In 1953, the 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—so much seems strange, foreign. 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 strange.

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 (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 because the refrigerated cargo ship (1876) hadn’t been invented yet. 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, you’d find that 2,000 years ago, most people bought their food, and they bought it from farmers who grew crops and herders who raised animals for their meat, eggs, and milk. But if you traveled back another couple thousand years before that, you’d find a lot fewer similarities to today. Pretty much everyone, everywhere, got their food by foraging and hunting. For the first 96% of our species’ 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 capture those big changes by asking the question, “Why aren’t most of us still foragers today?” Toward the end of Unit 2, you’ll encounter evidence that responds to this question as you explore how people in many places gradually became farmers. But the move to farming was just one of several major innovations during a period that saw humans learn to communicate effectively, migrate around the world, and—in many places—settle down to produce their own food for their first time.

Our foraging ancestors were physically identical to us. Their brains were as sophisticated as ours. Their hands could use tools. They innovated and created new tools and ways of thinking. And something big changed for them about 70,000 years ago that allowed our Homo sapiens ancestors to out-compete other human species. We think this change—called the cognitive revolution—produced changes in how our species communicated that helped our ancestors spread across the whole world. The cognitive revolution happened gradually, but it allowed Homo sapiens to develop something called symbolic language to communicate more flexibly and cooperate in larger numbers than other human species.

Humans are the only species that have symbolic language—which simply means that we use words to represent objects and ideas. We can speak or write about the past, present, and future. We create mythical creatures and discuss abstract concepts. Symbolic language is also the key to a process called collective learning—the ability to share and preserve knowledge that builds 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 to many people across generations s what allowed our species to spread across the globe.

Foragers

One of the benefits of Homo sapiens’ new cognitive skills was adaptation. Simply put, as they spread around the world, foragers had to develop techniques and strategies for collecting the new types of food sources they encountered in these new environments.

Foraging communities were generally small because their food sources were usually not large enough to sustain big, settled communities. And they were generally nomadic because they had to move when they had exhausted food supplies and to adapt to seasonal changes. For this reason, they may have been egalitarian, and the few possessions they had were probably widely shared among members. They also may have had lots of time to relax and be social, or so many scholars think. We’re not entirely sure whether any of these characterizations are entirely 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, and in several parts of the world, some humans began to adopt changes that would allow them to herd animals and farm crops. First, some cultivated wild plants. In other words, they promoted the growth of some edible foods by actively preparing the conditions for their growth. 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 and reproduce to provide food. 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 implements, such as hoes, adzes, and grinding stones. These tools give us the name for these communities—Neolithic (New Stone Age).

There are lots of 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 necessarily happen in the same way everywhere. The differences in available foods and innovations are why some regional cuisines even today are more 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 point out that most early farmers had access to more calories from food than foragers. But farmers also suffered poorer 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 cultivate plants. 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 problems and opportunities that were shared by farming communities around the world. Many societies developed similar strategies for dealing with them. But there were also great differences in different regions.

As you encounter 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 are the questions that make it so relevant for us to understand the earliest humans.