Summing Up Six Millennia of Agriculture

For slightly over six thousand years people lived in what would today be called the countryside. This period started around 5300 BC and lasted until about AD 1000. People lived on the land and also directly off the land. Of course, people before 5300 BC did the same, but the great difference is that after this date food was produced, not obtained by harvesting nature. Why people started to produce their food remains obscure. It was not based on a gradual internal process. The new kind of food economy came from the outside and the main influx of ideas came from the east, from beyond the river Rhine, though there are some indications that the south and/or south-west played a minor role. Whatever the nearer sources, the ultimate source of the food-producing way of life was the Near East.