Was it inevitable that humans would turn to agriculture?

I once came across an amusing theory that pointed out agriculture got going at around the same time beer was discovered and postulated a link between the two, namely that once early humans discovered the delights of getting smashed they needed a regular grain surplus in order to do so as often as possible, hence cultivation. I don't know how much substance to it there is, but given humanity's long and intimate association with alcohol based beverages...
amongst the barley/wheat/corn/rice/sorghum cultures yes that's actually quite an old theory. There are some researchers who believethe jump from Teosinte to early Corn derives mostly from old selections of sugary stems providing enough energy to form large seeds.

It runs along the same line as prestige foods of foraged and tended stands creating demand to produce them on a conscious level more intensely involving monocrops.
So there are some ways you can make it so Humans don't adopt agriculture; either the land humans inhabit is so rediculously rich with food to eat that its easiest just to gather or hunt than to grow(Which is unlikely as our diet overlaps with that of many other species) or humans are limited to a place that cant sustain agriculture, so enviroments where hunter-gatherers still live today(Tundra, Taiga, Desert and so on). Alternatively, you could have a Pastoral Nomadic wank timeline, where humans domesticate and herd species around most if not all biomes; could lead to some interesting domestication situations as Humans look for animals to herd say, in the Jungle. But most of these would require things that are ASB.
Well not exactly ASB but you want be making Worldwide Mongol Nations. Swineherds, aviculturalist, aquaculturists, and especially apiculture etc... Could fill up a number of niches. Kreb-harvesting, demarcation and temporal settlement would still develop though.

As DValdron and others have pointed out, agriculture was independently invented multiple times across much of the world soon after we entered the latest interglacial. Presumably it was the (relative) stability of the climate since then which permitted it to flourish. There is also evidence that proto-domestication of plants happened in various places in or near the Middle East during the glacial era, but was abandoned due to changing climates.

In terms of independent inventions of agriculture, we have at least Fertile Crescent (once, possibly simultaneously at different ends), China (once possibly twice in North and South China), Mesoamerica, Andes (once, possibly twice), eastern North America, and New Guinea. We can also include probably but not definitely Ethiopia and the Sahel as different areas. Tibet is also a possibility, as is India, and also possibly in Amazonia. That's a minimum of 6, quite possibly as many as 14 times.

So yes, it's looking pretty inevitable that people would develop agriculture, without the kind of geological/climatological one which would more or less end the world as we know it. (Basically, continued glacial period is the most likely option.)
Sahel is independent, Ethiopia's south was vegeculturalist and distinct from the poaceae centered systems of the Sahel. Looking at notions of prestige foods, its telling that Teff and Fonio are considered the greatest of foods in their respective homeranges to consume showing great antiquity. Also it helps reaffirm the pastoralist basis of Savanna cultural complexes given the very high protein content and digestibility content of the harvested straw useful for the cattle centered societies at that time.

A good pdf exploring production systems is Cattle Before Crops.
 
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So there are some ways you can make it so Humans don't adopt agriculture; either the land humans inhabit is so rediculously rich with food to eat that its easiest just to gather or hunt than to grow
The north west Pacific coast is one such area. No doubt there were originally other areas such as Mesopotamia. In the case of the latter it has been suggested the locals went into agriculture because the gazelle population crashed. Whether or not that was was a factor, one difference is that there was a complete crop package available in that area to be to able to switch. In contrast, for the north west Pacific coast natives, hunting and gathering was easier than farming.
 
We don't have any historical models for an independent invention or emergence of agriculture.

But we do know that in the post-ice age world, from about 14,000 to about 6000 years ago, it emerged repeatedly in widely separated areas of the world which could not have communicated with each other. In some cases it spread, in some cases it remained relatively restricted. But given the repeated emergences, and the rapid spread, I would suggest its an inevitable development when environmental conditions are stable enough long enough.

If I had to speculate, I would argue that agriculture as a fully formed model did not emerge overnight. There's a whole catalogue of intellectual structures and concepts underlying agriculture - a knowledge and understanding of seeds as the basis for plants is critical and neither obvious nor intuitive. Time-fixing, ie, storing harvest for long term. You don't just invent a profound paradigm like agriculture.

Rather, the paradigm probably follows on the practice. My thinking is that hunter-gatherer cultures evolved a series of pre-agricultural practices which were widespread, part of the hunter-gatherer cultural lores and technologies, and that in some places, these reached a tipping point into agriculture or subsistence horticulture, which resulted in the emergence and consolidation of agricultural packages.

If that's correct, then essentially, it was simply a matter of time.
 
If I had to speculate, I would argue that agriculture as a fully formed model did not emerge overnight. There's a whole catalogue of intellectual structures and concepts underlying agriculture - a knowledge and understanding of seeds as the basis for plants is critical and neither obvious nor intuitive. Time-fixing, ie, storing harvest for long term. You don't just invent a profound paradigm like agriculture.

Rather, the paradigm probably follows on the practice. My thinking is that hunter-gatherer cultures evolved a series of pre-agricultural practices which were widespread, part of the hunter-gatherer cultural lores and technologies, and that in some places, these reached a tipping point into agriculture or subsistence horticulture, which resulted in the emergence and consolidation of agricultural packages.

If that's correct, then essentially, it was simply a matter of time.
I would add some emphasis to this that food storage, while still in hunter-gatherer mode, appears to be quite an important part of the practice. In the case of the Middle East, we know that the invention of granaries, elevated above the ground to reduce the risk of pests such as rats getting in there, preceded agriculture by about 1000 years. It appears that food storage of wild-gathered grains came first, and then there was some gradual, probably unconscious, artificial selection of the wild-gathered grains in that region which led to the emergence of fully domesticated strains.
 
Agreed. Storage is pretty critical.grains may be particularly susceptible to agriculture because stored grains remain viable. Might help the linkage
 
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