9700 to 5500 BCE · Africanspan
The Holocene brought disruption, and disruption produced farming
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When the Younger Dryas ended around 9700 BCE, climate shifted across much of the world, natural environments changed with it, and people had to rework how they obtained food. The response that defines the following four millennia was a slow, cumulative turn toward deliberately protecting and tending particular food sources. That meant the first cultivation of food plants, and in several regions the protection and herding of animals. The change did not begin in one place and radiate outward. It began independently in Africa, in the Levant, in China, in New Guinea and in Mesoamerica, everywhere for the same reason: the old way of feeding people had stopped working and something had to replace it. The Holocene did not arrive bearing abundance. It arrived bearing disruption, and the largest transformation in the history of the species came out of it. The people who made it were feeding their families in a world whose rules had changed under them.
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