First Farmers Wanted Clothes, Not Food

For example, they might have draped a single layered wallaby fur cloak around their shoulders at the height of the last ice age, and decorations were made directly on their body.

There was no incentive for Aboriginal people to take up farming because all their needs were met by hunting and gathering, said Gilligan.

"The idea that early farming offered humans a more reliable food supply has been exposed as a myth," he said.

Hunting and gathering was a far more flexible, reliable and efficient way of getting food, he argues.

"Australian Aborigines never worried where their next meal was coming from, even in the outback, and they enjoyed much more leisure time than any early farmers," he said.

Lindsay Falvey, a professor from the University of Melbourne, whose research interests include agriculture in traditional societies, said Gilligan's paper is "really important."

"There's been a lot of difficulty how we explain the transition from hunting and gathering to farming," he said.

Falvey, a former dean of agriculture at the university, thinks both clothes and food were important in establishing agriculture, which he sees as a product of co-evolution between humans, plants and animals.

Whatever the origins of agriculture, he welcomes Gilligan's contribution.

"Keeping the discussion open, like this paper does, is the most important thing," he said.