An Edible History of Humanity Read Online Free PDF Page B

As farmers set out to establish new communities
     on unfarmed land, the result was a “wave of advance” centered on the areas where domestication first occurred. Greece appears
     to have been colonized by farmers who arrived by sea from the Near East between 7000 B.C. and 6500 B.C., for example. Archaeologists
     have found very few hunter-gatherer sites, but hundreds of early farming sites, in the country. Similarly, farmers arriving
     via the Korean peninsula from China seem to have introduced rice agriculture to Japan starting in around 300 B.C. Linguistic
     evidence also supports the idea of a migration from agricultural homelands in which languages, as well as farming practices,
     were dispersed. The distribution of language families in Europe, East Asia, and Austronesia is broadly consistent with the
     archaeological evidence for the diffusion of agriculture. Today, nearly 90 percent of the world’s population speaks a language
     belonging to one of seven language families that had their origins in two agricultural homelands: the Fertile Crescent and
     parts of China. The languages we speak today, like the foods we eat, are descended from those used by the first farmers.
    Yet there is also evidence to suggest that hunter-gatherers were not always pushed aside or exterminated by incoming farmers,
     but lived alongside them and in some cases became farmers too. The clearest example is found in southern Africa, where Khoisan
     hunter-gatherers adopted Eurasian cattle from the north and became herders. Several European sites provide archaeological
     evidence of farmers and hunter-gatherers living side by side and trading goods. The two types of community had very different
     ideas about what sort of sites were desirable for settlement, so there is no reason why they could not have coexisted, as
     long as suitable ecological niches remained for hunter-gatherers. Things would have become progressively more difficult for
     hunter-gatherers living near farmers, however. Farmers would not have worried so much about overexploiting wild food resources
     near their settlements, given that they had farmed foods to fall back on. Eventually the hunter-gatherers either joined farming
     communities, or adopted farming themselves, or were forced to move to new areas.
    So which mechanism predominated? In Europe, where the advent of farming has been most intensely studied, researchers have
     used gene tic analysis to determine whether modern Europeans’ ancestors were predominantly indigenous hunter-gatherers who
     took up farming or immigrant farmers who arrived from the Near East. In such studies, people from the Anatolian peninsula
     (western Turkey), which lies within the Fertile Crescent, are taken to be genetically representative of the earliest farmers.
     Similarly, Basques are assumed to be the most direct descendants of hunter-gatherers, for two reasons. First, the Basque language
     bears no resemblance to European languages descended from proto–Indo-European, the language family imported into Europe along
     with farming, and instead appears to date back to the Stone Age. (Several Basque words for tools begin with “aitz,” the word
     for stone, which suggests that the words date from a time when stone tools were in use.) Second, there are several Basque-specific
     gene tic variations that are not found in other Europeans.
    In one recent study, genetic samples were taken from both these groups and were then compared with samples from populations
     in different parts of Europe. The researchers found that the genetic contributions from Basques and Anatolians varied significantly
     across Europe: The Anatolian (that is, Near Eastern farmer) contribution was 79 percent in the Balkans, 45 percent in northern
     Italy, 63 percent in southern Italy, 35 percent in southern Spain, and 21 percent in En gland. In short, the contribution
     from farmers was highest in the east and lowest in the west. And this provides the answer to the