Abrupt Climate Change and the Invention of Agriculture

We draw attention to the effect of abrupt climate change on the major event in human history, the invention of agriculture. Our Homo Sapiens ancestors appeared almost 1/2 million years ago but agriculture was not first invented until 11,000 thousand years before the present (ybp). Since then agriculture has been independently invented at least 5 times, which demonstrates that it is not very difficult to invent agriculture if the conditions are right. But what are the right conditions and why did they not occur until 11,000 years ago. We note that the anatomically modern species of human being (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) first appeared in East Africa 130,000 ybp. This time scale is close to that of the climate records archived in polar ice cores, marine sediments and coral cores. These data sets imply major abrupt climate changes occurring in time scales of decades with characteristic times between changes of 300-700 years. By using time -scale analysis of the data we argue that these changes were too great and too frequent to permit the development of a successful agriculture until 11,000 ybp.