Farming

Farming begins after the last ice age, around 10,000 BCE, in the Fertile Crescent, and independently in China, the Americas, Africa, and New Guinea. People plant cereals and pulses and keep goats, sheep, cattle, or pigs instead of only hunting them.

The contribution is a food surplus tied to a place. A town can exist because the calories are in the field next to it, not walking away. Surplus feeds people who are not farmers: potters, metalworkers, scribes. Without that, writing and workshops stay rare.

Farming is not an automatic improvement in daily life. Early farmers were often shorter and sicker than hunter-gatherers, because diets narrowed and disease spread in crowds. It wins because it supports more people per acre, not because it was easier.

The date is a start, not a switch. Many people stayed mobile for thousands of years after the first fields. The timeline uses the Fertile Crescent window because it is the earliest clear one.