Abstract

The invention of sedentary agriculture (the Neolithic) around 10 000 years ago resulted from the coincidence between the start of the present interglacial and homo sapiens with a more complex brain, as indicated by the emergence of figuration only 40 000 years ago. This had six main consequences: a demographic boom, still underway; a race to improve techniques to feed more and more people on a finite planet; rising social inequalities; the aggravation of warlike conflicts; the growth of epidemics; increasing damage to the environment. All this ushered in a new period for the Earth, marked this time by human impact: the Anthropocene. Did agriculture have to be invented? As with any technique, it depends on what societies do with it…

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