3.1: The Neolithic Revolution

when where and why did humans first develop agriculture hello and welcome back to what's past is prologue this is the channel where we talk about the story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant and today we are continuing on chapter 2 of volume 1 and the first section of chapter 2 which is called from hunting to tillage in the last video we looked at hunting and today we're going to look at tillage or more specifically we're going to look at the the Neolithic Revolution and we're going to read what Durant has to say on the subject of Agriculture so this is a quote from that section uh by Duran this is what he has to say we shall never discover when men first noted the function of the seed and turned collecting into sewing such Beginnings are the mysteries of history about which we may believe and guess but cannot know it is possible that when men began collecting unplanted grains seeds fell along the way between field and camp and suggested at last the great secret of growth while we can't know for certain when agriculture began since Durant published this uh this first volume in the 1930s we've actually learned quite a lot about the beginnings of Agriculture experimentation with agriculture actually goes way back there's a archaeological site near the Sea of Galilee which suggests that small scale cultivation May date back all the way to 21,000 BC by the time we get to 12,000 BC we can see that the natufian culture that being the people that were living in what is today Israel Palestine were using wild forms of wheat a particular wheat called uh Emma which is a wild form of wheat that was being ground up using grindstones and whilst we don't have evidence at that stage of domestication it's pretty clear that the nans were experimenting with different types of Agriculture the first definite appearance of large scale agriculture was in Northwest Syria and Southern turkey in 10,000 BC this area was called the fertile cresant and by that we're talking about modern day countries that include the likes of Israel uh Palestine Lebanon Syria Southern turkey and Iraq this fertile Cresent is the area where agriculture first began I thought that today we would look not only at when and where agriculture first developed but also the types of plants that were first domesticated the first and most important plant domestication was that of wheat dates are not precise but it's believe that between 10,000 and 8,000 BC two wild forms of wheat called Emma and in corn these are German names were domesticated and adapted for human needs the domesticated versions of Emer and in corn aren't really cultivated So Much Anymore instead we've replace them with two other species of wheat particularly uh common wheat and darham wheat so common wheat and daram wheat are the two most popularly grown species of wheat in the world today wheat plays a pretty Central role in in most of our diets today so when you think about things like bread pasta noodles Pizza crackers biscuits pastries they're all made using wheat bread specifically is probably the most important food in the history of the world at least in the history of the western world its importance is both practical as well as symbolic about 20% of all the calories consumed worldwide come from foods that are made primarily out of wheat when you're thinking about the cultural and symbolic significance of something like bread it's not very difficult to think of examples I mean the most obvious example is probably from The Lord's Prayer everybody even people that aren't particularly religious know the saying give us this day our daily bread the next founder crop that I want to talk about today that was first domesticated in the fertile Cresent is barley now barley was first domesticated around 8,000 BC it is closely related to wheat and rye it is in the the Botanical tribe that is the trasi so wheat Ry and barley are all closely related barley um is used today very commonly in animal feed but historically it was used and I think it's still is used today in the Brewing of beer the first example we have of any uh anywhere in the world of of the Brewing of beer comes from the Sumerians they seem to have been using barley to brew beer around 4,000 BC two more founder crops that were first domesticated in the fertile cresant are lentils and chickpeas they're both legumes and they were domesticated between 8 and 7,000 BC lentils are often used in soups and stews in my opinion lentil soup is delicious an interesting fact about lentils is that they're often mentioned in the bible so if you read 2 Samuel you will uh you will hear about how the the camp of King David the supporters of David brought with them lentils in order to feed everyone this was during absum Rebellion when it comes to chickpeas they were domesticated a little bit later than lentils one of the interesting things about chickpeas is that they are pretty Central to most Middle Eastern Cuisines so if you go to the Middle East and you have hummus or Falafel one of the key ingredients is chickpeas the final crop that I want to mention that was first domesticated in the fertile cresant is flax now flax was domesticated around 7,000 BC and it's used for its fibers and its oil flax fiber is taken from the stem of the plant and is used to make linen fabric the seeds of flax are edible and in fact they're a particularly healthy type of food today we use flax primarily for the creation of Lin seed oil if we leave the fertile Cresent behind and head towards South America we can find another area where agriculture developed independently in the central andian Highlands in the area that is now Southern Peru and Northern Bolivia we find the development of new crops that were native to the Americas here we find the potatoes were first domesticated around 8,000 BC potatoes as everybody knows are starchy root vegetables that are native to the Americas the interesting thing about potatoes is that we don't actually eat the plant potato plants are actually toxic uh we eat the tubers that grow below the ground if you're going to grow potatoes in your garden you have to be rather careful to make sure that your cats and dogs don't actually get at the plants because it can make them quite sick in this same region this Central andian Highlands we find the domestication of another plant and that being quinoa now quinoa was domesticated around about 3,000 BC the interesting thing about quinoa is that it's actually a complete protein the human body cannot make all of the essential amino acids that it needs to survive and so we have to rely on diet in order to find these nine essential amino acids quinoa has all nine and so quinoa is actually very useful food for vegetarians and vegans who don't get enough uh enough of this these essential amino acids from protein because they don't eat meat if we leave South America behind and head north we can find another area where agriculture developed independently that being meso America now mzo America is really made up of places that we think of today as Mexico Guatemala Biz El Salvador like this in in Central America Central Southern America here in meso Amica we find the first domestication of maze otherwise called corn maze was first domesticated in Mexico around 7,000 BC it reached Central America by 5,600 BC and it reached the valleys of the Colombian Andes by 5,000 BC most modern maze is the ancestor of domesticated wild grasses called tiente mazee is a major staple crop used around the world maze is obviously a key ingredient in Mexican food but you can find maze in lots of other places too so most breakfast cereals are made out of maze as is popcorn obviously corn on the cob is Maz maze was very important in terms of Mayan mythology there was actually a maze God in Mayan mythology another crop originating in the Americas was squash squash was first domesticated in Mexico between 8,000 and 6,000 BC squash is one of the crops known as the three sisters in Central and North America squash Ma and beans were planted together and they help each other to grow the ways in which the three sisters crops help each other is like this so first of all the cornstalk will grow and this acts as a Windbreak to protect the other two crops it also acts as a trellis which allows the beans to grow around the cornstalk and they grow up too the beans will then provide atmospheric nitrogen to the soil which helps all three crops grow when the squash is larger the squash provides shade which protects the ground from drying out it keeps the ground nice and moist which provides water for all three crops the stems of the squash are also prickly and this keeps away pests and so each one of these crops actually is mutually beneficial to the other and that's why they're traditionally grown altogether beans and chili peppers were also both first domesticated in meso America beans are obviously legumes and they were first domesticated between 7,000 and 6,000 BC and chili peppers were first domesticated a little bit later around 4,000 BC the interesting thing about Chili Peppers is obviously they're famous for their their spiciness but spiciness is can be measured so when you want to measure the spiciness of a food it's measured on what's known as the Scoville scale the final area that I want to talk about in terms of the independent development of Agriculture is out east and that's in China when and where exactly rice was first domesticated has become something of a controversial topic given Rice's huge symbolic as well as practical significance many nations have claimed that they were the first to domesticate rice these nations include but are not limited to India Nepal Thailand Indonesia Korea Japan among others we may never have a definitive answer as to who domesticated rice first it may be the case that Rice was developed independently at several locations however in so far as there is a consensus that consensus is that Rice was first domesticated in the yans River Basin in China between 11,500 BC and 7,000 BC rice is a Serial grain and a staple food for more than half of the world's population it's been estimated that like wheat 20% of the world's caloric intake comes from Rice that percentage obviously Rises significantly when you're just thinking about Asia today we have thousands of different varieties of rice rice cultivation is very water intensive for at least part of the growing season the rice fields are flooded given the large amounts of water required for irrigation there are concerns about how rice cultivation will adapt to climate change the second crop I want to talk about in relation to China is millet now Millet is a name that's given to a collection of small seeded grasses one of the most common types of millet is fox tail Millet and this is used in porridge it's used to make beer it's most commonly used these these days for animal feed Millet was domesticated between 8,000 and 6,000 BC in the Yellow River Valley Millet in some ways stands in contrast to rice in the sense that it's capable of being grown in areas that are particularly prone to Drought the final crop that I want to talk about in relation to China is obviously tea tea has been cultivated in China for thousands of years but its domestication seems to have started around 3,000 BC Chinese Legend has it that Emperor Shen Nong discovered T in the year 7 37 BC when some tea leaves accidentally fell into a pot of boiling water that he was preparing the emperor found the drink so refreshing that he concluded that tea was a gift from Heaven these four regions the fertile Cresent the Peruvian Andes mesoamerica and China these aren't the only regions where agriculture developed independently these are just four areas that I thought I would mention specifically it's also worth mentioning that agriculture seems to have Arisen independently in New Guinea around 8,000 BC as well as in the indust valley around 7,000 BC at the same sort of time in Egypt 7,000 BC we see the Egyptians cultivating emo wheat and barley and flax um now the interesting thing Egypt is a really interesting case because it's not 100% clear whether they developed these independently or whether they were diffused there from the fertile Cresent it's a really interesting question about exactly how agriculture began in Egypt uh much later agriculture also developed in the Ethiopian Highlands uh this is the region where coffee was first domesticated when it comes to Europe agriculture seems to have arrived first in Anatolia and then gradually spread Westward over the next 2 and a half thousand years I've talked a little bit about cultivation and domestication and I thought it might be useful to try and Define these terms a little bit so when it comes to cultivation what we're talking about here is we till the soil we plant the seeds we're deliberately trying to grow crops in order to get a harvest that's what we do with regards to cultivation but when it comes to domestication this is a similar process but slightly different in the sense that with domestication we are deliberately selecting certain traits within the plants we want the plant to be a certain way and so we select that trait and we hope that that trait will be therefore reproduced in future yields so domestication crucially involves selection another term worth thinking about is the term cultivar so cultivar is a portmanto term for cultivated variety so when you think about crops we have particular cultivated varieties we have chosen certain traits within that crop that we wanted to cultivate so a cultivar is a cultivated variety when we're talking about the Neolithic Revolution the most important trait that we deliberately domesticated for was nonshattering wheat barley rice soybeans sunflower flax all of these plants in their wild forms are shattering they shatter and they disperse their seeds but we deliberately selected non-shattering versions of those plants and that is what we domesticated and we did this because nonshattering plants are easier to harvest and because we wanted to also control the seeds signs of non-shattering in plants is one of the key factors that paleobotanists look for when they're trying to determine exactly when domestication began domestication was a very slow process it took thousands of years and involved an enormous amount of experimentation and um I'm going to read to you now a quote from Durant where he talks about some of this experimentation we picture early man experimenting with a thousand products of the earth to find at much cost to his inward Comfort which of them could be eaten safely mingling these more and more with the fruits and nuts the Flesh and fish which he was accustomed to but always yearning for the booty of the chase we shouldn't think of domestication as common there are somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 plant species and of those we've domesticated about 300 so that's about one in a thousand and even of those there is only about 30 crops of global significance when we ask ourselves the question why did certain regions develop agriculture sooner than others it's important to remember that certain plants are easier to domesticate than others and so the fertile cresant had lots of plants that were easier to domesticate this is one of the major reasons why why that region was first in terms of development of Agriculture people in the Paleolithic had a pre-existing knowledge of plants and animals and so it's quite likely that they knew how to grow crops thousands of years before they fully adopted agriculture you can imagine a scenario where Paleolithic people discover how to grow crops so suppose that they were out uh Gathering wild Bley and they bring it back to the camp and they they decide to bury it underground in order to prevent Rats from getting at it and so after a few months the B grows out and then suddenly they've discovered that if we bury B SE seeds we can regularly grow crops if hunter gatherers in the Paleolithic knew potentially thousands of years before they fully adopted agriculture how to grow crops then it begs the question well why didn't they why didn't they develop agriculture sooner I think this is a pretty simple explanation for this they didn't need to they had a system in hunting a gathering that worked and since it worked why would you change it and Durant writes a little bit about this in this section and I'm going to read another quote to you he says this Not only was the change presumably gradual but it was never complete man merely added a new way of securing food to an old way and for the most part throughout his history he has Preferred the old food to the new if there is right here and Mankind preferred the old ways of securing food then it does raise the question why did we transition to agriculture the first thing that strikes you about this question is the extent to which the beginnings of Agriculture also matches up with the beginnings of the Hol scene so we enter this interglacial period And if you don't know about the intercial periods in the Hol scene I would recommend going back to a previous video I made called the conditions of civilization where I talk about that there but we enter the interglacial period and at the same time agriculture begins so the planet warms and we begin agriculture so it does seem very strange if these two things are not related we have to be very careful of post hoc egop prop tooc fallacies and not engaging in flous reasoning when we think about something causing another thing but it does seem very strange that these two things are absolutely lined up in terms of the in terms of the time frame at the end of the Ice Age the planet warmed up and we had a long stable climate and so uh this this created the ideal conditions for agriculture particularly near near major rivers now given that the agriculture first developed around the fertile cresant and given in this region we have two major rivers in the Euphrates and the tigras it would be a major surprise if these things had nothing to do with each other climate may have been a cause but what are the other theories that have been suggested as to why we adopted agriculture one idea that's been suggested is that individual leaders wanted to demonstrate their power by feasting large numbers of people and that in order to do this they had to develop agriculture in order to grow the food that was necessary to feed these people so it's a form of status now this may seem like a far-fetched idea but how much of the things that go on in the modern world are simply done because somebody is trying to show off another theory is the idea that demographic pressure simply pushed people towards agriculture perhaps there were too many people in one area hunting and Gathering wasn't able to sustain the whole population so some people turned to agriculture this then led to increases in population which created more demand for agriculture and so the the adoption of Agriculture became self-reinforcing one interesting question is with regards to sedentism did people settle down and adopt agriculture or did they adopt Agriculture and then settle down one place we might be able to find an answer to this question is in gcle teepe built in 9,500 BC in the pre potery Neolithic it's become a major archaeological site the excavation of this large site in southern turkey has raised a lot of questions first of all it seems that the site was built before the adoption of agriculture but that raises the question how were the workers who built this site fed the this site is so large that it would have taken hundreds if not thousands of workers to build and they would have all needed to be fed and if hunting and Gathering was insufficient one proposed solution to this problem is that people adopted agriculture in order to feed workers who are building sites on this scale gobee is unlikely to be the beginnings of agriculture in fact it's quite likely that there are other sites on a similar scale that have yet to be discovered right the way across the Middle East but what gcae does prove is that sedentism came before agriculture we settled down then we adopted agriculture when I was reading about gcae one of the things that interested me is I wondered what Durant would have made of it now um the site wasn't the site was identified in the 1960s but it wasn't properly excavated until the 1990s and so by this time Durant had been dead for more than a decade and so he didn't know about the site significance but if he had have done I'm certain he would have written about it in this volume in the first volume to to to the series there's no doubt that a site on this kind of scale wouldn't have interested him and so I think I think he would have covered it extensively but again the book came out in the 193s and the site wasn't excavated until 1994 if we go back to sedentism for a moment it's interesting because I said in the last video that nomadic peoples adopted a high rate of pilicide and infanticide but of course that isn't necessary once you adopt sedentism once you adopt sedentism it isn't difficult to move people because you're not moving large distances in in a sedentary agricultural Community uh children are a huge economic asset and so there's no need to practice infanticide at such a high rate when it comes to the study of the human prehistory some early anthropologists had believed that there was some uh individual genius who had created seemingly out of the blue Agriculture and that from this one individual the knowledge of Agriculture had spread right the way around the world most anthropologists and historians and archaeologists don't really believe in this sort of individual genius Theory anymore partly because we know that agriculture developed in different places at different times independently and partly because U now anthropologists and historians and archaeologists they tend to focus Less on individuals and they focus more on environmental conditions what's interesting to me about this is that it's almost certainly wrong in the sense that there must have been individuals who first discovered agriculture we can't say that they were Geniuses we can't we don't know their names we can't really say very much about them at all um they may have been men there may have been women we don't really know but there would have there would have had to have been multiple individuals at different places in the world would have been somebody in China somebody in the fertile presentant someone in meso America and in the Andes who was the first person to discover agriculture we don't know their significance and we don't know whether anyone paid any attention to them but there would have been individuals who would have pioneered this uh this transition from Hunter Gathering to to agriculture one of the questions that this all relates to is this idea of diffusion was agriculture developed in certain places and then diffused outward well it almost certainly was but it didn't diffuse right the way around the world what we said earlier with regards to Europe is that agriculture seems to have spread to Anatolia and then from there it diffused right the way across Europe although it took thousands of years so diffusion certainly did take place although it didn't play take place uh globally but it would have taken place regionally when we ask ourselves why why did we adopt agriculture one potential answer to that question maybe to to to challenge the premise of the question that is to say perhaps there was no deliberative and conscious choices made in the adoption of Agriculture when we when we ask a question like why we assume that people are making choices perhaps there were no very thought through and deliberative choices being made as we adopted it gradually I've talked about different theories uh in this video but uh it's important to keep in mind that there are cultural and environmental variations right the way around the world and so one theory that works for the fertile present might not work for China and so we have to keep in mind that uh when we come up with these theories they may not be globally applicable another thing to keep in mind is we might not just we might just be in a situation where we don't really definitively know why we transitioned there are multiple theories some of them may be true maybe it's a combination of different theories but um we might have to live with the possibility that we know we don't definitively know why this transition took place when we're thinking about the Neolithic Revolution we may not fully understand why it happened but we can really begin to understand what impact it had and the impact has been enormous the Neolithic Revolution is probably the biggest change in human history now when we're thinking about the Neolithic Revolution we should divide its impact into its short-term impact and then its long-term impact the immediate impact of the Neolithic Revolution was overwhelmingly negative we went from having a diverse diet as hunter gatherers to having a much more limited diet as agriculturalists this more limited diet damaged human health the switch to a high carbohydrate low fiber low protein diet lowered the average height of the population it also damaged teeth it increased child mortality and it lowered life expectancy increasing urbanization led to more interactions between people as well as more interactions with domesticated animals and this led to increases in disease and high levels of infection crop yields were vulnerable to bacteria viruses rodents insects and fungi this led to occasional declines in crop yields and famine the physical activity of farming was also detrimental to the human body moving around as hunter gatherers was much more healthy and so we see a general decline in human health it is for these reasons that we don't see a large scale increase in the population after the adoption of Agriculture it is a gradual increase it takes some 6,000 years after the Neolithic Revolution before we get to widespread large civilizations like the Sumerians however gradually things do improve we become better at farming we diversify our diets via trade we develop new tools and so the longer term impact of the neic revolution is much more positive and Durant talks about this in the volume and I'm going to read another quote slowly it became apparent that agriculture could provide a better and steadier food supply than hunting with that realization man took one of the three steps that led from the Beast to civilization speech Agriculture and writing the long-term impact of the neic revolution has been enormous once we began to diversify our diets the population began its rapid Ascent we went from 4 million prior to the neic revolution to 8 billion people today and Durant talks a little bit about this in a future section I'm going to read what he says here before agriculture the Earth could have supported in the rash estimate of Sir Arthur Keith only some 20 million men and the lives of these were shortened by the mortality of the Chase and War now began that multiplication of mankind which definitely confirmed man's Mastery of the planet agriculture led to more people and as there were more people this increased the possibility of new ideas as farming spread around the world it had to be adapted to different environments and this ushered in a new wave of Technology it was no longer the case that we were limited to light OB objects like the spear or the bow and arrow after we abandoned nomadism we were capable of increasing the amount of possessions that people had new tools were needed for agriculture and this really began and precipitated the enormous technological Revolution that we still see today with exponential technological growth another long-term impact of the neic Revolution was the emergence of distinct classes among people we began to see social hierarchies the need to store grain led to centralized power structures and urbanization agricultural surpluses meant that fewer people had to work on the land and what we began to see is this General shift towards urbanization this is a trend that continues today now we have more than half of the world's population living in urban areas but when you take urbanization combined with the need to store grain we begin to see the emergence of what we think of today as um architecture agricultural surpluses are really the foundation of the field of Economics once you have either surpluses or scarcity these are key factors in terms of pricing uh once you have surpluses though you can allow for division of labor which lets people specialize in different trades these people can produce different varieties of goods which can be traded between groups so we should see surpluses as the foundation not just of the field of Economics but also of the field of trade it's not to say that trade and economics didn't exist before the Neolithic Revolution they did but they just accelerated dramatically after the Neolithic Revolution rules are also needed for the distribution of the Surplus as well you need rules for the inheritance of Farmland so when you think about these rules these are really the beginnings of what we think of today as the field of law ancestor Cults developed quickly after the Neolithic Revolution and you can see ancestor Cults in lots of different parts of the world one of the reasons that this happened is because of the class distinctions which emerged after the Neolithic Revolution so we go from being hunter gatherers with greater degrees of equality to a society where your Authority is often based on your ancestry and so in an environment where ancestry is crucial to your social status it's not really surprising that we see the emergence of of ancestor Cults which reinforced this social hierarchy gray needed to be stored and so after the ne Revolution we begin to see the emergence of pottery now Pottery is very useful in that after 6000 BC you can start to track different cultural changes within a society based on Pottery Styles hunter gatherers had been adapting the land for their own uses for thousands of years but it's really only after the Neolithic Revolution that we start to see the radical transformation of the environment the intensification of land use if you look at a scene like this it may seem like it's a very natural landscape but in fact nothing about this landscape is is natural at all every part of this landscape has been heavily altered and adapted for human use we're so used to seeing Landscapes like this we just assume that this is natural but there's nothing natural about this at all to say that there aren't many places left on Earth that are unspoiled by mankind would be a pejorative statement it's not that transformation of the environment is necessarily a bad thing in fact it's a necessary thing for our civilization to survive it's just that when you look around at the world wherever you seek ugliness it's usually a product of human beings nature itself doesn't really produce a lot of natural ugliness the scale of the impact that human beings have had on the environment is something that people have become very aware of and very interested in in the 21st century and so it's possible that this will be the century where we finally begin to scale back our effect on the environment so social hierarchies inequality division of labor economics architecture law Pottery the transformation of the environment these are just some of the ways in which the Neolithic Revolution has transformed our lives so why did farming communities ultimately displace hunter gatherers well in the end food surpluses paid off it led to larger populations which meant the farming communities were better able to protect their lands from attacks by hunter gatherers and it also meant that as the population grew farming communities spread out gradually displacing hunter gatherers after generations of working on the land Farmers forgot the skills necessary for foraging and hunting in time it must have seemed that farming is how life had always been and always would be some people have questioned whether there really was a Neolithic Revolution this is really a semantic debate about the nature of the word revolution is a gradual Revolution or contradiction in terms the Neolithic Revolution certainly was revolutionary but was it rapid enough to really be considered a revolution so that's the Neolithic Revolution in the next video we're going to talk a little bit about the domestication of animals and then we're going to move on to the next section of the book which is called the foundations of Industry I hope you enjoyed the video and I'll see you next time bye

Channel: What's Past is Prologue

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Keywords: The Story of Civilization, The Story of Civilisation, Will Durant, Ariel Durant, The Durants, 11 Volumes, Our Oriental Heritage, The Life of Greece, Caesar and Christ, The Age of Faith, The Renaissance, The Reformation, The Age of Reason Begins, The Age of Louis XIV, The Age of Voltaire, Rousseau and Revolution, The Age of Napoleon, Booktube, History, Western Canon, Western Civilisation, Grover Gardner, Books on Tape, The Story of Philosophy, Non-Fiction, Heroes of History

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Length: 29min 33sec (1773 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2024