The Biggest Technological Development in Human History Happened All Across the World Around the Same Time, by Groups of People With Zero Contact With One Another
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.
After the great ice sheets age of the Pleistocene Epoch began to retreat about 11,700 years ago, humans who had gradually migrated to at least four continents — Africa, Eurasia, and North and South America — moved from hunting and gathering to domesticating plants. In as many as 24 separate sites of origin, the paper explained, people began farming within a few thousand years of each other, with no means of contact between them.
Across scientific disciplines, researchers have long been trying to figure out why this leap in evolutionary behavior occurred with so many groups simultaneously. Anthropologist Melinda Zeder, the senior scientist emeritus at the Smithsonian Institute, told PNAS in 2023 that some of her colleagues even argue that humans may have been "tricked into it by plants" — but still, there's nothing near consensus about why, exactly, our ancestors all picked up farming around the same time.
In his more recent musings, Marshall, the New Scientist writer, pointed out that agriculture may have emerged as a response to any number of external factors: food shortages, climate change, or even sociopolitical reasons as evidenced by research suggesting that a rudimentary form of property rights may have begun around the same time that farming emerged.
He then went on to hypothesize something that hasn't been studied outright before: that Neanderthals, or any other early hominin groups, may have "tried their hands at gardening, if only in a small way."
"If they were lacking some crucial cognitive or physical capability to enable gardening, I'm not sure what it was," Marshall wrote. "And if they did enjoy tending their own small gardens, that would have given our species a head start on creating full-blown farms."
Even if Neanderthals did make early attempts at agriculture, however, it wouldn't explain why subsequent evolutionary groups wouldn't have immediately followed suit, or why there was suddenly a global explosion of farming activity more than 100,00 years after the first known deforestation projects took place in modern-day Germany.
Like many worthwhile mysteries, this one doesn't have a neatly-packaged answer — and unless something unprecedented about our ancestors' agricultural practices is uncovered, it may never be explained at all.
More on our origins: Something Mysterious Swept Over Our Entire Solar System, Scientists Say
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