Big History Genesis 4: Agriculture
Transcript:
Genesis 4: Agriculture
With the power of story, No prey was untrappable, no plant untested as food or medicine, no climate could not be bent to fit our needs.
Agriculture arose independently multiple times on every continent. But ideas that succeed as stories evolve are not right in some objective sense, anymore than the evolutionary success of tardigrades or cockroaches or humans makes them “Superior”
Foragers in fertile areas built more permanent settlements than the wanderers of the wilderness. Stationary, they relied more and more on crops specific to that region, and learned over time how to cultivate these crops. When climate fluctuations caused famine, their cultivation techniques had to become more organized.
We did not domesticate our flocks and fields. They domesticated us. This changed our lives, our bodies, and our relationship to each other.
When we first began to farm, humans knew how to grow only a handful of carbohydrate rich foods. We went from eating dozens of different kinds of foraged vegetables to a more caloric but less nutritious mix. Life expectancy, average height, and overall health declined. We went from working less than thirty hours per week to gather the food we needed for each day to more than forty to keep our fragile farms alive.
As Hunter gatherers, wealth was limited by what you could carry. Social standing was limited by your usefulness to the group. Agriculture allowed the concentration of power.
Some among us quickly realized that the more fertile land you called your own, the more animals you penned into it, the more people you could convince through lineage or violence to help you tend to these resources, the more powerful you could become.
Ancient empires across the world share a similar historical shape. Agriculture advances to a point where people begin to rely on it and forget their forager roots. From the scribes and priests who control the holy sites and granaries arises a God-king and his attendants. The idea sold to peasants and ruling classes alike is that this imperial order is eternal.
The god king comes to believe he really is a god as he uses his stolen wealth to subjugate more people and land, the scribes canonize the inventions of previous generations and innovation stagnates. The monuments the elite erect to themselves become more elaborate, their consumption of resources more intense.
When intellectual stagnation and inequality of wealth become extreme enough, the empire collapses. Usually a new civilization grows on the fringes of the old, adopting and innovating on the empire's ideas before consuming it.
For a few thousand years, humanity advanced by inches, believing our most brilliant days were behind us, that the amount of wealth in the world was static, and that conquest and domination were the only way to enrich oneself
Kings and gods and nations rose and fell, technologies were created and forgotten and rediscovered, wealth and fame came to a privileged few through war or craft or commerce. But life for most of us remained the same. We were born, we tended our fields, we loved and parented and answered calls to arms and prayed for peace and rain. Sometimes it came. But never for long.
