Around the world, on separate continents that had no contact with each other, multiple groups of ancient humans invented farming more or less simultaneously — and scientists still don’t know how or why.
Known to archaeologists and anthropologists as the Neolithic Revolution, the discovery of this historical head-scratcher is by no means new. Nevertheless, it continues to fascinate folks like Michael Marshall, an author at New Scientist who pondered this phenomenon in a new piece about this quantum leap in human development.
As a 2023 PNAS paper cited by Marshall suggests, the things scientists do know about this incredible happenstance are what make it so captivating.
In as many as 24 separate sites of origin, the paper explained, people began farming within a few thousand years of each other[…]
And I would add the always-important addendum: that we know of. It is interesting, though. It could be there was some kind of contact, even if a one-off of someone blown off course with enough knowledge, here and there over several thousand years. It could be deeper contact or exchange than was known. It could also be some ancestral thing passed down, but not done during the last glacial maximum, then restarted when it was possible. It also could be complete coincidence.
I would go further than this: It is absurd to assert that we know they had no contact with each other. Archaeology of full of occasional one-off weird shit from one civilization randomly being found in some other civilization thousands of miles away that it had no business having contact with. And yet, there it is.
A lot of scientists see the breadth and the rigor of the models that they follow, and they make the understandable but wrong leap into saying “this thing isn’t in my model, so that means it is definitely not true (even though there’s no particular negative evidence), because if it were, it would be in my model.”
I have no way of being sure, any more than they have any way of being sure in the other direction, but I think the sudden appearance of farming at basically the same time the world over is explained by exactly the explanation that it seems like it would be explained by. All it takes is one.
Around the same time = within a few thousand years
I feel that definition is a bit loose. It is cool that there seems to be an order of things and that farming seems to come at a similar point in your development as a culture, but I wouldn’t call this “around the same time”.
