In 1953, author L.P. Hartley wrote, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” In many ways, Hartley was correct—when historians study the past, it’s as though they’re visiting another place. The further back in time you travel, the more different things look, and yet sometimes we find surprising similarities, and our early ancestors suddenly don’t seem so alien.

The way we get our food is a great example of how much our lives have changed. For most of human history, neither electric refrigeration (invented in 1913) nor supermarkets (1918) existed. You could buy your food, of course, but there was no instant ramen (1958), and most fresh food came from nearby.

If you went back 2,000 years to the Roman Empire or Han Dynasty China, things would look very different from today, but you’d also find plenty of similarities to how we live now. For example, most people bought their food from farmers and herders who raised animals for their meat, eggs, and milk. But if you traveled back 4,000 years, you’d find a lot fewer similarities to today. Pretty much everyone, everywhere, got their food by foraging and hunting. For the first 96 percent of human existence—between 250,000 years ago and 10,000 years ago—that’s what all people did. Very, very few do so today.

In this unit, we try to understand those big changes by asking the question, “Why aren’t most of us still foragers today?” Toward the end of Unit 2, you’ll explore how people in many places eventually became farmers. But the move to farming was just one of several major innovations during a period that saw humans learn to communicate effectively and migrate around the world. And—in many places—settle down to produce their own food for their first time.

Humans as a divergence

Many thousands of years ago, there were several species of humans. Today, there is only one human species, Homo sapiens, who evolved first in Africa, probably between 300,000 and 250,000 years ago. Then, starting around 70,000 years ago, our ancestors spread to other parts of the world, eventually migrating to every continent except Antarctica. On their migrations, they met other species of humans, including Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthals). Archaeologists used to think humans arrived in North America around 3,000 years ago. Today, we know that it was tens of thousands of years before that. As humans spread to new areas, they developed new ways to deal with changing environments—just like people today who move from chilly Alaska to balmy Florida. These changes might have helped our ancestors develop new ways to think, communicate, and use tools.

Our foraging ancestors were physically identical to us. Their brains were as advanced as ours, and they came up with new tools and ways of thinking. And, about 70,000 years ago, something big changed that allowed Homo sapiens to out-compete other human species. We think this development—called the cognitive revolution—helped our ancestors spread around the world by improving the way they communicated. Cognition is the way we acquire and process knowledge. The cognitive revolution happened slowly, but it allowed Homo sapiens to develop symbolic language, which simply means using words to represent objects and ideas. This development allowed Homo sapiens to communicate more flexibly and cooperate in larger numbers than other human species.

Humans are the only species that have symbolic language. We can speak or write about the past, present, and future. We create mythical creatures and discuss ideas. Symbolic language is also important to collective learning—the ability to share and preserve knowledge over generations. Some researchers believe that symbolic language improved our ability to tell stories. Telling stories about gods and myths—and the ability to pass those stories on across generations is what allowed our species to spread across the globe.

Foragers

One benefit of Homo sapiens’ new cognitive skills was the ability to adapt. As foragers spread around the world, they had to learn how to collect new types of food sources in new places.

Foraging communities were generally small because their food sources were usually not large enough to feed big, settled communities. They were nomadic, moving when they exhausted food supplies and with seasonal changes. For this reason, they may have been egalitarian, meaning everyone was treated equally. The community’s few possessions were probably shared among members. They also may have had lots of time to relax and be social, or so many scholars think. It’s unknown whether any of these characterizations are fully correct, but we do know that when some foraging societies began to farm and herd animals, things changed dramatically.

Farmer revolution

Beginning about 12,000 years ago in several parts of the world, some humans began to adopt changes that would allow them to herd animals and farm crops. First, some began to grow wild plants. Then, around 10,000 years ago, small groups of humans in many different places began to domesticate both plant and animal species. This means they selected the best ones and actively helped them to grow. Because these groups of humans had new daily tasks, their tools changed. New kinds of farming equipment were developed. We see this in the archaeological record in the form of different types of stone tools, such as hoes, adzes (tools similar to axes), and grinding stones. These tools give us the name for these communities—Neolithic, meaning New Stone Age.

There are many debates about how these changes developed. It certainly was very difficult and took a long time—thousands of years in some regions. And it didn’t happen in the same way everywhere. The differences in available foods and innovations are why some diets are based on roasting and others on boiling, some on noodles and others on breads. Once groups started to farm, agriculture was hard to give up because it provided a lot more food and sustained larger populations than foraging could.

Was farming a good idea?

But was switching from foraging to farming a good idea? Scholars can’t agree. Some say that early farmers had access to more food than foragers. But farmers also suffered worse nutrition, more diseases, and harder labor conditions. There are also disagreements about how many people really became farmers during this period. Just about everyone today eats food grown on farms and ranches, but throughout the period covered in Unit 2, most people probably remained foragers. Some only herded animals and didn’t farm at all. Even members of early farming societies continued to do some hunting and gathering.

By the end of this period, the shift to farming had triggered many huge changes. Farming allowed people to build permanent settlements. The populations of these communities grew, often dramatically, until their settlements became villages and cities. They needed more labor and more ways to control those laborers, which meant they developed governments. Agricultural societies produced enough extra food—called surplus—that some people could specialize in other kinds of production or jobs. Ideas about the world and forms of worship changed.

These changes created similar problems and opportunities experienced by farming communities around the world. Many societies developed similar plans to respond to them, but there were also great differences between regions.

As you consider the evidence about different agricultural and foraging societies in this unit, it’s your job to ask the hard questions. Why did farming develop first in some places? How did the development of farming change the history of humanity? Why were there different pathways and choices that societies around the world made, rather than just one pattern? What can we learn about ourselves by studying the lives of our foraging ancestors? These questions help us understand the earliest humans.