Against all odds, agriculture was not part of the “creative explosion.” The Upper Paleolithic people, completely obsessed with wildlife – especially with grazing animals (as evident, for instance, from their art) – strangely enough found no interest in domesticating any of them. Food production would have been, it seems, the logical conclusion of the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition, yet for no immediately apparent reason it was never attempted. This failure to act defied for a long time any explanation, although such an explanation is key to any attempt to understand the transition to agriculture, if not to civilization itself.

In 1993 a promising clue was discovered in unexpected quarters. Of all places, it was extracted from a deep hole in the ice-cap over a remote mountaintop thousands of miles away from the nearest site that could conceivably have served as a cradle of early agriculture. It came in the form of a three-page report published that year in Nature (364: 218–220) by a group of scientists from the Ice-core Project Summit (GRIP) of Greenland (a country with a land area 99% unfit for agriculture). I will come back to this report shortly, but first we have to establish the necessary environmental and economic connections.

Five unexplained remarkable facts

The first humans who relied on agriculture left more traces in the archaeological record than any culture that preceded them; so much so, that they are a mystery to us primarily because of what we know about them, rather than what we don't.