Michael Button

But there's that bizarre thing that, you know, agriculture appears in multiple different places at pretty much the exact same time all over the world.

And that's never made sense to me because if agriculture was such a kind of vital invention for civilization to flourish...

then why did no one invent it for, you know, 310,000 years?

And then in South America, in Mesopotamia, in ancient China, and you could argue there's other different places that, so say there's like South America and there's Central America.

I mean, you could argue that's potentially connected, but a lot of people say it isn't.

So how can agriculture, if it's such an incredible invention...

be invented by multiple people at the same time, but no one else thought of it before.

It doesn't make sense to me.

Doesn't that seems like you'd figure that out in one lifetime.

I think the idea always has been that it's because of the climate, right?

So because of the Holocene, which began around 12,000 years ago, as we came out of that and we had kind of stable climate conditions that we still live in today, that's what enabled the invention of agriculture, right?

But then the question I always ask is, well, what about all the other warm periods that have come in the past, as the idea is that...

you know, stable climate led to agriculture, then why couldn't such a thing have happened in the Eemian period 120,000 years ago?

There's been four distinct warm periods that have lasted for like over 10,000 years while modern humans have been around, at least.

And obviously these Morocco remains of Homo sapiens, it's unlikely they're the earliest Homo sapiens that ever lived.

They're just the earliest we found.

So

We could be even older than that.

So considering we've been through four distinct warm periods before the Holocene, and if the argument is that the Holocene was what led to the invention of agriculture due to the stable climate, then why couldn't it have happened in the earlier warm periods?

That's the question I've always asked myself and been fascinated by.