Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene

Abstract

The advent of farming around 12 millennia ago was a cultural as well as technological revolution, requiring a new system of property rights. Among mobile hunter-gatherers during the late Pleistocene, food was almost certainly widely shared as it was acquired. If a harvested crop or the meat of a domesticated animal were to have been distributed to other group members, a late Pleistocene would-be farmer would have had little incentive to engage in the required investments in clearing, cultivation, animal tending, and storage. However, the new property rights that farming required--secure individual claims to the products of one's labor--were infeasible because most of the mobile and dispersed resources of a forager economy could not cost-effectively be delimited and defended. The resulting chicken-and-egg puzzle might be resolved if farming had been much more productive than foraging, but initially it was not. Our model and simulations explain how, despite being an unlikely event, farming and a new system of farming-friendly property rights nonetheless jointly emerged when they did. This Holocene revolution was not sparked by a superior technology. It occurred because possession of the wealth of farmers--crops, dwellings, and animals--could be unambiguously demarcated and defended. This facilitated the spread of new property rights that were advantageous to the groups adopting them. Our results thus challenge unicausal models of historical dynamics driven by advances in technology, population pressure, or other exogenous changes. Our approach may be applied to other technological and institutional revolutions such as the 18th- and 19th-century industrial revolution and the information revolution today.

Keywords: agent-based simulation; big history; evolutionary game theory; institutional change; technical change.

Fig. 1.

Holocene coevolution of farming and private property. A conventional causal sequence is that a is a sufficient condition for b, which is then followed by d. Our model and simulations suggest a coevolutionary scenario: In the absence of farming, c is a necessary condition for d, which in conjunction with a provided the necessary but not sufficient conditions for b.

Fig. 2.

Climate variability and the emergence of farming and private property. The gray bars (Right) indicate for the year given the number of simulated populations (of the 1,000 simulated) in which more than 50% of the entire population were bourgeois farmers. Estimated dates of some well-studied cases of the initial emergence of cultivation are on the horizontal axis (8, 54, 55). Climate variability (Left) is an indicator of the 100-y maximum difference in surface temperature measured by levels of δ¹⁸O from Greenland ice cores (SI Appendix). A value of 4 on the vertical axis indicates a difference in average temperature over a 100-y period equal to about 5 °C.

Fig. 3.

Simulated process of transition. Shown are the dynamics occurring in a single implementation of the simulation (a single population representing an ethnolinguistic unit), indicating (vertical axis) the fraction of the population that are, respectively, farmers, adopters of the new property rights, and both (bourgeois farmers) for the given year.