Food & agriculture · c. 9,500 BCE
Agriculture
In the Fertile Crescent people began sowing what they once gathered, and settled life followed.
Around 9500 BCE communities in the Levant and upper Mesopotamia started cultivating cereals and legumes, the so-called founder crops. Farming supported perhaps ten to a hundred times more people per square kilometre than foraging, making villages, surplus and eventually cities possible.
What it built on 2
What it led to 14
- Domesticated wheat 9000 BCE
- Livestock domestication 8500 BCE
- Mudbrick 8500 BCE
- Clay accounting tokens 8000 BCE
- Domesticated maize 7000 BCE
- Domesticated rice 7000 BCE
- Weaving and the loom 7000 BCE
- Domesticated potato 6000 BCE
- Irrigation 6000 BCE
- 365-day civil calendar 2800 BCE
- Mesoamerican rubber 1600 BCE
- Paper 105
- Crystalline sugar 350
- Ethanol fuel program 1975
Related measurements
The dashed line marks when it first worked.
World population over a million years Latest: 6.27k million people (2000) Source: DeLong 1998, table 'Total World Population' (Kremer series); Kremer 1993, Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990, QJE 108(3)
World GDP over a million years Latest: 41k billion 1990 international $ (2000) Source: DeLong 1998, Estimating World GDP, One Million B.C. - Present; Wikipedia: Gross world product (DeLong table, cross-check)
Share of people living in cities Latest: 57.5 % (2025) Source: Our World in Data