Neolithic Agriculture

"I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth,

And every tree that has fruit with seed in it.

They will be yours for food” Genesis 1:29

Food was the fuel of, and catalyst for, the genesis of civilisation. Agriculture is the still evolving outcome of a human journey taken over thousands of years from the animal herding, foraging diet of the Palaeolithic to the agricultural surplus of the Neolithic to the meeting of the Old and New Worlds and later the industrial revolution leading to modern farming methods. The domestication of wild plants and animals led to the birth of civilisations around the world. Adaptation of the environment using technology coupled with the selection and propagation of desirable traits in plants and animals is still the basis of successful agricultural production techniques today.

Humans first started to dabble in the control of wild plants which included weeding, irrigation and propagation of root crops such as yams (Forrester, 2006). The domestication of plants and animals resulted in a process called ‘artificial selection’ whereby the continually favouring of certain characteristics by humans improved their usefulness as agricultural crops (Feder, 2011). Recent discoveries suggest figs were domesticated 11,400 years ago in the Near East, one thousand years before cereal crops and five thousand years earlier than other fruit trees, and are the oldest evidence for plant propagation. (Kislev, Hartmann, Bar-Yosef,