Tuesday, July 07, 2015

A new theory of the invention of agriculture

Climate-driven technological change: seasonality and the invention of agriculture by Andrea Martanga: "I propose a new theory for the Neolithic Revolution, construct a model capturing its intuition, and test the resulting implications against a panel data set of climate and adoption. I argue that the invention of agriculture was triggered by a large increase in climatic seasonality, which made it hard for hunter-gatherers to survive during part of the year. Some of the most aff ected populations responded by becoming sedentary in order to smooth their consumption through storage. While these communities were still hunter-gatherers, sedentarism and storage made it easier for them to adopt farming." 
via On the economics of the neolithic revolution which has some discussion.

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