Jorome Solano
History 100
Section 4
How, When and Why Did the first Agricultural Societies Evolve?
Imagine each night as we prepare dinner, we are faced with the task of having to hunt down cows that we must slaughter and butcher or gather the mushrooms for our salads. However, today with 36% of the worlds population devoted to agriculture, we are free to simplify our daily agendas. With the emergence of the Agricultural era, we formed new ideas and techniques to effectively collect resources previously never used in past eras of human history that fueled the development of even more complex societies. Agriculture, the idea of acquiring larger amounts of resources from a fixed amount of land through a systematic approach has greatly improved our ability to extract from our surroundings. The Agricultural era extends itself from 10,000 years ago to just 200 years ago, and is characterized as containing most of our written history. People in todays world enjoy the benefits made available to them from the advancements during the Agricultural Era. In turn we must not fail to see just how it came about in the beginning. As mounting pressures of overpopulation and lack of land were placed for the nomadic people in the time period, it was inevitable that they took on a more sedentary lifestyle, ultimately resulting in the formation of techniques and ideas that we know to be agriculture. This claim is supported by, “ The world population rose from 6 million in 10,000 BP to about 50 million 5 thousand years ago which implies a six to twelve fold increase in 5,000 years.” A new way of life was emerging that would carry long lasting effects for the humanity (Christian 2005, 209).
The Agricultural era occurs during a time of transition. Beginning 18,000 years ago the climate began to get warmer and wetter. The era belonged to a time known as interglacial periods that marked the duration between ice ages, specifically the Holocene interglacial. Furthermore the Agricultural Era succeeds the Paleolithic a time where Monadic lifestyles were common (Ibid, 211) . As the climate changed the ice sheets the covered a massive expanse of land retracted, as a result much of North America and northern Eurasia were exposed. The transformation of the globe was astonishing, regions of the globe such as the Sahara Desert were now experiencing increased humidity transforming it into a land of pools and lakes. Additionally the melting of the ice, raised the oceans and submerged most land bridges extending to other lands such as North America and the cluster of islands found in southeast Asia. With an essentially new environment, people were free to explore new lands never experienced before in the Paleolithic Era. As plants and animals quickly rose to these changes, so must the people that inhabited the globe. These changes had a snowball effect in shaping the course that man must take (Ibid, 212) .
The effect of the abundance of newly uncovered land and warmer climates created an environment with certain variables leading to an inevitable agricultural society. The warmer, wetter conditions proliferated the number of plants especially within regions near water supplies such as lakes and rivers. This in turn attracted prey and predators alike, including nomadic people. The overabundance meant a land capable of sustaining human settlement for a longer period of time, and with this we find that people have taken a step towards sedentism eventually leading to agricultural societies and away from their nomadic lifestyle. The plethora of newly found resources had an effect on the human population throughout the globe. To cope with the rising numbers, people were pressured to inhabit less densely populated regions of the world. With this, people were forced to reside in less adequate grounds such as tundras, this coupled with the hunting of large animals to extinction and the rise in use of smaller packet foods such as seeds and shellfish were all signs of the mounting pressure. However, the global migration was not the ultimate solution to the problem of overpopulation, with time the pressure was being felt by groups throughout the world. Linked to the population increase and the enticement of hospitable conditions were the growing exchanges between people of different regions. As people started staying in one localized area for longer periods of time, trades between neighboring people encouraged connections between the two, an incentive for a sedentary lifestyle.
With signs of sedentism inevitable this paved the path for a new way of living known to be as agriculture (Ibid, 232). However, agriculture is not merely a process that we must take for granted, agriculture has many components linking at this time to create a lifestyle that furthered humanity's need for resources.
As the foundations for agriculture had been laid, new ideas and techniques blossomed to create societies based on channeling nature's resources for our increased gains. A key foundation, sedentism had several effects, families were now able to cope with larger numbers without the worry of being lightweight for purposes of travel. Additionally, people living under a sedentary lifestyle narrowed their knowledge of other terrain, plants and animals not specific to their region, with this they were able narrow and accrue information on that around them. As each generation passed they lost their nomadic skills replaced by a narrowed base of knowledge useful in their region. However, as the abundance of life that had originally enticed the settling into sedentism diminished through the continuous overuse, the pressure was set to raise the ability of the species they did know to yield more resources in order to suffice with their needs. After generations of sedentism, the people had lost their skills or lacked the will to return to a nomadic lifestyle, this marked the pivotal step leading to an agricultural society. As a response those with enough water supply began to plant seeds like wheat in cleared out regions of lands, free of all none essential plants. This process known as domestication increased their efficiency and capacity to gain more resources in return. Domestication is the process of altering the behavior, size and genetics of animals and plants to better suite the needs of the humans around them (Ibid, 235). Over successive generations the domesticates as a response to the pressures set upon them by their human companions and instinct to survive, the captive populations adapt both instinctively and deliberately. In this sense people created new species of animals and plants different from their wild ancestors. Most of the changes were phenotypes or observable as shown in how plants now produced larger clusters of seeds and cows ability to produce more amounts of milk. However, the genes themselves were altered as certain characteristics were chosen to be reproduced, thus variables such as female to male and young to old ratios within the population distinguishes them from their wild counterparts. The changes humans have brought about made it so that the domesticated species were no longer able to survive in the wild, thus dependent to human interaction. This can be seen with corn, with proper care corn can extend for miles but left to grow naturally without and human supervision, within weeks the corn will no doubt die. (Smith 1995, 4) However, not all animals and plants were fit to be domesticated. Nutritional values were considered in choosing certain species to invest upon as a majority of plants and animals are inedible to humans like grass and poisonous animals. By growing out species people can eat and weeding out unfavorable species, people increased their consumption to 90% rather than 0.1%. A clear example of this is shown with domesticated livestocks, as we increasingly became dependent on livestocks for meat, milk and labor. Livestock interacted with domestic plants as well, helping to fertilize and plow the ground while at the same time feeding off of the harvests to become fatter and healthier. (Diamond 1997, 88) Availability along with ability to cope under such environments were also considered. In regions like the fertile crescent species such as wheat demonstrated ease in domestication this contrasted to the Americas where the number of species that were determined to be a good candidates for domestication needed several generations before they met people's needs such as maize (Christian 2005, 225). Through the study of skeletal elements and genetic sequences over time scientists can determine the changes that domestication brought about in the chosen species. Scientists can develop time lines as to the development of these animals that coincided and lived with humans through their traits. Looking at a certain species like the domesticated pig, scientists regard the reduction in size of the teeth as a morphological marker which were acquired through numerous years of domestication. Agricultural societies in Eurasia contained the earliest signs of an agricultural system, however, throughout the world in various regions, agriculture emerged with parallel beginning (Smith 1995, 18-19). Technological advancements of the time stemmed from their works in the fields, as inventions such as saddles and stirrups were made to efficiently handle their resources. In this sense agriculture was becoming deeply rooted in every aspects of their living (Christian 2005, 217).
Human advancements in the field of agriculture have paved the road for further more complex forms of societies. As time progressed these agricultural societies became larger to become villages, cities and eventually entire empires, all supported with the agricultural techniques and ideas built upon in the early agriculture era. The long lasting effects of these times can be felt today as we depend and thrive upon our bountiful resources brought upon with efficient agriculture. However, in today's world the expansion of agriculture is at times opposed due to encroachment on wild surroundings like the Amazon forest. This forces people in modern times to come up with even more efficient ways of accruing resources with the land given, a problem faced by the people in the agricultural era. Additionally people in the modern age are still facing the same pressures placed on people during the Holocene. Today with over 6 billion people worldwide, our successes in resource collection has both helped us and signed our faith. However, as previously shown before, human ingenuity must not be overlooked, as humans are capable of developing new ideas and lifestyles in increasing speed demonstrated in the Agricultural societies 10,000 years ago. The future holds more complex and fascinating ways of living as we battle our need to survive in a seemingly shrinking world.
Work Cited
1.Christian David, An Introduction to Big History (University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2005)
2.Diamond Jared, Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1997)
3.Smith Bruce D., The Emergence of Agriculture (Scientific American Library 1995)