residents had nothing to domesticate. Th is meant that they
had to depend on wild animals such as fi sh for protein. As
the population of New Guinea grew, people came to subsist
entirely on the food they grew. Th e local landscape could
not support many hunter-gatherers. Taro made up the bulk
of the local diet, but it contains almost no protein and few
other nutrients. Th is locally grown diet was defi cient in
many ways and caused children to grow up malnourished.
New Guineans ate small rodents, frogs, spiders, and insects
in an eff ort to consume some protein; they even ate the bod-
ies of their dead, but these measures could not make up for
a general lack of nutrients.
Over the years humans traveled by boat to the far-fl ung
islands of the Pacifi c. Th ey started with the islands closest to
the mainland, near southern China and Southeast Asia. Tai-
wan had human inhabitants by 3500 b.c.e. and Java by 2000
b.c.e. Borneo was inhabited by 1600 b.c.e. In 1200 b.c.e.
people settled in Samoa. Pacifi c peoples made it to Hawaii
and Easter Island by 500 c.e. Wherever humans settled,
they adapted their agricultural practices to local conditions.
Th e staple crops of most Pacifi c islands were those of New
Guinea: taros, yams, bananas, coconuts, breadfruits, and
other tropical fruits and vegetables. To augment their diet,
many Polynesian islanders kept domestic dogs as a source
of meat.
Australia was the only large landmass that humans
failed to turn to agricultural production. It has an extreme-
ly dry climate, infertile soil, and unpredictable extremes of
weather. No suitable wild plants grew there for humans to
domesticate. None of Australia’s large mammals were ame-
nable to domestication; kangaroos are notoriously danger-
ous, and the other large marsupials that lived in Australia
during the last ice age all became extinct soon aft erward.
Aboriginal Australians did modify their environment by
burning it from time to time, which drove out game ani-
mals and made some edible grasses and ferns grow better,
but they did not sow and harvest their own crops. Th ese
techniques were a way of maximizing the foods they could
collect as hunter-gatherers, which remained the way of life
for Aboriginal Australians into the 20th century.
EUROPE
BY AMY BOGAARD
Farmers across Europe face a wide range of climatic con-
ditions. Mild winters and hot, dry summers characterize
southern regions bordering the Mediterranean; harsh win-
ters and hot summers are typical in central Europe; and the
Atlantic coastline experiences moderate seasonal shift s.
Climatic diff erences underlie broad regional contrasts in
crops. Plants that cannot withstand frosty winters (such
as chickpeas and olive trees) are confi ned to the Mediter-
ranean region, while hardier crops (such as barley, rye, and
oats) can be grown in the far north. Th e timing of farming
tasks is also related to climate. Th e winter rainfall of the
Mediterranean encourages farmers to sow their crops in the
autumn, while the long, cold winters of northern Scandina-
via necessitate later sowing, in the spring.
Climatic conditions alone, however, do not dictate which
crops to grow or when and how to sow them. Nor do they
determine the amount of care taken to tend crops through-
out the growing season, the area of land planted, and so on.
Rather, a series of social factors, refl ecting the particular na-
ture of a society, come into play. One factor is the relation-
ship between the producers and the consumers of crops: Do
farmers grow crops for their own use or for others who do not
farm? A related factor is land ownership: Is land held com-
munally, divided up by family, or controlled by an elite few?
Available labor, patterns of settlement, culinary tradition,
and ideology are also important factors. Study of early agri-
culture in Europe is thus concerned not only with adaptation
to diverse environments but also with changing social condi-
tions. In some cases, new social formations emerged through
constraints and opportunities introduced by the farming way
of life.THE EMERGENCE AND SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE
IN EUROPE
Th e earliest agriculture in Europe appeared around 9,000
years ago (ca. 7000 b.c.e.) in the Aegean, on the eastern side
of the Greek mainland and on the island of Crete. Th e early
emergence of agriculture in the Aegean refl ects its proximity
and environmental similarity to the area of the Near East,
where agriculture and herding began. Th is area is known as
the Fertile Crescent: an arc of grassland and open oak-pis-
tachio woodland curving round from the Mediterranean
coast in the west (modern Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and
southeast Turkey) to the Zagros mountain range in the east
(northern Iraq and Iran). By 8000 b.c.e. agriculture and herd-
ing were established in the Fertile Crescent and on the nearby
island of Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean.
Cultivation of a range of crops (cereals, such as wheat and
barley; pulses, such as lentils and peas; and fl ax or linseed)
and herding of animals (sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle) were
linked practices that spread together from the Near East to
Europe. Th e crops that formed part of this package comple-
ment one another in terms of nutrition (cereals and pulses to-
gether providing complete protein, for example) and ecology
(allowing rotation of crops on the same land). Similarly, the
grazing preferences of sheep, goats, and cattle target diff er-
ent components of vegetation, while pigs consume a variety
of settlement waste. It appears unlikely, on current evidence,
that any members of this original set of Neolithic crops and
livestock were domesticated independently in Europe.
Agriculture and herding spread into Europe by two ma-
jor routes: a land route that followed river valleys up the Bal-
kan Peninsula and into central Europe and a maritime route
along the northern Mediterranean coast. Farmers along these
two routes emphasized diff erent types of cereals: Th ose on
the land route grew mainly the hulled wheats einkorn andagriculture: Europe 33