Agriculture and domestication

For most of our evolutionary history, our species fed on the hunting and gathering of animals and plants in the environment. An innovation with far-reaching consequences was the "invention" of agriculture.

Agriculture is a kind of co-evolution or symbiosis of humans and other living things: certain plant and animal species that were present in the environment were favored by humans for food, processed for clothing, tools and other purposes, or animals were used for protection and work. This preferential use of certain species has led people to preferentially treat, feed or protect these species, or lead to the accumulation and multiplication of seeds and germinating plant parts of used plant species in their environment. So began the domestication - the natural selection of living things, in which the human is a selection factor (also called "artificial selection", especially in recent times, when selection of traits is done through intentional scientific breeding programs).

This coevolution transformed genes from domesticated plant and animal species as well as humans. This is because agriculture changed the diet of people, who adapted to this diet through biological evolution. One third of people today have a lactose tolerance, i. e. they can digest milk and dairy products in adulthood. These are mainly people who come from regions where animal husbandry and dairy processing have a long history.

People in some regions began interacting with ruminants in their environment: using them for various purposes, providing ruminants with food and shelter. Those who were able to use ruminants' nutrient-rich milk had higher chances of survival and reproduction than others. Among those who practiced dairy farming, those in turn had higher chances of survival and reproduction than others in their populations who were able to use and digest the nutritious milk even in adulthood. A gene that allows lactose digestion beyond breastfeeding appeared in these populations. Under the cultural environmental conditions of dairy culture, the carriers of this gene had a selective advantage. The gene thus spread through natural selection in the populations that had a milk culture.

Compared to the fungus cultivation of leafcutter ants, human agriculture is very young - it originated around 10,000 to 4,000 years ago in parallel in several regions of the world. Through the co-evolution of humans and domesticated species, more food, and more nutritious food, has been extracted from the environment than by hunting and gathering "wild" species whose evolution has not been influenced by interrelation with humans. Thus, the feeding of our population has increasingly become dependent on agriculture.

Agriculture contributed significantly to an increase in group sizes and an increase in the total population of our species. In addition, food could or had to be stocked increasingly, and domesticated animals had to be cared for. All of this had an impact on the social organization of our species: a shift to sedentary lifestyles, wealth accumulation, the formation of hierarchies in human groups, the ability to steal accumulated supplies and possessions from others by force, and the need to protect accumulated possessions from others.