Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Rise of Agriculture

Starting point is 00:00:00 For hundreds of thousands of years, humans lived a nomadic life hunting for game and foraging for food. Then, several thousand years ago, they stopped. They began domesticating animals, started growing crops, and lived a sedentary lifestyle. The question anthropologists have always asked is why? Learn more about the rise of agriculture, aka the Neolithic Revolution, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep, only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pill? Hello? Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day, or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where,

Starting point is 00:00:54 well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. There's an argument to be made that the most important thing in human history was the transformation from being hunter-gatherers to becoming farmers.

Starting point is 00:01:38 When, where, and why this happened has been the subject of much debate. However, almost everything we take for granted in our world today is the direct or indirect result of the transition to agriculture. Agriculture allowed for cities and civilization, which in turn allowed for the rise of writing, mathematics, and technology, which eventually led to the Industrial Revolution and you listening to this podcast right now. It's all a path that began with the rise of agriculture. The first thing to know about the rise of agriculture is that it wasn't a single event that occurred at a single point in time or even in a single place. It occurred over thousands of years in different places and at different speeds. There's much that we don't know, but let's start with what we do know.

Starting point is 00:02:25 Humans have been eating grains in some limited amounts for at least 100,000 years. At some point, probably by accident, people threw seeds on the ground at one of their campsites and then found grain growing at that spot when they came back the next year. Once they noticed it, it was possible to do it on purpose. They would throw seeds on the soil and there would be plants later when they returned. The rise of agriculture wasn't the same thing as the discovery of plant cultivation. Plant cultivation had probably been known for thousands of years. It was just that no one structured their lives around it. The first place where we have evidence that agricultural rose was in the fertile crescent about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. This is the important period

Starting point is 00:03:08 that occurred after the end of the last Ice Age. The fertile crescent is the area that stretches from the top of the Persian Gulf through the Levant and southern Turkey and down into Egypt. There were eight principal crops that were grown in the region which are known as the founder crops. There were three cereals, emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, and barley, four pulses, lentils, peas, chickpeas, and bitter vech, and the final crop, flax, had only limited use as a food but was mostly used as a fiber. Those crops were unique to that region. They were not unique to agriculture. Soon after agriculture developed in the Fertile Crescent, it independently arose in other regions.

Starting point is 00:03:50 Not too long after the rise of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, about 9,000 to 9,500 years ago, agriculture appeared in China in the Yangtze River Basin. The first crops grown in China were rice and barley, although they also grew crops such as acorns, water chestnuts, and fox nuts. By all accounts, the rise of agriculture in China was completely independent of the development of farming in Mesopotamia. About 8,500 to 9,000 years ago, the cultivation of barley appeared in the Indus River Valley in what is today Pakistan. It isn't known if this was an independent development or if it came from Mesopotamia, as many of the early crops were similar to those grown in the Fertile Crescent.

Starting point is 00:04:32 Across the ocean in the Western Hemisphere, where, as far as we know, there was absolutely no communication with the Old Western, world, there were several independent developments of agriculture as well. The Americas saw agriculture rise in a very different way than it did in China or Mesopotamia. The Americans didn't have large seed grains like wheat that could be domesticated. In Mesoamerica, around modern day Mexico, about 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, the wild grass Tio Sente was over a period of centuries, selectively bred, transforming it into the crop that we now know as maize or corn. Tio Sente didn't naturally have large grains. It was humans who created the crop which has the large grains we know today. Further south, the earliest known evidence of agriculture was discovered in modern

Starting point is 00:05:18 day Colombia and Ecuador. The crops grown in this region included Laren, Aeroot, squash, and bottle gourd. Agriculture in the Americas was very different than agriculture in Eurasia. Agriculture in Mesopotamia and China, for example, tended to be single crops planted in a field, and then they later used domestic animals to help plow and harvest. In the Americas, they didn't have the same type of domesticated animals. They only had human labor, so they tended to plant multiple crops in the same field, usually at a much higher density. The regions of Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica, and South America are widely considered

Starting point is 00:05:56 to be the four core independent places where agriculture arose. While they were the largest epicenters of agriculture, they probably weren't the only ones. The domestication of plants may have taken place in different forms in different areas. There is new evidence to suggest that the people in the Amazon rainforest were shaping the land to selectively encourage the growth of certain types of trees. This wasn't domestication per se, and they weren't planting crops, but it's very close to agriculture. Likewise, there's now evidence that suggests there was limited crop growing in Australia, and that the Aboriginal people there used fire to modify the land to encourage the growth of certain plant and animal species.

Starting point is 00:06:37 In North America, the native people grew sunflower, squash, and tobacco. However, they usually didn't rely exclusively on growing crops. They usually grew crops in conjunction with hunting and fishing. In Poopo, New Guinea, banana, root vegetables, and sugar cane may have been cultivated as early as 8,000 years ago. And in the Andes Mountains, about 8,000 years ago, potatoes were also domesticated. The interesting thing is that all over the world at around the same time, give or take, one or two thousand years, people that had absolutely no contact with each other began growing crops as their primary means of substance. Moreover, around the same time that plants were being domesticated, so were animals. Sheep, goats, chickens, and cattle were all being domesticated about the same time that plants were.

Starting point is 00:07:26 In fact, it isn't even certain which came first, plant or animal domestication. So the big question is, why did people around the world all start engaging in the same behavior, in what, evolutionarily speaking, was the same time? And I should note up front that there is no consensus answer to this question. There have been dozens of theories put forward. One theory is that something happened after the last Ice Age. One possibility is that large megafauna that was the primary hunting targets of humans either went extinct or numbers decreased so greatly that they couldn't support populations anymore.

Starting point is 00:08:04 This meant that agriculture wasn't so much a choice as it was forced on people at the time. They probably already knew the secrets to growing plants, so they doubled down on it to survive. Another theory held that conditions after the Ice Age were simply better for growing crops. In this case, it wasn't so much an issue of shifting to crop cultivation, to survive as it was an opportunity to thrive by growing more food. Another theory is that agriculture was a response to rising populations who were in need of greater sources of food. And another theory is that the rise of agriculture was due to tribal chiefs who wanted to throw ever larger feasts to display their power.

Starting point is 00:08:43 Whatever the reason, it happened, and the agricultural revolution had profound consequences. The first of which was that it made it easier to survive bad times. Hunter-gatherers had to follow large game, but sometimes the game just wasn't around. And when that happened, they had to move, hunt smaller game, forage for plants, or starve. Hunting small game and scrounging for plants wasn't as calorically efficient as hunting large game, and it was arguably even more difficult. Farming and animal tending, on the other hand, allowed for more calories to be created per person. Moreover, in the case of grains, they could be stored for extended periods of time.

Starting point is 00:09:23 If there was a drought, it was possible to just eat what you had stored from previous harvest. Similarly, in hunter-gatherer societies, everyone was somehow involved in the acquisition or preparation of food. That was the entire point of their society. In an agricultural society, the caloric surplus created by farming allowed for people in society to focus on things other than food production. This caloric surplus is the basis of civilization. All of the other benefits of civilization stem from this caloric surplus. When people speak of the agricultural revolution and all its benefits, it's usually spoken of as being only beneficial.

Starting point is 00:10:05 However, there were actually downsides to it as well. While the number of calories produced went up, overall nutrition actually went down. Life expectancy actually dropped after the development of agriculture. D diets became much more monotonous as only a small, number of foodstuffs were produced, which meant fewer nutrients. Tooth decay was almost non-existent amongst humans before the rise of agriculture. The first signs of obesity and heart disease appeared in ancient Egypt, where the common people ate a diet that was overwhelmingly dependent

Starting point is 00:10:36 on bread. Likewise, the rise of cities and urbanization also allowed for organized mass warfare, taxes, and the rise of monarchies. It is hard to overstate just how important the agricultural revolution was. It was far more important than the industrial revolution because it was more foundational. The most remarkable thing, however, isn't the long list of civilizational achievements that agriculture was responsible for. It's the fact that so many different places develop the idea independently of each other at roughly the same time. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I just want to thank everyone, including the show's producers, who support the show

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Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Rise of Agriculture

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