First farmers wanted clothing, not food

Discovery News

Oh alright, this is not really Egyptology, but there has been very little of interest in the worlf of Egyptology recently, and the earliest fully evolved mixed farming in Egypt (in the Faiyum and Merimde in the southern Delta) certainly included flax, which was used to make fabrics of different types and qualities. And have you ever been in the Faiyum Depression on a windy day?

People turned to farming to grow fiber for clothing, and not to provide food, says one researcher who challenges conventional ideas about the origins of agriculture.

Ian Gilligan, a postgraduate researcher from the Australian National University, says his theory also explains why Aboriginal Australians were not generally farmers.

Gilligan says they did not need fiber for clothing, so had no reason to grow crops like cotton.

He argues his case in the current issue of the Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association.

"Conventional thinking assumes that the transition to farming was related to people's need to find new ways of getting food," said Gilligan. "That doesn't really make sense for a number of reasons."

It doesn't explain why cultivating plants and domesticating animals only started 10,000 years ago in some areas of the world.

Gilligan says a better explanation is climate.

In the northern hemisphere during the last ice age it was roughly 20 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than today, which led hunters and gatherers to develop sophisticated forms of clothing.

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