ShmoopTube

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Shmoop around 10,000 years ago the transition to agriculture was well on

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its way it officially started in different places at slightly different [a cave man and woman digging]

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times China West Africa South America and the

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Fertile Crescent in Mesopotamia now that last one is not to be confused with the

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Fertile Crescent role which is an entirely different thing

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agriculture probably got the earliest strongest start in the Fertile crescent [an empty desert land]

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which is some lovely farmland in modern-day Iraq archaeologists have

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found evidence that there were fully domesticated animals and plants in that

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area around 9,000 years ago we wonder if they were as obsessed with their [a man taking a selfie with a cow]

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domesticated animals as we are with ours well they also started grinding and

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storing grain living in settled villages irrigating their fields and making bread [someone squishing a ball of dough]

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what about bread bowls well we sure hope so how else would they have enjoyed

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their clam chowder but most of those changes were the result of new ideas and

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strategies but they came with some important new tools like hose. Hose

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were tools used to move dirt around there just sticks with some flat stone [a hose stuck in some dry land]

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pieces at one end but don't underestimate them they can be used for

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weeding killing digging and zombie killing in a pinch then there were

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[a man swinging an aardvark] simple plows called ards yeah they were basically pointed sticks that were

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dragged over the ground and named by pirates plowing the ground helped turn

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over weeds aerate the soil and create cute little furrows for seeds sickles

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also were also a big deal these look like clone boomerang with one sharp edge they [a furrow flying through a crop field]

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were used by early farmers to harvest green crops by slicing the cops off the

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stalks and by the Grim Reaper to harvest soul and corn then the Reaper loves corn [grim reaper holding corn]

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so agriculture developed slowly and took a lot of work but why do we care

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well farming was the basis for most of human civilization and it changed

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everything from human health to political organization to our

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relationship with nature so you know nothing to write home about as usual [a hand writing a letter to mom]

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some changes were bad and some were good one positive thing was the creation of

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food surpluses when we farmed we were making a big investment in time and

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labor and hoping we'd come out with a whole bunch of food at the end of the [grim reaper stood in a field with two kids]

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season if our bets paid off we ended up with a

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nice surplus of food at the end of the day and our community would be able to [a huge field of crops]

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survive droughts or hurricanes or marauding bands of hungry baboon those

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guys have no manners all these food surplus is also created larger settled

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population more people that hang out together in farm the more food they have [farmhouses and huts on a farm land]

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while hunter-gatherers could only hunt and gather so much before their supplies

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ran out so their populations a stayed on the low side with agriculture we

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suddenly had towns and cities while agriculture also allowed humans to make [a boy holding a sign in a hallway]

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a lot of cool stuff they could use certain plant fibers to make cloth like

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cotton and silk and the hair and hides of their critters to make clothes and

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leather goods so yep that about covers the good stuff what about the bad [children eating plants in a field]

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well weirdly agriculture didn't make humans healthier than they'd been before

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the agricultural diet didn't have much meat in it and sometimes people ate so

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much of the same crops they missed out on important minerals and vitamins and [raining vegetables on a girl]

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there were no GNC's back then hunter-gatherers had a more diverse diet

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even if they were probably eating fewer calories per person yeah the world was

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their GNC basically what we lost a ton of leisure time back in the [father and son hunting in a field]

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hunter-gatherer days too - turns out farming is hard yeah we know shocker

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it takes more hours of labour to grow our own food than the shades of sand

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which meant that the average person's leisure time basically disappeared many [a man driving a tractor through a field]

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scholars Imperius also think that agriculture increased the importance of

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hierarchy in communities since farming produced surpluses of food it was

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possible for some people to eat without contributing to the work and thus the [a giant stand with assorted fruits]

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fat cats were born well some people even think that large agricultural systems

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encourage things like slave labour again farming was a lot of work and for some

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it seemed much more pleasant to force others to do that work than them Oh

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humanity what are we going to do with us an agriculture and hunter-gatherers both [a map of a large land]

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depleted the world's resources but the mobility and low population of

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hunter-gatherers kept the effects of their grabby little hands to a minimum

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agriculture on the other hand supported larger populations of people and led to

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[lots of smoke bellowing through a town] some serious environmental damage this was especially true for soil quality if

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we hang out and grow the same crops in the same field for

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a decade or so we're going to have a dusty problem on our hands we might even [a persons dusty hand in an empty field]

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have a dust bowl like America had during the Great Depression if only it had been

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a bread bowl everyone would have been much less depressed heck if it had been

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a fertile crescent roll folks would have been ecstatic [girl throwing a crescent roll into a crowd of people]

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