{"id":2969,"date":"2019-11-13T20:20:17","date_gmt":"2019-11-14T00:20:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=2969"},"modified":"2022-03-09T16:55:52","modified_gmt":"2022-03-09T20:55:52","slug":"what-was-the-agricultural-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/what-was-the-agricultural-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"What Was the Agricultural Revolution? Was It Good for Us?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What was the Agricultural Revolution<\/a>? How did it affect homo sapiens, and how did it affect the rest of the animal kingdom?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Agricultural Revolution was the moment in human history, between 9500 and 8500 BC, when Sapiens started shifting from forager lifestyles to a life revolving around agriculture. The revolution started independently in China, the Middle East, and Central America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’ll cover the causes of the Agricultural Revolution and how it impacted both humans and animals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

What Was the Agricultural Revolution?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The second major upheaval of the Sapiens\u2019 way of life was the Agricultural Revolution. We’ll chart the advent of farming while also introducing the idea that success isn\u2019t the same thing as happiness<\/strong>.
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Sometimes, our evolutionary success is at odds with our well-being and happiness<\/a>. Evolutionary success is pretty easy to judge and quantify\u2014the more individuals of your species that survive, and the more copies of your DNA in existence, the more successful you are. Happiness, on the other hand, is harder to quantify.
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Sapiens isn\u2019t the only species that matters<\/strong>. As we examine their history, we should also look at how the success of Sapiens affected other species.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Success (and Suffering) of People During the Agricultural Revolution<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

What was the Agricultural Revolution? About 10,000 years ago, between 9500 and 8500 BC, Sapiens started shifting from forager lifestyles to a life revolving around agriculture. This was the Agricultural Revolution. It was so successful for our species that we went from 5-8 million foragers in 10,000 BC to 250 million farmers by the first century AD.
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This gradual movement of the farming revolution started independently in the Middle East, China, and Central America, areas that had plants and animals, like wheat and sheep, that were easy to domesticate. The movement had a monumental impact on not only the way we live today but on our diet. 90% of the calories in the modern diet comes from plants domesticated by our ancestors, like wheat, rice, and potatoes.
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The Agricultural Revolution: Progress?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Many people have suggested that the Agricultural Revolution was the product of a species that was becoming more intelligent, but there\u2019s no evidence of this. The move toward farming isn\u2019t necessarily common sense<\/a>.
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For example, agriculture was much harder than foraging<\/a> and hunting for food, and left farmers more vulnerable to disease and hunger. Farmers also had a less nutritious diet than foragers due to its lack of variety. 
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Agriculture also led to promotion of disease. All the extra food they grew resulted in a population boom<\/a>. More people meant closer living quarters, leading to disease epidemics. Child mortality soared. 
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Most of the agricultural surplus went to the elite, and they probably did live better lives than their ancestors. But the Agricultural Revolution didn\u2019t translate to a better life for most individuals.<\/strong>
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We won the game of evolution, which judges our success based on how many of us there are on the planet, but we lost individually. In other words, the Agricultural Revolution allowed more people to survive, but the conditions under which each individual lived were worse.
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The Success of Wheat<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Wheat is one of the most successful plants ever. About 870,000 square miles of the earth are covered by wheat. This is the area of Britain, multiplied by 10.
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We like to think we\u2019re the masters of our land, and everything that grows on it, but humans didn\u2019t domesticate wheat. Wheat domesticated humans.<\/strong>
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