Pre-History

All I have ever known is the call of the hunt. Me and my family chase large beasts around for food, while foraging for fruit and vegetables in the wilderness. We seem to be always on the move, in a constant cycle of building up camp and taking it down. It has been like this generation after generation. Shockingly, I have come to recognize patterns that no one else has seen. As we travel, I noticed that the beasts tend to follow similar routes. It seems random at first but once I noticed it, it can’t be unseen. Call it luck, or maybe even the gods, but I think I have found a way to stop having to travel all the time.

I started to take note of where we would set up camp and where the sources of food where. It was under my leadership that our foraging rate went up. I remembered where the fruit and vegetables grew so we always set up camp in the same places. This way, even if the hunt took longer or wasn’t as successful, we were able to feed the entire family. Death rates dropped and we were able to keep a more steady pace after the beasts.

That was when I started to notice something extraordinary. It seemed that where we camped, there seemed to be a random chance that some of the food was grown where we once were in the season prior. It seemed like the gods were trying to tell me something. Food was growing where we were. I took some time to monitor and think about what I was seeing. How was food growing where we were staying? Then I noticed it one morning when we were packing up. The scraps of food were left behind in our wake. They were somehow producing more of themselves.

I took the time at our next location to see if this was accurate. I went a little bit outside of our camp and left certain amounts of food out in the open. The next time were were at that location, I found some food grown. I took the next year to do different things at each of our normal stops. Sometimes I dug and put the whole plant in. Sometimes I split in it half. Other times I put just a small piece in the ground. Other foods, I just left as we normally did.

After a number of years I found out the best conditions for food. Each piece of food has a small piece in it that new life comes from. When I separated these pieces from the food, I found that the taste didn’t change and we didn’t lose any food, so I began to collect these pieces. I also found out that placing them in the ground had a higher chance of more food. It was amazing. Like a fire was being lit in my head and spread throughout my body.

I brought this information to the elders and they agreed with my plan. I wanted to set up permanent locations in the places where food had the ability to grow the most. We began to call this farming. I had teams of people under me that would dig up the ground and plant, what I called, seeds. Every year, more food grew. After some time, we stayed in these areas. Some groups continued to hunt, naturally. They were unable to go against tradition.

We believed that the gods had used me to to create this new lifestyle so we built huge buildings for them to continue to give us ideas and blessings. Throughout our time, we also found out how to keep certain animals and allow them to breed at specific rates. We never would have to travel again. Since we had all the food that we had, we began to grow as a society. Once we were too big, I sent others to the locations that I had marked where this could be reproduced. Now there are over a dozen of these communities.