While farmer ants emerged just
after the dinosaurs died out, human only came up with the idea
of agriculture 10,000 years ago
Ian
Johnston Science Correspondent
Wednesday 20 July 2016
After the age of the dinosaurs
came to an end some 65 million years ago, a ‘tribe’ of ants known to scientists
as the Attini decided to give up life as hunter-gatherers and become farmers
instead, according to a new genetic study.
It was an astonishing move that
humans only managed to accomplish some 10,000 years ago.
The ants, native to South
America, began farming fungus that grew on decomposing wood, setting off
an evolutionary revolution.
About 25 million year ago, one
group of fungus farmers began growing a particular fungi that produced
protein-rich bulbs that proved a highly nutrious food.
This allowed ant colonies to
increase in size until 15 million years ago when the leafcutter ant emerged.
They feed a fully domesticated species of fungus kept in vast underground farms
with fresh green leaves every day, supporting colonies number millions of
individual insects.
A paper about the research, published in the journal
Nature Communications, said that ants had evolved “complex societies with
industrial-scale farming”.
“Farming created advanced human
civilizations in just a few thousand years, producing a huge diversity of
domesticated crops with improved nutrition, growth characteristics and yield,”
the researchers wrote.
“Industrial-scale farming,
comparable to that in humans, has evolved in only two non-human organisms, the
fungus-growing ants and termites.
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