The spread of agriculture and nomadic pastoralism: insights from genetics, linguistics and archaeology

Abstract

The population of modem humans has increased progressively since the initial expansion of Homo sapiens from Africa opened new territory for settlement. The human population probably increased at least fivefold in the period from about 60,000 or 70,000 to 10,000 years ago. This estimate is based on the consideration that Africa forms about 20 per cent of the land surface of the world. It assumes that there was no increase in efficiency of use of the land over that time period, which is unlikely, and it is therefore probably an underestimate. Whatever the total human population was at the beginning of the Holocene around 10,000 years ago (cf. Groube in Ch. 7 in this volume), just before the beginnings of agriculture and animal breeding, it is likely to have been near saturation for the prevailing hunter—gatherer technology, so that population pressure was probably at the time an important stimulus to innovations in food production (Cohen 1977), leading to the development of plant and animal domestication in several different regions of the world. It is possible, or indeed likely, that contemporaneous climatic changes, which in turn caused floral and faunal changes, contributed significantly to generating the need for new technological developments, which led gradually to the replacement of food collection by food production.

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