The emergence of plant and animal domestication represented a monumental change in the ways that humans interacted with Earth’s resources: the rate at which Earth’s surface was modified and the rates of human population growth. The development of agriculture was accompanied by fundamental changes in the organization on human society: disparities in wealth, hierarchies of power, and urbanization.

Phrases like “plant and animal domestication” and “the invention of agriculture” create the impression that humans made the transition to cultivating plants and tending animals rather abruptly, maybe with a flash of insight. Most scholars don’t think so. It seems more likely that humans used and manipulated wild plants and animals for many hundreds of thousands of years. The transition to gardens, fields, and pastures was probably gradual, the natural outgrowth of a long familiarity with the environmental requirements, growth cycles, and reproductive mechanisms of whatever plants and animals humans liked to eat, ride, or wear.

For years, scholars argued that the practices of cultivation and animal domestication were invented in one or two locations on Earth and then diffused from those centers of innovation. Genetic studies are now showing that many different groups of people in many different places around the globe learned independently to create especially useful plants and animals through selective breeding. Probably both independent invention and diffusion played a role in agricultural innovation. Sometimes the ideas of domestication and cultivation were relayed to new places. In other cases the farmers or herders themselves moved into new zones, taking agriculture or improvements such as new tools or new methods or new plants and animals with them.

Scholars used to assume that people turned to cultivating instead of gathering their food either because they had to in order to feed burgeoning populations, or because agriculture provided such obviously better nutrition. It now seems that neither of these explanations is valid. First of all, the risk attached to exploring new food sources when there were already too many mouths to feed would be too great. Second, agriculture did not necessarily improve nutrition or supplies of food. A varied diet based on gathered (and occasionally hunted) food probably provided a wider, more secure range of nutrients than an early agriculturally based diet of only one or two cultivated crops. More likely, populations expanded after agricultural successes, and not before.

Richard MacNeish, an archaeologist who studied plant domestication in Mexico and Central America, suggested that the chance to trade was at the heart of agricultural origins worldwide. Many of the known locations of agricultural innovation lie near early trade centers. People in such places would have had at least two reasons to pursue cultivation and animal raising; they would have had access to new information, plants, and animals brought in by traders, and they would have had a need for something to trade with the people passing through. Perhaps, then, agriculture was at first just a profitable hobby for hunters and gatherers that eventually, because of market demand, grew into the primary source of sustenance. Trade in agricultural products may also have been a hobby that led to trouble.

E. N. Anderson, writing about the beginnings of agriculture in China, suggests that agricultural production for trade may have been the impetus for several global situations now regarded as problems: rapid population growth, social inequalities, environmental degradation, and famine. Briefly explained, his theory suggests that groups turned to raising animals and plants in order to reap the profits of trading them. As more labor was needed to supply the trade, humans produced more children. As populations expanded, more resources were put into producing food for subsistence and for trade. Gradually, hunting and gathering technology was abandoned as populations, with their demands for space, destroyed natural habitats. Meanwhile, a minority elite emerged when the wealth provided by trade did not accrue equally to everyone. Yet another problem was that a drought or other natural disaster could wipe out an entire harvest, thus, as ever larger populations depended solely on agriculture, famine became more common.