sites such as Jericho and Abu Hureyra (Bogucki 1999). By 10,000 years ago the descendants of the Natufians, whose culture is known as Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, had adopted a strategy involving the domestication of emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, and barley, followed by the domestication of sheep and goats. These founder crops and animals of the Near East—emmer and einkorn wheat, sheep, and goats—were transported with the spread of agriculture through southeastern Europe to western Europe, reaching the British Isles by 4,000 to 3,000 years ago (Haviland 2000).

Agriculture developed independently in East Asia from two centers, the Huanghe or Yellow River valley in northern China, where foxtail millet was domesticated, and the middle Yangzi River in southern China, which was the source of domesticated rice. Archaeological evidence places the origins of rice crops at about 8,500 years ago (Bogucki 1999). In West Africa crops such as sorghum, pearl millet, watermelon, black-eyed peas, and kola nuts were domesticated, and they spread through central Africa with the migration of Bantu speakers (Haviland 2000).

mesoamerica is the site of the earliest domestication in the New World. There, archaeologists have long sought the origin of maize, believed to have originated in wild teosinte (found in the Valley of mexico) and been domesticated as early as 7,000 years ago, after which it spread throughout the New World (Pringle 1997). Some of the earliest examples of the domesticated dog have been found in North America, dating back almost 15,000 years, although this animal was domesticated independently in many areas of the world. In addition, North Americans were the first to domesticate the sunflower, squash, marsh elder, and chenopod by about 4,000 years ago (Smith 1995), and they also adopted maize and beans introduced from Mesoamerica. South American domesticates include the bottle gourd, cotton, and, later, the potato and manioc, as well as animals such as guinea pigs, llamas, alpacas, and ducks.

The mechanisms and motivations behind the beginnings of food production continue to be explored. We know that the switch from hunting and gathering to cultivation and herding did not arise from new knowledge about the reproduction of plants and animals, for people had a deep understanding about their environment long before they chose to adopt agriculture. Additionally, the transition to an agricultural economy entailed many disadvantageous conditions and an overall decline in health and longevity. For instance, sedentism and population increases coincided with an increase in communicative diseases, some of them created by new waste-disposal problems. And agriculture provided a less stable subsistence base: farmers became vulnerable to crop failure, and since they were invested in permanent settlements, they could no longer move on when local food resources were depleted. Consequently, archaeologists are concerned with discovering the possible pressures that caused people to adopt a stressful and potentially dangerous subsistence strategy involving sedentism, cultivation, and animal raising.

The first cultigens, such as maize, wheat, and barley, grow easily in a disturbed habitat, and they may have propagated themselves around peoples’ living areas. But these plants selected for domestication were not first-choice foods for foragers. Instead, early farmers sacrificed flexibility, diversity of diet, and access to first-choice foods in exchange for permanent, year-round settlement with a nearby food supply.

Possible reasons for this shift include environmental factors such as food shortages, population pressure, and climatic drying and cultural developments such as adaptation to sedentism and changes in band organization beginning in the preceding Pleistocene society (Bogucki 1999). Previous theories explaining the emergence of food production, proposed by archaeologists such as vere gordon childe, robert braidwood, Kent Flannery, and Andrew Moore, primarily dealt with environmental and population pressures on foraging societies. More recently, social factors have been examined for their contributing role in the dramatic shift in subsistence strategy that occurred in the Neolithic (Bogucki 1999).

Thalia Gray