but they lend themselves to being harvested and cultivated by humans. People learned to exploit other plants too, including flax, pea, chickpea, lentil and bitter vetch, intentionally planting, tending and harvesting them.
Scientists wonder whether the timing of this shift to crop domestication, which probably occurred independently in different places across the Fertile Crescent – as well as in parts of eastern Asia where wild varieties of millet and rice were the grains of choice – might not be a coincidence. One suggestion is that as the climate warmed at the end of the last Ice Age, and sea levels rose, so people were forced to higher ground where they would have encountered wild wheat and barley growing naturally. Levels of carbon dioxide were also increasing in the atmosphere – possibly due to its release from warming oceans – boosting worldwide plant production, including grasses such as cereals, and kick-starting what is often called the Neolithic revolution.
With the right kind of seeds, well-prepared soil and a favourable climate, the pioneer farmers soon found themselves amassing more food than they needed. This calorie boost, combined with a reduction in energy spent moving around, is thought to have ramped up human reproductive rates. A population boom led to civilisations across the Fertile Crescent, an 800-kilometre arc of territory encompassing the floodplains of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates. But the discovery of farming may have set off a vicious cycle: the more people bred, the more food was needed and the harder everyone had to work. If they didn’t want to, or couldn’t, they might cheat or steal, requiring strong laws and even stronger rulers to keep the peace. Of course, there was nothing stopping rulers themselves from hoarding food and growing their own power in the process. At the same time, more and more of the landscape was turned over to crops which meant an acceleration in deforestation, erosion and other varieties of environmental degradation.
Unsurprisingly, given its peripheral location and challenging climate, Britain wasn’t an early adopter of agriculture. By the time wheat and barley made their appearance here some 6,000 years ago – and those precious spelt grains were being hoarded in a primitive hut on Hembury hill – the world’s first city of Uruk was already rising from the Mesopotamian floodplain. The farming of livestock also appeared in Britain, and the rest of northern Europe, around this time, again having been pioneered long before in the Middle East.
Goats and sheep are believed to have been domesticated from their wild ancestors – bezoar and mouflon, respectively – across southwest Asia from about 11,000 years ago. These low-maintenance creatures, compatible with a semi-nomadic lifestyle, were probably first kept for their flesh alone, and only later used for milk, wool and other secondary products. The fertilising properties of livestock manure was also noticed and exploited. Despite their benefits, sheep and goats would go on to become among the world’s most destructive invaders, especially on islands where their relentless chomping wipes out rare plants and degrades ecosystems. Indeed, their unfussy diet, their rapid reproductive rate, their tolerance of a breadth of environmental conditions – the very traits which first drew us to them and of course to so many other problematic species – go a long way to explaining their world domination. At the last count, two billion sheep and goats roamed the planet.
Around the time that people first domesticated sheep and goats, cattle also joined the ranks of tamed ruminants. Cows were descended from the extinct wild ox, or aurochs. This was a spectacular beast, particularly the bull which stood nearly two metres high at the shoulder and sported fearsomely curved horns. Unlike the bezoar and mouflon, aurochs were already present in post-glacial Britain – indeed, they roamed the entire Eurasian landmass; however, domestication probably occurred in the Middle East. That’s because early cattle were much smaller than our native aurochs, and DNA studies show that modern cows, including British ones, are genetically closer to Syrian aurochs than home-grown ones. In fact, today’s entire global cattle herd – numbering some 1.5 billion cows – is believed to be descended from a founding stock of just 80 animals, likely to have originated in the Middle East. There’s a good chance, however, that hybridisation would have occurred between local British aurochs and the smaller incoming cattle. Neolithic farmers may not have been thrilled about this: their petite cows, bred for milking, may have risked serious injury when attempting to birth an outsized hybrid calf.
Other modern domesticates with native British versions also seem to have derived from imported stock. These include the pig, whose ancestor, the wild boar, was widespread here before the advent of agriculture. Porkers are thought to have been first farmed in the eastern Anatolian region of modern-day Turkey about 10,000 years ago – along with a later independent domestication event in central China – and descendants of these Anatolian versions were subsequently brought to Britain. As with cattle, the amount of wild boar DNA in the genome of domestic pigs suggests frequent hybridisation between the two. To an extent, this may have benefited pig farmers, as crossbred versions may have been better suited to the more bracing local conditions in Britain, although too much of the ‘wild’ in a pig could make it a handful. A balance had to be struck.
Many of our supposedly native crops may also have come from elsewhere too. For instance, Britain’s blackberries, raspberries, carrots and parsnips, as well as the perennial ryegrass, red clover and common vetch traditionally used as animal fodder, all probably derive from southern European strains.
Whether there’s the whiff of the exotic about other domesticated species is less certain. For instance, the honeybee is thought to have originated in Asia, or maybe Africa, around 300,000 years ago, later spreading naturally across Europe, so the likely presence of this woodland insect in Britain before the most recent Ice Age would qualify it as native. Yet, the earliest known archaeological evidence for honeybee exploitation by humans in this country – as suggested by beeswax residues on seven pieces of Neolithic pottery found in southern England – dates to as recently as 4,000 years ago. That’s several millennia after sweet-toothed pioneer farmers in Turkey, and later in central Europe, began gathering honey and wax from the insects, and possibly even domesticating them. So, we’re left to wonder if Britain’s first apiarists collected honey from wild bees or perhaps were using a tamer, introduced, variety that had been bred on the continent. In a sense, this discussion is somewhat academic, since pretty much all of our honeybees are today derived from southern European stock after parasitic mites devastated Britain’s existing honeybee population in the early twentieth century.
So, how did the ‘Neolithic package’ – although this term for an apparent commonality of elements, including domesticated crops and livestock, along with other characteristic artefacts, is increasingly criticised as over-simplistic – reach our shores? Did Fertile Crescent farmers themselves migrate north and west, or was it just their agricultural practices that travelled, along with the wheat, barley, sheep, goats and other domesticated species upon which they were reliant? The question has been debated for well over a century, although recent research is beginning to support the former hypothesis. For instance, a genetic study published in 2018 found strong affinities between Mesolithic British and western European hunter-gatherers over a period spanning Britain’s separation from the continent. The authors of this paper believe that British Neolithic people derived much of their ancestry from Anatolian farmers who followed the Mediterranean route of dispersal and entered Britain from northwestern mainland Europe. One thing is certain: when times were good, farming guaranteed a steady food supply and supported a burgeoning human population. In Britain, its practitioners rubbed along with nomadic hunter-gatherers for hundreds if not thousands of years, but the agricultural way of life, and the settled civilisation it supported, proved irresistible. So too, would the invasive species that profited from both.
The omens were there from the start. For millions of years, a spectrum of fast-growing, fast-spreading pioneer plants, both annuals and perennials, evolved to benefit from landscape impacts very similar to those that humans would one day cause. Many were adept at exploiting forest clearings opened up by fallen trees or recolonising habitats scraped clean by fires, glaciers, floods, landslips, volcanic activity and other natural disturbances. So, when the first farmers razed woodland and stripped soil bare in readiness for crops, they were teeing things up for a plethora of undesirable species. Commonly known as ‘weeds’,
