IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/qjecon/v139y2024i3p1467-1504..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Ant and the Grasshopper: Seasonality and the Invention of Agriculture

Author

Listed:
  • Andrea Matranga

Abstract

The Neolithic revolution saw the independent development of agriculture among at least seven unconnected hunter-gatherer populations. I propose that the rapid spread of agricultural techniques resulted from increased climatic seasonality causing hunter-gatherers to adopt a sedentary lifestyle and store food for the season of scarcity. Their newfound sedentary lifestyle and storage habits facilitated the invention of agriculture. I present a model and support it with global climate data and Neolithic adoption dates, showing that greater seasonality increased the likelihood of agriculture’s invention and its speed of adoption by neighbors. This study suggests that seasonality patterns played a dominant role in determining our species’ transition to farming.

Suggested Citation

  • Andrea Matranga, 2024. "The Ant and the Grasshopper: Seasonality and the Invention of Agriculture," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 139(3), pages 1467-1504.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:139:y:2024:i:3:p:1467-1504.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjae012
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:139:y:2024:i:3:p:1467-1504.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/qje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.