondered about this

Also the question of why with a similar starting point, Europe/Africa/Asia developed the wheel and bronze/iron/steel. Guns, Germs, and Steel explores it to some degree (ability to migrate east-west vs. north-south). Also the fauna (horses, camels, and oxen) that could be used for transport were eaten before they could be domesticated.

Not a big fan of Graham Hancock but you do have to wonder about how first Egyptian constructions of pyramids occur around the same time frame as Caral in Peru.

[eppur_se_muova]

5. All based on the earliest evidence THAT WE KNOW OF -- potentially subject to revision every time a new dig is opened.

Given that the glaciers retreated as the climate warmed up, I'd suspect a change in vegetation had a lot to do with it. Changes in vegetation may be linked to the die-off of large mammals, particularly cold-adapted animals like wooly mammoths and rhinos. There have been attempts in recent years to clone living mammoths from fossil DNA, but it's not clear if such animals could graze successfully on modern plants.

[EverHopeful]

6. A professor once said that, given the changes agriculture brought about

to human existence, rather than saying humans domesticated wheat, it could be said that wheat domesticated humans.

Hope that's not too off-topic but it always come to mind for me when this puzzle is discussed.

[c-rational]

7. "Tricked into it by plants." I agree.