Giving someone the fig: the Renaissance equivalent of giving someone the finger.

“Don’t eat the figs.” Livia to soon-to-be Emperor Tiberius in the Masterpiece Theater adaptation of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius.

The development of agriculture was quite possibly the most significant event in human history. Prior to the domestication and cultivation of plants, humans across the globe were engaged in hunting and (predominantly) gathering. This is the way we evolved to eat—subsisting mainly on gathered plants with occasional meat hunted or scavenged. Once thought to be a primitive method of obtaining sustenance, hunting-and-gathering is now recognized as in many ways healthier and less time consuming than agriculture. The problem is that hunting-and-gathering cannot sustain a large population except under very unusual conditions. Northwest Coast Indians in America and the Jomon culture in ancient Japan are exceptions. Northwest Coast Indians had huge amounts of salmon, and Jomon huge amounts of shell fish to sustain them in large and happy numbers. But in general, hunting-and-gathering requires small family groups to have access to large areas of land.

The success of agriculture was not that it was easier or more nutritious. It never has been. The effort spent feeding oneself through agriculture is backbreaking and almost devoid of leisure, while hunting-and-gathering takes far less time and effort per calorie consumed. Furthermore, archaeology shows that human health declined sharply when humans switched to agriculture, probably because a rich and varied diet was usually replaced with a monotonous, grain-based diet.

The success of agriculture was in the volume. Far more food could be produced per acre than through hunting-and-gathering, so a much larger population could be sustained. More people meant you could out-compete your hunting-and-gathering neighbors, which is why the vast majority of people today exist in an economy fed by agriculture.

This pivotal step in human history has for a long time been pinpointed to a specific place (the Near East) and time (about 10,500 years ago) and has focused on grains, mainly wheat and barley. These grains were believed to be the very first domesticated crops and the basis for the development and spread of agriculture. This has become such a “given” in archaeology that people had largely stopped disputing it.

But a recent study reported in the June 2nd issue of Science (Vol. 312. no. 5778, pp. 1372 – 1374) throws that largely out the window. Fig remains found during archaeological digs in the Jordan Valley during the 1970’s and 1980’s were largely ignored at the time. But recently scientists from the US and Israel reanalyzed these figs and found that although they dated to 11,400 years ago, they were a variety of figs that were very fleshy and sterile. These traits are typical of domesticated fruit and could not survive without humans propagating them by hand. Such propagation and modification of plants to suit human needs is the very definition of domestication. Thus this handful of figs represents the earliest surviving crop ever found. It is assumed that it would take hundreds of years for such a variety of fully domesticated fruit to develop, so the origin of agriculture can probably be pushed back at least to 11,500 years ago. And the first crop was not barley or wheat, but the fig.

But figs were not the basis of any great civilizations, though they certainly were well enjoyed throughout Near Eastern and Mediterranean history. Grains and beans were the basis of the first large-scale civilizations, supplemented with meat, onions, garlic, and, a little later, olives and grapes.

From the News and Views article on the discovery:

The purposeful planting of figs shows that settlers in the Jordan Valley were auditioning a variety of foods to see what they could grow, says archaeologist Bruce Smith of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The development of early agriculture, he notes, was a slow process that took place on a small scale in different areas, through trial and error with different plants. It would take another 2000 years before humans were such adept farmers that half of their calories came from crops. The discovery of dried cultivated figs, however, makes it clear that 11,000 years ago, more than meat, cereals, and wild nuts and berries were on the menu. "Humans cannot live on steak alone," says Bar-Yosef. "They wanted condiments and all kinds of things that tasted good.

The rations for the workers building the pyramids indicate bread, beer, and onions were their staple diet, probably supplemented by fish of their own catching. Ancient Greece and Rome subsisted on bread, wine and olive oil. Chinese civilization grew on millet and, later, rice. And in the Americas, the Mayan and Incan empires ate primarily corn and beans (and quinoa in the South). But it was the fig that started it all.