A chat on the Invention of Agriculture with Andrea Matranga

GrowthChat is a podcast on the social and cultural journey of humankind, hosted by Marco Lecci and Sascha O. Becker.  In this episode we chat with Andrea about his paper​ "The Ant and the Grasshopper: Seasonality and the Invention of Agriculture”. Andrea finds that the invention and adoption of agriculture were both a response to a large increase in climatic seasonality. In the most affected regions, hunter-gatherers abandoned their traditional nomadism in order to store food and smooth their consumption. Their new sedentary lifestyle greatly simplified the invention and adoption of agriculture. Seasonality patterns 10,000 years ago were amongst the major determinants of the present day global distribution of crop productivities, ethnic groups, cultural traditions, and political institutions.