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An excerpt from
Neanderthals, bandits and farmers
How agriculture really began
by Colin Tudge
Yale University Press, 1998
Human beings manipulated their environment to some extent, to their advantage, even before they were bona fide human beings. These manipulations graded into farming by a series of minute steps, and fitfully. Palaeontologists and archaeologists have described a particularly striking watershed around 40,000 years ago, when the anatomi- cally modern human beings, Homo sapiens, seemed truly to get into their stride. So it seems reasonable to suggest that this is when true farming began as well - many millennia before the Neolithic Revolution [around 10,000 years ago].
Farming eventually succeeded, ecologically speaking, not because it is pleasant but because it works: it coaxes more food from the environment than would otherwise be the case. Because of this, it enables human populations to rise; and it favours people who work hard whereas hunters - human and animal - are not rewarded for their efforts in the same way. Large populations of hard-working people will inevitably prevail over smaller populations of people who are more laid-back. Ever since that time the human population has been rising exponentially, from an estimated eight million worldwide around 10,000 years ago, to between one hundred and three hundred million at the time of Christ, to six billion - 6,000 million - by 2000 AD.