Ways of the World Chapter 2: First Farmers


The agricultural revolution was a long time in coming and the occurrence of it was just as much luck as it was evolution and innovation. The combination of things like the ending of the Ice Age and globalization paved the way for farming to happen. Many of the large animals that thrived during the Ice Age were now becoming extinct due to a shift in climate. On the other hand, the domestication of other, smaller animals also greatly contributed to the further development of farming, and through natural selection, the animals better suited to human needs survived and reproduced. It's interesting how the book says that humans not only tamed the animals and settled them, but that the animals also, in a way, tamed humans, as they made gather-hunting obsolete and much more useless. However, this made domesticated animals and humans much more dependent upon each other since the animals were fed and raised by humans while the animals, in turn, fed the humans or were used for other things like wool or milk. Gathering and hunting became useless because people got more from farming than they did from from hunting. Because they got a lot more food, population also greatly increased as humans strove to settle and migrate all over the world. Population actually seemed to explode with the agricultural revolution going from 6 million to 250 million by the common era. Gone with gathering and hunting was the understanding the paleolithic people had of the natural world. It seems like the people of the neolithic era were more out of touch with the environment because they did not depend on it as much as they once did.  I also found it interesting how the agricultural revolution happened generally around the same time period, which was between 12,000 and 4,000 years ago. This makes sense though, considering that the ending of the Ice Age brought with it the end of animals and plants that people used to rely on, thus creating the need to domesticate animals and start farming. The adaptation of crops over time was also very pertinent to the further advancement of civilizations, and it seems rather clever that peoples of the neolithic era were able to conquer such a feat.  Diffusion and migration were also essential as they probably meant contact with other societies bringing trade and further growth which all seems much more advanced than I would have thought the people of the time were capable of. Although most places around the world developed farming around the same time, the environments in which they lived allowed each place to grow and develop separately, effectively creating different types of cultures all around the world. Perhaps the most interesting things was that farming not only led to domestication, population, and globalization, but also a lot of technological advancement. Technologies newly available or more essential included pots, textiles, weaving and newer tools. One of the only negative things that developed, in my opinion, was the rise of inequality through chiefdoms, however, even these were not so bad as they were based off of giving, not of force which is probably how it should be. Overall, the peoples of the neolithic era provided a strong foundation for society today through agriculture and although these people lived thousands of years ago, it is easy to see that their ways of life definitely influenced how we are today.