(Roughly) Daily

Lest we wonder if climate change might have fundamental effects…

Why was agriculture invented? The long run advantages are clear: farming produced food surpluses that allowed population densities to rise, labor to specialize, and cities to be constructed. However, we still don’t know what motivated the transition in the short run. After 200,000 years of hunting and gathering, agriculture was invented independently at least seven times, on different continents, within a 7,000 year period. Archeologists agree that independent inventions occurred at least in the Fertile Crescent, Subsaharan Africa, North and South China, the Andes, Mexico, and North America. Moreover, the first farmers were shorter and had more joint diseases, suggesting that they ate less than hunter gatherers and worked more. Why would seven different human populations decide to adopt remarkably similar technologies, around the same time, and in spite of a lower standard of living?

I propose a new theory for the Neolithic Revolution, construct a model capturing its intuition, and test the resulting implications against a panel dataset of climate and adoption. I argue that the invention of agriculture was triggered by a large increase in climatic seasonality, which peaked approximately 12,000 years ago, shortly before the first evidence for agriculture appeared. This increase in seasonality was caused by well documented oscillations in the tilt of Earth’s rotational axis, and other orbital parameters. The harsher winters, and drier summers, made it hard for hunter-gatherers to survive during part of the year. Some of the most affected populations responded by storing foods, which in turn forced them to abandon their nomadic lifestyles, since they had to spend most of the year next to their necessarily stationary granaries, either stocking them, or drawing from them. While these communities were still hunter-gatherers, sedentarism and storage made it easier for them to adopt farming…

During the Neolithic Revolution, seven populations independently invented agriculture; a new paper argues that climate change was the cause: “The Ant and the Grasshopper: Seasonality and the Invention of Agriculture,” from Andrea Matranga (@andreamatranga)

[image above: source]

* Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

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As we reap what we sow, we might spare a thought for Clarence Birdseye; he died on this date in 1956.  An  inventor, entrepreneur, and naturalist, he was the founder of the modern frozen food industry.

On Arctic trips as a field naturalist for the United States government, he noticed that freshly caught fish, when placed onto the Arctic ice and exposed to the icy wind and frigid temperatures, froze solid almost immediately. He learned, too, that the fish, when thawed and eaten, still had all its fresh characteristics. He concluded that quickly freezing certain items kept large crystals from forming, preventing damage to their cellular structure. In 1922, Clarence organized his own company, Birdseye Seafoods, Inc., New York City, where he began processing chilled fish fillets.  He moved on to vegetables and other meats, then to the “fish stick,” along the way co-founding General Foods.  In the end, Birdseye had over 300 patents for creating and handling frozen food.

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