People turned to farming to grow fibre for clothing, and not to provide food, says one researcher who challenges conventional ideas about the origins of agriculture.

Ian Gilligan, a postgraduate researcher from the Australian National University, says his theory also explains why Aboriginal Australians were not generally farmers.

He argues his case in the current issue of the Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association.

"Conventional thinking assumes that the transition to farming was related to people's need to find new ways of getting food," says Gilligan.

Gilligan says it doesn't explain why cultivating plants and domesticating animals only started 10,000 years ago in some areas of the world.

He says a better explanation is climate.