''Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began'' is a book on prehistoric agriculture and

anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of be ...

by the British science writer

Colin Tudge Colin Hiram Tudge (born 22 April 1943) is a British biologist, science writer and broadcaster. Tudge was born and brought up in south London and attended Dulwich College, from where he won a scholarship to Peterhouse, Cambridge, studying zool ...

. The book is one of a series of long essays by respected contemporary

Darwinian Darwinism is a theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that ...

thinkers, which were published under the collective title ''Darwinism Today''. The series was inspired by a course of 'Darwin Seminars' which took place at the London School of Economics−LSE in London in the late 1990s. LSE.uk: The London School of Economics Darwin Seminars
/ref> In '' Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers'', Tudge offers an explanation for the beginning of the

population explosion Overpopulation or overabundance is a phenomenon in which a species' population becomes larger than the carrying capacity of its environment. This may be caused by increased birth rates, lowered mortality rates, reduced predation or large scale m ...

and that farming was not suddenly invented 10,000 years ago, but had existed as what he called proto-farming or hobby farming for at least 30,000 years earlier. What happened 10,000 years ago in the

Fertile Crescent The Fertile Crescent ( ar, الهلال الخصيب) is a crescent-shaped region in the Middle East, spanning modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan, together with the northern region of Kuwait, southeastern region of ...

was the raising of

sea level Mean sea level (MSL, often shortened to sea level) is an average surface level of one or more among Earth's coastal bodies of water from which heights such as elevation may be measured. The global MSL is a type of vertical datuma standardise ...

at the end of the last ice age over a relatively short period of time. This forced a population who were primarily

hunter-gatherers A traditional hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living an ancestrally derived lifestyle in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, ...

to leave a rich prey region and to move inland. The new area was less able to support these immigrants as hunter-gatherers, and they were forced to increase their labors to extend their use of farming in order to maintain their population. Tudge explains what happened next: :"Hunter gatherers take from their environment only what their environment happens to produce; and if they take too much, the desirable prey species collapse. ..But the whole point of agriculture is to manipulate the environment so as to increase the amount of food that it will provide. ..And if you increase the food supply, you can increase your own population. But then, of course, the farmers find themselves in a vicious spiral. The more they farm, the more their population rises and the more they are obliged to farm, because only by farming can they feed the extra mouths."

References

{{Reflist

External links

Yale Press.edu: Short summary of the book

1999 non-fiction books History books about agriculture Anthropology books Human evolution books Hunter-gatherers Neanderthals Prehistoric agriculture Hachette (publisher) books