Archaeologists and paleoanthropologists have discussed in detail about the origins of agriculture. Most of the literature shows that agriculture was originated during Neolithic period. Some others say that it was during upper-Palaeolithic period the first agriculture was domesticated. In different regions, agriculture was originated in different periods of time. Broadly it is assumed that agricultural systems appeared between ca. 10000-5000 years and by 2000 ago most human populations were dependent on agriculture . (Flannery, 1973) has discussed how the origin of agriculture took place at different points of time at different places. As far as the question of domestication of crops is concerned, which crop was first domesticated than later, there is no unique and established fact. But the available answers for domestication of crop and the period of cropping in the past can guide us about the cultural behaviour. The crops were domesticated in both plain and riverine areas in different regions. The domestication induced the scope for growth of family (extended), settlement of colonies, strengthening kinship pattern, etc. Whether it is the nature of family that motivated for domestication of agriculture or viceversa is nothing but chicken-egg evidence. But a few evidences can be better traced from the works of ethno archaeologists, paleo botanists, or paleoanthropologists.
There are many hypotheses constructed about the origins of agriculture. A few of them are very briefly discussed below.
Ø Early views on the origins of agriculture focused on climate change. In the end of Pleistocene, with gradual increasing warmth and dryness in the earth’s climate when vegetation grew only around limited water sources, the Oasis hypothesis suggested a circumstance in which plants, animals, and humans
would have clustered in constrained zones near water. V. Gordon Childe was one of the proponents of this idea.
The Natural-habitat hypothesis suggests that the domestication of agriculture should have appeared where their wild ancestors lived. Cohen (1977, 2009) argued that the only way for a successful but rapidly increasing species such as land snails, shellfish, birds, and many new plant species, to cope with declining resources was for them to begin and cultivate the land and domesticate its habitants rather than simply to collect the wild produce (Douglas Price, October 2011).
Ø Cultural progress hypothesis assumes that bio-culturally capable humans would inevitably develop agriculture subsistence as part of culturally-mediated progress from simpler to more complex, from arduous nomadic life to comfortable sedentary one, from wild to more and more “civilised and settled
state”
Price and Bar-Yosef (2011) beautifully explained the ideas about the origins of agriculture which is categorised as either push or pull models. Push or pull model, where for example, hunter-gatherers are either pushed or forced to become farmers or they are pulled, drawn by the benefits of a new life style. Population pressure approach, for example, force human societies to find way out for domestication of
crops or later the agricultural intensification. Social hypothesis usually involve pull, in which members of society are drawn into relationships of inequality in order to benefit from new arrangements and elevate social status by increasing wealth and reduce risk.