View source for Oasis Theory on the Origins of Farming

=Description=

Trevor Watkins (?):

"When, almost a century ago, Raphael Pumpelly put forward the ‘oasis theory’ for the origins of farming in the Near East, his was one of the first in a long series of explanations which looked to environment and ecology as the cause of the shift from hunting and gathering to cultivation and animal husbandry. Pumpelly envisaged climatic desiccation at the end of the last Ice Age as the primary factor, forcing humans, plants and animals into ever closer proximity as the arid zones expanded around them. Subsequent fieldworkers took the closer investigation of environmental changes as a key aim of their research, both in the Near East and elsewhere, and this has remained a fundamental theme in theories for the emergence of agriculture. More recent advances in our understanding of environmental change have placed particular emphasis on the cold Younger Dryas episode, at the end of the last Ice Age. The impact of this sudden reversal of climate warming on the complex Natufian hunter-gatherers of the Levant may, it is argued, have forced or encouraged these communities to explore novel subsistence modes."

(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231877808_The_Birth_of_the_Gods_and_the_Origins_of_Agriculture_by_Jacques_Cauvin_translated_by_Trevor_Watkins_New_Studies_in_Archaeology)


=More information=

* Book: The [[Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture]]. Jacques Cauvin.

[[Category:Civilizational_Analysis]]
[[Category:Agrifood]]