It is a familiar tale: when humans started farming, their lifestyles changed radically and forever. People stopped foraging, and had a narrower, nutritionally poorer diet. But new evidence suggests we may need to rethink this story.

Farming arose in many places, but the “ Fertile Crescent ”, an area that today includes parts of Egypt, Iraq and other countries, was one of the first. Many archaeologists assume that there was a big shift in what people there ate when they became farmers 12,000 years …