How in the sweet name of everything holy did we ever come to live in a world where such a thing can even be created? And how is it possible that those 490 calories can be served to me for—assuming I make the federal minimum wage here in the United States— And most importantly, should I be delighted or alarmed to live in this strange world of relative abundance? Well, this may not strictly be history, since we don’t have much of a written record, but thanks to archaeology and paleobiology, we do have some idea of the prehistoric world. let’s go to the thought bubble. 15,000 years ago, humans were foragers and hunters. Foraging meant gathering fruits, nuts, and also wild grains and grasses. Hunting allowed for a protein-rich diet, so long as you could find something with meat to kill. By far the best hunting gig in the prehistoric world was fishing, which is one of the reasons that, if you look at the history of people populating the planet, we tended to run for the coasts and stay there. Marine life was A. abundant, and B. relatively unlikely to eat you. While we tend to think that the lives of foragers (hunter/gatherers) was pretty bad, fossil evidence suggests that they actually had it pretty good. Their bones and teeth are healthier than those of agriculturalists, and anthropologists who have studied the remaining forager peoples have noted that they actually work a lot fewer hours than the rest of us, and spend more time on art, music, storytelling—and It’s important to note that cultivation of crops seems to have arisen independently over the course of millennia in a number of places, from Africa to China to the Americas. Using crops that naturally grew nearby—rice in Southeast Asia, maize in Mexico, potatoes in the Andes, wheat in the fertile crescent, yams in West Africa —people around the world began to abandon their foraging for agriculture. Since so many communities made this choice independently, it must have been a good choice, right, even though it meant less music and ? Thanks, Thought Bubble. Okay, to answer that question, let’s first take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of agrictulture. Advantage: Controllable food supply. You might have droughts or floods but if you’re growing the crops and breeding them to be healthier and heartier, you get a bit more say in whether you starve.
By the way, over the next 40 weeks, you will frequently hear generalizations followed by the caveat “Unless you are the Mongols.” But one of the main reasons herding only caught on in certain parts of the world is that there aren’t that many animals that really lend themselves to domestication: Like, you have sheep goats cattle pigs horses camels donkeys reindeer water buffalo yaks all of which have something in common: They aren’t native to the Americas. Llamas are the only halfway useful herding animals native to the Americas, and lots of animals just don’t work for domestication. Hippos are large and provide lots of meat, and they mostly eat plants, but they also like to kill us, which makes them bad for herding. Zebras are too ornery; grizzlies’s wild hearts can’t be broken; elephants are too slow to breed. Which reminds me…it’s time for the open letter. An Open Letter to Elephants: Hey, Elephants. You’re so cute and smart and awesome; why you gotta be pregnant for 22 months? That’s crazy! And then you only have one kid! If you were more like cows, you might have taken us over by now. Like, here is the graph of cow population and here is the graph of cow population. Elephants, if you’d just inserted yourself into human life the way cows did, you could have used your intelligence and power to form secret societies conspiring against the humans and then you could have risen up and destroyed us and made an awesome elephant world with elephant cars and elephant planes, but nooooo you’ve gotta have 22-month pregnancies with one offspring and tusks that people want to kill you for. It’s so depressing. Best wishes, John Right so but back to why the Agricultural Revolution occurred. We don’t have records, but historians love to make guesses: Maybe population pressure necessitated agriculture even though it was more work, or abundance gave people leisure time to experiment with domestication or planting originated as a fertility right or—as some historians have argued—people needed to domesticate grains in order to produce more alcohol. Darwin, like most 19th century scientists, believed agriculture was an accident, saying: