IELTS Reading 149: How Farming Began — The Neolithic Shift

Adapted from Oregon State University Open Textbook / Bynumpedia Neolithic. IELTS Reading Section 3 difficulty, approximately 1,050 words. Source: https://open.oregonstate.education/cultivatedplants/chapter/agriculture/

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Reading Passage

A. For almost all of human history, people ate what they could find: wild plants gathered where they grew, animals hunted as they passed. Then, roughly twelve thousand years ago, in a strip of upland and valley often called the Fertile Crescent, something changed. Human groups began deliberately to sow, tend and harvest plants they had previously only gathered, and to manage animals they had previously only pursued. That shift — from wandering hunters to settled farmers — is so momentous that archaeologists call it a revolution. It did not happen overnight, and it was not a single invention spread by one people. Rather, over several thousand years and across a broad arc spanning modern Syria, Jordan, Israel, Turkey and Iraq, generations of foragers experimented with the wild species around them until the plants and animals themselves were transformed into the crops and livestock we still depend on. Everything that followed — towns, cities, written records, dense populations — grew out of that slow, unplanned experiment. It is hard to overstate how strange this makes the modern world: every supermarket, office and capital city rests, ultimately, on a choice made by unknown people ten thousand years ago to linger beside the plants they had always simply gathered.

B. The revolution did not start from scratch. Long before anyone planted a seed, the people of the region — the semi-sedentary Natufian foragers — were already harvesting wild stands of cereals and grinding the grain into meal. They were familiar with wild wheat and barley, understood their seasons, and may have scattered seeds near their camps without yet imagining them as a crop. A clue at Jericho, where fig remains dated to about 9400 BC were preserved in a house, hints at how early this tinkering began: the figs were a mutant, seedless variety that can only survive with human help, meaning people were already propagating a favoured form thousands of years before full farming took hold. In other words, agriculture was less a sudden leap than a gradual deepening of habits that long predated it. The decisive question for archaeologists is why these capable foragers, who had thrived for millennia, eventually committed themselves to fields they had to tend every year. Farming, after all, is harder work than gathering: it demands daily labour, exposes people to the weather, and ties them to one plot in a way that a migratory life never did. The puzzle is not how people learned to farm, but why they ever wanted to.

C. When domestication did gather pace, it centred on a small set of species. So-called founder crops appear again and again in the earliest farmed soils: einkorn and emmer wheat, barley, and four kinds of pulse — lentil, pea, chickpea and bitter vetch — together with flax for oil and fibre. The mix was not random. The cereals supplied starch and calories; the legumes, which house bacteria that enrich the soil with nitrogen, kept plots fertile; and flax added oil and material for weaving. Animals followed a similar pattern. At the site of Abu Hureyra, the lowest layers are full of the bones of wild gazelle, hunted on the open steppe; later layers show that sheep and goats had been brought under control, with cattle and pigs added still later. By selecting which plants to resow and which animals to keep, people gradually reshaped both, so that over centuries the domesticated forms grew visibly different from their wild ancestors. The change was slow enough that no single generation would have noticed it, yet decisive enough that, after a few hundred years, the plants in a cultivated plot could no longer survive without the people who sowed them.

D. Settled life then fed on itself. Once a family stored grain, it could support more children and stay in one place; a settled village could hold more people still. Abu Hureyra grew to several thousand inhabitants, one of the largest communities of its age, its mud-brick houses packed close together. The reasons people moved from easy foraging into the harder work of farming are still debated. One influential idea points to climate: a cold, dry spell called the Younger Dryas may have shrunk wild stands of cereals at just the moment when people had already begun to settle beside them, pushing them to intensify cultivation rather than wander off. Others stress population pressure — as semi-sedentary groups grew too large to feed by gathering alone, sowing became a necessity rather than an option. Probably both forces, and others besides, pushed different communities in the same direction at roughly the same time. Which mattered most is still argued about, because the Fertile Crescent is so old that the evidence underneath it has been worn away or buried by later occupation.

E. The costs were real even as the benefits were enormous. Farming could feed many more people on a smaller patch of land, allowing populations to rise and, eventually, cities to form. But the evidence from skeletons shows that early farmers were often shorter, less well nourished and more riddled with disease than the foragers who preceded them: a narrow diet of grain, crowded villages, and animals living beside people all invited infections that scattered hunter-gatherers never faced. Stored surplus also allowed some families to accumulate more land and wealth than others, laying the ground for the inequalities that foraging life had barely known. Yet however ambivalent its early effects, the new way of life could not be undone. It spread outward from the Fertile Crescent, and independently arose in a handful of other regions, until the sowing of seed and the tending of herd had become, in most of the world, the only way people imagined living. Looking back, the revolution that made cities possible also, quietly, made the problems of cities possible too.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. The foraging prelude — and why figs matter ii. Why farmers built the first pyramids iii. A small set of founding plants and animals iv. Settlement, growth and the debate over causes v. The double-edged gift of farming vi. How ploughs were invented vii. The collapse of the Fertile Crescent today

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. Where did the earliest farming emerge? A. In the Fertile Crescent of the Near East. B. In river valleys in China. C. In the highlands of Peru. D. In northern Europe.

6. Why were the Jericho figs significant? A. They were the first fruit eaten by humans. B. They were a mutant variety requiring human help to reproduce. C. They proved that farming began in Egypt. D. They were imported from America.

7. What role did legumes play in the early farmed mix? A. They provided oil for lamps. B. They enriched the soil with nitrogen. C. They were used only as animal feed. D. They could not be stored.

8. What does the evidence from skeletons suggest about early farmers? A. They were taller and healthier than foragers. B. They were often shorter and less well nourished than foragers. C. They suffered no disease. D. They lived far longer than foragers.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Agriculture began gradually over several thousand years.
10. The Natufian people were fully nomadic farmers who never settled.
11. At Abu Hureyra, the earliest layers contain mostly the bones of wild gazelle.
12. Most archaeologists agree that climate alone explains the rise of farming.
13. The Fertile Crescent had no wild stands of wheat or barley before farming.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The founder crops included cereals such as wheat and barley, and pulses such as lentils and (14) _____________, which enrich the soil. At Abu Hureyra, wild gazelle were later replaced by domesticated sheep and (15) _____________.

Answers & Explanations

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