A fundamental question about the precise role of agriculture in early human history remains unanswered.
Did the advent of intensive farming practices encourage people to live around farmland in communities and develop complex social structures?
Or did the drive to live in social groups create spur the development of agricultural practices to feed all those hungry mouths?
Typically, the conventional assumption the development of intensive agriculture paved the way for primitive social groups, such as hunter gatherers, to form permanent communities and develop structured societies.
But a team of scientists from the University of Auckland and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History have released a study which uncovered compelling new evidence.
“The findings suggest that intensification of agriculture and the rise of more hierarchical, socially complex human societies promoted each other, perhaps as a part of a feedback loop that may also have involved population growth,” says lead author and University of Auckland PhD candidate Oliver Sheehan.
The scientists argue that farming and social and cultural factors played an equal part in driving the creation.
Societies that farmed intensively were likely to become more socially complex.
But the reverse was also true.
Complex societies were more likely to develop intensive agriculture.
The study uses computing power to reconstruct the history of cultures, mapping traits of intensive farming, or evidence complex societies.
The scientists mapped Austronesian-speaking societies, a family of language groups spanning Southeast Asia and the Pacific – from Taiwan in the north, New Zealand in the south, Madagascar to the west and Easter Island to the east (and excluding Australia and Papua New Guinea.
University of Auckland Professor Quentin Atkinson said the cultural history of farming and social development is encoded in the languages people speak.
“The Pacific is an ideal setting to test these ideas, with populations spread across hundreds of islands with different political institutions and modes of subsistence,” Professor Atkinson said.
