Establishing an adequate supply of food is historically one of the fundamental challenges facing humanity. The modern food infrastructure employed by contemporary society is rooted in the creation and innovation of food production. Its effective use decreases the level of societal contribution to the labor required and discourages apprehensions related to food shortage among individuals. It is difficult to imagine, given the current state of our society, a huge agro-industrial complex, that the hunter-gatherer organization of society has dominated for more than 99 percent of our existence (Fagan 2007: 126). The hunter-gatherer population was characterized by its primary method of subsistence, which involved the direct purchase of edible plants and animals from the wild. The main methods employed were foraging and hunting, which were carried out without any significant recourse to the domestication of either food source (Fagan 2007: 129). Food production is assumed to have emerged around 12,000 years ago as a system of “deliberate cultivation of cereal grasses, edible root plants, and domestication of animals” (Fagan 2007: 126). The pronounced shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture and domestication can be simplistically referred to as an agricultural or Neolithic revolution (Pringle 1998). The catalytic developments of the Neolithic Revolution mark a major turning point in human history. The resulting animal and plant domestication laid the foundation on which modern civilization was built. Archaeologists generally offer different hypotheses about the origins of food production. Various theoretical approaches have attempted to identify the circumstances that caused people to turn to deliberate cultivation and make...... middle of paper ...... Chapter 25: Origins of Food Production. Oxford University Press. University of California Davis. Pages 476, 482, 478, 479-480Scarre, Chris2005. The human past: global prehistory and the development of human societies. The world transformed: from gatherers and farmers to states and empires. Thames and Hudson. P. 188Sutton, Mark Q. Anderson, Eugene N.2004 Introduction to Cultural Ecology. Chapter 8: The origins of food, Rowman Altamira. Page 177Weiss, Ehud. Kislev, Mordechai E. Hartmann, AnatJune 2006 Scientific anthropology: autonomous culture before domesticationVol. 312 No. 5780 p. 1608-1610White, NancyJanuary 2004 MATRIX Introduction to archaeology: origins of food production. Electronic document. http://www.indiana.edu/~arch/saa/matrix/ia/ia03_mod_12.html, accessed October 9, 2010