8 Revolutionary Changes from Agriculture

Just as traveling to various locations throughout the year set the stage for everything about early peoples’ culture, intentionally planting seeds meant people had to stay put to care for them. After discovering discarded seeds sprouted in rubbish piles, ancestral farmers soon realized crops needed water and protection from animals and other tribes. This fundamental shift to a stationary existence had a cascading impact on every facet of human life in every corner of the planet.

Now that people were staying put to care for their crops, they put more time into building structures and planning city layouts like roads and markets as well as marking off property using fences. Putting this much effort into permeance shifted people’s mindsets about land to ownership and thus nomadic people became very territorial about the food they were growing and cities they had built.

While members within tribes of the earliest people would have excelled at and helped each other with different things (ie. weaving shoes or tanning hides), all people participated in most tasks to some extent. But as cities grew, there were simply too many tasks to everyone to participate in equally. So people began focusing on their specialties and “trading” time or goods with other members for mutual survival.

For example, a farmer out tending field daily didn’t have time to mend their roof, make new shoes, patrol the city wall at night and bake bread every day. So the farmer contributed grain to the city stock piles to pay the night guards, traded grain with the baker for fresh loaves and paid the roofer in grain to repair their roof after a storm. Children learned the trades of their families and were super proficient by teen years to begin their careers too!

Keeping track all the names in ballooning populations was difficult, so secondary names were added that often denoted occupations (ie. Jim Baker, Jim Brewer, Jim Farmer, etc), locations (Jim Hill, Jim Lake) or characteristics (Jim Brown, Jim Little). What does your last name mean?

While one of the risks of nomadic life was starvation when migration times don’t line up with nature’s harvest, this lifestyle does ensure that people eat a fresh seasonal varied diet with lots of different fruits, vegetables, proteins and fats throughout the year.

Early agriculture, on the other hand, focused on a couple of staple crops and perhaps an animal or two for protein. Grains like wheat, rice or oats could be harvested and kept for a couple of years, then cooked or ground into flour to make breads daily. This limitation of food variety meant that people were fed, but not fully nourished with all of the nutrients, vitamins and minerals that a nomadic diet provided. What domestic foods did your ancestors eat?

So now that everyone has a job, consistent food and other people to trade tasks with, there’s a lot more free time. Cities, homes and entertainment become more complex as people have time to tinker. Architecture, arts and entertainment become their own trades as people hyperspecialize in painting, sculpture and music with improved tools and shared techniques.

Staying put plus innovation means more stuff. None of us would carry a full dining table and chairs around if we moved on foot 8 times a year, but it makes perfect sense to put one in a permanent house. The same can be said for dishes, toys, game pieces, tools and decorations. And, now that houses were full of lots of things that people had to work hard to trade for, they needed to protect them when they were away from home. So locks were invented to keep people from walking off with hard earned wares.

With less moving around and lots of jobs to do, populations in these agricultural cities boomed. But the anonymity of large populations provides cover for people to violate other people and their property. So as every world civilization grew into agricultural society, the need for leaders to make decisions and laws to guide behavior arose. From the pharaohs of Egypt and Caesars of Rome to the Rulers of the Maya and Emperors of China, most rulers were also heads of religions as a way to provide authority and make sense natural phenomena.

Hieroglyphs (3500-400BCE)

Ancient Egyptians are known for this pictorial language with a standard character for EVERY THING in their world. With somewhere between 500-5000 symbols depending on the time period, only elite scribes could fully communicate with it. Written in columns on bumpy brittle papyrus (check out how it’s made) made from tall Nile river grasses, many of the scrolls have crumbled away in time. Those etched in stone monuments tell us more about this one culture than we know about all of the ancient nomads combined.

Cuneiform (3100 – 100BCE)

Originally created for accounting of trade in ancient Mesopotamia, it could be learned by anyone in just a couple of minutes. The maximum number of 60 explains why we still count time in this quantity. Over time, characters were added for other words until it became an overwhelming 2000 characters at its maximum as well. Pressed into clay with flat sticks, cuneiform tablets could be reused regularly while wet, dried for short term keeping or fired into permeance giving us glimpses into ancient Babylon.

What was the BEST change to human civilization from agriculture?

What was the WORST change to human civilization from agriculture?

Let’s learn what plants need to grow food…