Climate change and the Birth of Agriculture: The cultural transition from foraging to food production in Southwest Asia

The cultural transformations of human societies depend on various factors, one of the most important of which is climate change. This event can expand or limit livelihoods by changing the environment. Paleoclimate and archaeological studies show that the tendency of human societies to change their subsistence system was not unrelated to climate and environmental changes. Using these studies, this article examines the climatic conditions of the late Pleistocene and the early Holocene to identify the environmental situation and the probable time of the beginning of agricultural activities in Southwest Asia, especially Iran. It seems that the subsistence challenges associated with the continuous climate change of the late Pleistocene have increased man's understanding of his strengths and weaknesses, as well as the potential of nature around him so that he has been able to overcome the most difficult biological tension of this period, called the Younger Dryas(12.9–11.7kaBP) event, and then, in the early-early Holocene(11.7–10.5kaBP), he began to produce food through the cultivation of cereals. The process of increasing humidity during the early Holocene in the continental regions (as opposed to near the sea) was very slow, and this situation, most likely, hindered the development of environmental facilities in parallel with population growth. Thus, it is likely that the invention of agriculture in continental regions to adapt to livelihood difficulties occurred in the early-early Holocene. The occurrence of this great progress in the path of human cultural transformation reflects the effective role of his will in reducing the pressures of nature.