Understanding the origins of agriculture to guide future climate adaptation

Around 12,000-years ago 99% of the human population were hunter gatherers, but by 5000-years ago 99% were farmers (Weisdorf, 2005). This characterises one of the most fundamental transitions in our species' history, dramatically altering our relationship with nature. After 300,000-years of modern Homo sapiens', agriculture arose rapidly and independently in as many as 11 separate regions - termed the Neolithic Revolution (Harlan, 1971; Meyer et al., 2012).

What precipitated this radical change? Was it driven by growing population, increasing cultural and technological sophistication, over exploitation of natural resources or environmental change? In the coming century of climate change, global agriculture will be forced to undergo another rapid change.

Crop distributions will shift to keep pace with suitable climate envelopes and new or underutilised species may form an increasingly important part of our food system (Borrell et al., 2020; Rampersad et al., 2023). What can early agriculture teach us about the potential to adapt?

This project will investigate the rapid, but asynchronous origins of agriculture in a number of discrete regions at the end of the last ice age, and the highly heterogeneous distribution of 'centres of domestication' that do not necessarily align with broader global biodiversity gradients (Pironon et al., 2020). This is important, because we face a twin biodiversity crisis, whereby the decline of wild biodiversity is mirrored by a decline in the diversity of crops we use.

Indeed, over recent decades our global food system has become increasingly uniform (Khoury et al., 2014). Despite evidence that humans have consumed more than 7000 species of plants, more than half of global calories are derived from just three species - rice, wheat and maize (SOTWPF, 2020). Understanding what drove and maintained hotspots of agrobiodiversity will be the key to conserving them and their associated indigenous knowledge for a sustainable and resilient future food system.

This project supports our broader goal of area-based conservation for agrobiodiversity. By identifying agrobiodiversity hotspots we can support countries to meet the Global Biodiversity Framework 30x30 target, and avoid loss of the biodiversity on which we are most dependent. Methodology:

This project is timely because of multiple newly available datasets and increasingly accessible analysis techniques employing Google Earth Engine. In the first phase, the student will collate archaeobotanical and socio-cultural data on the origins of global crop species. We will then integrate high-resolution global palaeoclimate layers (e.g. http://www.paleoclim.org/) across the Greenlandian, Northgrippian and Meghalayan data to understand the environmental conditions and sociocultural context associated with asynchronous adoption of agriculture and domestication of diverse crops.

The multiple independent origins of agriculture over a several thousand-year period, together with heterogeneous global climate trends provide a means to examine and test hypotheses for the drivers of agriculture.

A major feature of this proposal is the use of interdisciplinary methods. The student will be trained to integrate diverse archaeological evidence of past land-use change, to generate alternative lines of evidence with analytical modelling approaches including redundancy and geographically weighted path analysis.