Why Do We Farm?: Risk Assessment of the Foraging Farming Transition in North America

Summary

The evolution of the genus Homo is characterized by the emergence of numerous biological and cultural traits including bipedalism, encephalization, and language. A more recent adaptation led humans to transition from a foraging subsistence strategy to one based on farming. This is significant because foraging persisted for approximately 95% of human existence until farming emerged about 12,000 years ago. For nearly a century, anthropologists have studied the foraging-farming transition and proposed several hypotheses to explain its occurrence. Naturally, current research has prioritized ultimate explanations emphasizing long-term causality with limited research focusing on proximate explanations representing immediate causal mechanisms. This study evaluates the potential of "foraging risk" to have functioned as a proximate mechanism facilitating the transition to agriculture using a small sample within the North American Eastern Agriculture Complex, where independent domestication of numerous plants occurred during the Late Archaic period (4500-4000 BP). This study uses species distribution models, archaeological diet data, and paleoenvironmental proxies to reconstruct the paleoenvironment, assess the availability of prehistoric resources, and compare expected and observed diets. Results of this research lead to a better understanding of the effect of foraging risk on the independent development of and ultimate foraging-farming transition in North America.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21604