Agriculture encompasses crop and livestock production, aquaculture, fisheries and forestry for food and non-food products. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people to live in cities. While humans started gathering grains at least 105,000 years ago, nascent farmers only began planting them around 11,500 years ago. Sheep, goats, pigs and cattle were domesticated around 10,000 years ago. Plants were independently cultivated in at least 11 regions of the world. In the twentieth century, industrial agriculture based on large-scale monocultures came to dominate agricultural output.
Based on the information below, when might people have started baking bread?
Bread typically requires grains as an ingredient, so it’s feasible that humans could make bread when they started gathering grains 105,000 years ago. However, it may be more likely that they began baking bread around the time they began intentionally planting grains 11,500 years ago.