The shift from foraging to farming and from commonplace practices by multiple groups to greater sociocultural creativity by only a few groups is a complex process that has been approached by scholars in different ways. For instance, in Africa, the first shift has been viewed as a continuum of people-plant interaction based on the resource richness of ecotones (Harris 1989). In contrast, scholars working in regions like Panama, India, Pakistan, and the Near East have modeled the onset of plant cultivation as a result of seasonal food shortages and climate change crisis (Mehra 1999). In Papua New Guinea, scholars believe it was the technological advances of low-risk horticulture that accelerated deforestation and led to agriculture (Golson 1989). In various sectors of the Andes, plant cultivation has been variously viewed as a strategy for reclaiming land following environmental catastrophes like volcanic eruptions and as a result of long-term cultural and ideological processes involving the roles of food in identity and politics (Hastorf 1999). In regions like the eastern United States, the prevailing model is that there was little to no intentionality involved in the development of cultigens and instead there was a process of co-evolution and plant-human interdependence (Rindos 1984; Smith 2001). There is thus a wide variety of models, and a definite sense that each region had distinctive cultural and environmental circumstances, along with concomitant creative social, technological, and ideological changes, that nurtured plant cultivation and ultimately farming.