3000 BCE–300 CE: (Environmental Constraints and Alternative Paths to Food Production — In the Farther Northern and Southern Portions of the World Environment…

3000 BCE–300 CE: (Environmental Constraints and Alternative Paths to Food Production — In the Farther Northern and Southern Portions of the World Environmental Differences Commonly Delaying the Expansion of Food-Producing Ways of Life, the Constraints Diverting Immigrant Farmers and Giving Existing Inhabitants Time to Gradually Incorporate Food-Producing Activities into Their Previously Wholly Foraging Economies, the Uralic Speakers of the European Boreal Forest Zone and the Khoe Peoples of Southern Africa Providing Salient Examples of Differing Paths by Which People Adopted Food Production): Developments in the farther northern and southern portions of the world offer still another perspective on how historical processes played out during the continuing spread of agriculture and livestock raising. Environmental differences commonly delayed the expansion of food-producing ways of life into those regions. The constraints of environment, by diverting the spread of immigrant farmers away from those regions, gave time for many of the existing inhabitants to adapt to the new possibilities by gradually incorporating food-producing activities into their previously wholly foraging economies. The histories of the Uralic speakers of the European boreal forest zone and of the Khoe peoples of southern Africa provide salient examples of the differing paths by which people, in this kind of historical circumstance, adopted food-producing activities into their livelihoods. The transition to food production was not a single event but a spectrum of processes. At one end, immigrant farmers carrying a complete agricultural package displaced or absorbed existing foraging populations — the Bantu expansion model. At the other end, existing foragers gradually adopted elements of food production into their existing economies without being displaced — the Khoe and Uralic model. The environmental margins of the agricultural world — the boreal forests of northern Europe, the arid lands of southern Africa — were precisely the places where this second path was most likely to occur, because the farming populations that drove the first path could not easily penetrate these environments. The result was not replacement but adaptation — foraging peoples selectively adopting livestock herding or crop cultivation into economies that retained their foraging foundation, creating hybrid subsistence systems that were neither purely foraging nor purely agricultural.