A Brief History of Agriculture.
People gotta Eat.
Around 200,000 years ago our current branch of hominids showed up on the scene.
That’s us: Homo Sapiens.
We weren’t the only hominids, but we had some special mutations that made us smart and curious and dangerous.
We were omnivores. That means we ate anything and everything we could get our hands on. We were adaptable. We ate differently as we expanded into different climates and ecosystems. Some of us might survive on mollusks on the seashore, while others might find themselves scavenging dead animals and bugs in the desert.
Not just animals. We ate a lot of plants too. We figured out which plants ripened when. Where the berries would be available what time of year. We ate the nuts, the seeds and the plants with big roots. We figured out how to use grinding and fire to break down these plants’ defenses and make them edible and more efficient. We maximized calories.
Archeology has found these seeds of the plants we ate, charred from our fires, from 100,000+ years ago.
This was in the middle of the last ice age.
That’s right. People think about ice ages like they think about the Grand Canyon; they know it’s there and it’s big, but don’t really appreciate it until they’re looking over the edge.
While we were munching berries and bugs in southern Europe most of the northern and southern hemispheres were under giant ice sheets. In fact, the last Glacial Maximum was only 22,000 years ago. Meaning the maximum coverage of glaciers. The oceans were 400 feet lower, the global temperatures were around 11 degrees cooler, the world was very dry because so much water was locked up in ice.
We were there, eating whatever we could find.
Since the oceans were much lower and the southern regions close to the equator were much cooler, that left a lot of open land for these paleolithic people to hunt and gather on. During these glacial maxima there was a land called Doggerland which connected the Netherlands and Jutland to England. Basically England was an isthmus of Europe and the early hunter gatherers could walk over the channel to the British Isles.
Likewise, there was the bridge from Siberia to North America across the Bering Sea that allowed Siberian hunter gatherers to walk all the way down to the tip of Chile. Although there is ever emerging evidence of multiple population routes, the point is that these we early ultra-runners spread out across the world.
Then we caught a break. The glaciers quickly receded.
Around 10,000 years ago, probably in the fertile crescent of what is now Israel, Jordan and bits of other countries, some tired homo sapiens said, “Hey, how about instead of chasing these dang wild pigs and goats and cows around the country, why don’t we just grab a couple and keep them around?”
No more running about the world. Now we could just hang out by the fire and eat some stored animals instead. Domestication.
Around the same time some other bright chappie said, “Hey, you know these seeds we’re collecting and eating? How about we plant some so we have a ready source next year?”
And just like that we we’re farming. And it changed everything. It changed us. It changed the animals we lived with. It changed pests and diseases we had. It changed, or rather enabled our culture and society.
It wasn’t all good for us.
Those hunter gatherers had some issues with access to quality health care, but in general they were taller and lived longer than the farmers who came after them. But, the farmers won out. What we see in the DNA is that the Farmers didn’t wholesale replace the hunter gatherers. The farmers absorbed them. The technology of farming absorbed the hunter gatherers.
I’m sure there was some old hunter gatherer guy, we’ll call him ‘Og!’, who bemoaned that in his day you didn’t milk the cow. In his day you chased the cow down and hit it with a pointy stick! That’s what real men did! None of this namby-pamby farming life stuff! That’s not what the gods wanted.
Speaking of cows, they weren’t so cute back in the day. The wild Aurochs were more like modern yaks or buffalo. They weighed a ton or more and stood 6 foot tall and had 3 foot horns. These are the big guys that you see on the cave paintings. It is said that the last wild Aurochs were in a Polish forest until the 1620’s. They used to roam all over Europe, India, Africa and Asia. They are very much part of our story.
Until some bright hunter gatherer said, “Hey let’s take one of these home as a pet.” The Aurochs DNA still exists inside our current cattle. As with all our domesticated animals and plants they have been changed by us into forms that provide the outcomes we are interested in. More flesh, fatter fruits and sweeter melons.
Over the last 10,000 years we have overtly selected the species and traits we like. You might say that’s a bad deal for those domesticated plants and animals, but it is symbiotic. Who can look at the 100’s of thousands of acres of corn across the Midwest and not wonder ‘who domesticated whom?’ It’s been a successful bargain for them.
They have changed us as well. For example, around 5,000 years ago we developed a mutation that allows many of us to digest dairy products. And there are other examples. It’s still evolution. It’s a form of human-directed evolution.
This shift into a farming life also directed the evolution of other species. Our friends the house mouse and the rat came along for the ride. Lots of lovely infectious disease made the leap from animals into a ready pool of densely settled humans. Farming enabled cities and empires but also plagues and extinctions.
Once those first seeds were scattered in the fertile crescent things accelerated. We figured out that the seeds grew better if we plowed the soil and we build irrigation canals to control the rivers. Now that we could farm up more than enough food, we had extra people available to do other things, like fight wars and build pyramids. Farming took over the world and enabled a good population growth for the next couple thousand years.
The next big thing, really quite recently, was a device called the Mould Board Plow that the Europeans came up with in the 1700’s which enabled a big jump in productivity. Then the tractors and combines came in the early part of the 20th century. Finally, after WWII there was another big jump in productivity with modern farming techniques, fertilizer, pesticides and gene tweaking.
What would Og! have thought? Sitting by his cave mouth, tending the fire, chewing the marrow out of auroch bones with greasy hands and stained teeth. What would he have thought? Maybe he would have thought about all the same things – His mate, his children the tribe across the river and the wandering lions.
The big impact of all this productivity is that we can produce something like 300% more food with substantially less homo sapiens working on it. Those homo sapiens that are freed up can jaunt off to the big city and become mascara salesmen or fry cooks.
The challenge we face is that we have hit the wall in terms of not only productivity but also in terms of sustainability. We can produce enough food, but it comes at a cost to the environment and the species that we have domesticated.
Now you might say, ‘no problem, we’ll just go back to hunting and gathering, like in the good old days!’ The fly in the oatmeal there is that the world could support maybe 100 million hunter gatherers and we’ve got 7.8 billion homo sapiens to feed today globally. Interestingly, it took us 200,000 years to get to a billion people and only 200 years to get to 7.8 billion.
Agriculture has made us who we are.
I was looking for a quote that I remember struck me to close this piece out.
It’s funny you have these moments and memories that stick with you where you remember, or I suppose, imagine the exact place and time. I was in my 20’s. Flying somewhere internationally. Reading some throw away paperback version of either Camus’ “The Stranger’ or ‘Oedipus’ Rex by Sophocles, I can’t remember which, but it sticks in my memory that it was one of those.
I remember the flight was nearing its end and I would soon have to bustle off the plane with the rest of the herd. I was rushing to finish the final pages. I was a restless soul in my 20’s. I thought there should be answers to all of life’s big questions. Straight forward, easy answers. I suppose we all are restless and searching in our youth.
In the narrative I was reading the author finally finishes all his travels and troubles and retires to his simple home. He finds that beyond all the striving and chaos of life there is a simple truth. That truth is to ‘till your garden’.
Till your garden.
I can’t find that quote. So, I’ll leave you with another by the famous author and philosopher Anonymous.
“Gardening is cheaper than therapy and you get tomatoes.”