The first storable surplus appears in the Neolithic. Everything that follows — writing, hierarchy, war over the stores — comes from it.
The surplus and what it sets off
Farming didn't only change what people ate. It produced something new in human history: a surplus that could be stored.
A group that keeps its food can feed people who don't produce any. That's the material condition for any specialisation. The potter, the smith, the priest and the soldier only exist because a granary exists.
Everything else follows from that same condition. Stocks have to be counted, so people write. Someone has to decide who gets access, so hierarchy appears. A fixed place that can no longer be abandoned has to be defended, so people organise militarily. And for the first time, it pays to take someone else's store rather than produce your own.
Palaeopathology studies of the first farming populations show a consistent and counter-intuitive picture: shorter stature, more frequent deficiencies, worse teeth, and a heavier parasite load than the hunter-gatherers they replaced. A diet focused on a few species instead of several dozen. Total dependence on a harvest, and therefore on a season. Constant close contact with domestic animals, where most of the great human infectious diseases come from.
Farming didn't win because it made life better. It won because it fed more people on the same land. A larger group, even in poorer health, wins demographically and militarily over a healthier but smaller one. It's a logic of numbers, not quality.
The real price lies elsewhere. A hunter-gatherer answers a bad year by moving. A farmer no longer can: their investment is in the soil, their reserves in one place, their survival in infrastructure they can't take with them. A farming society can't flee. It has to hold on, store more, or collapse where it stands.
Where and when
Domestication didn't happen once. It appeared independently in at least ten or so centres, thousands of years apart and with different species.
In the Near East, from around ten thousand years BCE, with wheat, barley, peas and lentils, then goats, sheep, pigs and cattle. In China, with millet in the north and rice in the south. In Mesoamerica, with maize, squash and beans. In the Andes, with potatoes, quinoa, llamas and alpacas. In New Guinea, with bananas and taro. In West Africa, with sorghum, millet and yams.
Each centre domesticated what grew locally. The species available on the spot determined what each region could become: few high-yield cereals and few large domesticable animals in some places, many in others.
What the skeletons show
Palaeopathology studies of the first farming populations give a consistent picture: average height lower than that of hunter-gatherers from the same region, more frequent signs of deficiency on bones and teeth, a sharp rise in tooth decay with cereal eating, and a heavier parasite load.
The identified causes are a diet focused on a few species instead of several dozen, dependence on a single harvest, constant close contact with domestic animals, and a population density that makes contagious what wasn't before.
Farming populations still replaced the others, because they fed more people on the same land.
What appears next
Archaeological traces regularly link farming with a series of things that didn't exist before: the granary and the silo, bookkeeping writing — see L'écriture est née des comptes, pas des poèmes —, unequal burials, which signal social differences, fortifications, and the first epidemics linked to density, a mechanism described in Hygiène et transmission des maladies.
The order in which they appear is the same in centres that had no contact with each other.