For 10,000 generations the Neolithic Village environment was good enough. Mankind lived in it and mankind’s thinking became more and more adapted to it.
Then, 500 generations ago, some of the humans who had been living the Neolithic Village lifestyle found a better way to do things. They entered the Agricultural Age.
Developing agriculture is not a single invention. It’s a whole bunch of innovations that, in the right environment, can do more for humanity than hunting-gathering can.
It’s important to stress in the right environment. At first, agriculture worked better in only a handful of places, such as the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East and the Indus River valley in Pakistan. But where it did work better it was steadily improved, and as it improved the number of places it worked better grew and grew.
The spread of agriculture had two major consequences for humanity.
First, in the eyes of the adapters, it made human life a lot better. Those who chose not to adapt, disagreed. More on that later.
Second, to do agriculture right required different thinking than doing hunter-gathering right. Agriculture pushes human thinking, and the human gene pool, in different ways than hunting and gathering does.
Update: Yangbo Du, a fellow MIT alumnus, pointed out this 21 Jul 11 Economist article, The plough and the now, which cites a study by Alberto Alesina and Nathan Nunn of Harvard University and Paola Giuliano of the University of California, Los Angeles, which finds striking evidence that ancient agricultural techniques have very long-lasting effects [on human thinking about gender roles]. (Here's the .pdf of the paper at http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/paola.giuliano/NBER_WP17098.pdf.)
Let’s look at those differences.
Humans who farm tend to farm the same fields over much of their lifetime. The semi-nomadic lifestyle of hunting and gathering gave way to spending a lifetime within a few miles of one’s birthplace.
The surprise consequence of sedentary lifestyle was the acquisition of more tools. (In this usage, “tools” is a very general concept, meaning things as diverse as food, implements, buildings, and more.) Humans no longer had to carry all their tools from place to place. Lots of tools, lots more kinds of tools, and the concept of ownership, all came from this. Having more tools was a big change.
Agriculture works better when large groups of people can be mustered to do things such as clear fields, harvest, and construct infrastructure, such as granaries and irrigation works. One of the big challenges for human thinking was inventing ways to make larger groups work well.
Closely related to forming larger groups was the creation and acceptance of the concept of more privileged and less privileged people in the group.
This one is big. With bigger groups and more tools, the need to do complex accounting-type activities became more and more important. A versatile memory improver was desperately needed. Writing started as an accounting assistant and grew from there.
Dogs were domesticated by hunter-gatherers. Agriculturists lengthened the domestication list enormously.
Each of these, and many others, was a technological breakthrough. Each was first implemented to solve an existing commodity problem that was being handled in a clumsy way by hunter-gatherer technology. Then each went on to have numerous surprise applications that became much more interesting and influential on human lifestyle.
Each of these calls for a different mix of skills than hunter-gatherers use, and therefore a new style of thinking.
This means that for up to five hundred generations, the gene pool has been pushed in a dramatically different direction than it is when living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Let’s talk next in detail about each of these changes, the surprises they brought, and how they have pushed the gene pool.
In hunter-gatherer times, humans moved around regularly. This kept the human community light on its toes. One question that haunted every decision to acquire new goods was, “Am I ready to carry this with me to the next place we live?”
With farming, that motion stopped. The range of goods that a family found it valuable to acquire grew. The range of tools and structures that humans could afford to build and keep grew enormously.
It was in this sedentary setting that the notion of property ownership grew. If you are constantly moving around, saying you own more property than you can personally carry is a crazy statement—if the community carries it, the community owns it. If you’re going to spend most of your life in a specific place, your sense of property is going to expand.
One of the hardest innovations for humans has been enlarging the size of workable groups. In Neolithic Village, the largest group that had to work together on a day-to-day basis was the extended family. There were family insiders and there were outsiders. Outsiders could be dealt with fairly, but they could also be betrayed without causing much recrimination within the family group.
In a farm setting, larger groups are valuable for all sorts of activities such as farming, building, and fighting.
Humans found two basic solutions to building larger groups. One was inventing hierarchy—the concept that there are leaders and there are followers, and they are not treated the same.
The second solution was inventing virtual leaders—leaders who would be followed even if they weren’t present. This allowed two or more local leaders to cooperate in circumstances where they would otherwise first have a dominance contest. It also let them work together and not feel bad about not betraying each other—they wouldn’t be jeered as “suckers” by fellow community members for not taking advantage of a betraying situation.
One of the surprise applications of learning how to live in larger groups was that of building cities. Others were making formal governments and formal religious organizations.
Yet another surprise application was further specialization of labor. It wasn’t necessary for every human to know how to do every human activity well, not even within their gender group.
In Neolithic Village there is little to own because everything the village owns gets packed up and moved regularly. And as I said above, much of that little tends to be owned communally—he or she who needs it, uses it
As humans become sedentary and develop hierarchy to manage larger groupings, the community’s stock of goods grows dramatically and ownership becomes uneven. There are leaders who own more and followers who own less.
This means there is a big change in thinking about both ownership and access to resources. Poachers hunting in the King’s Forest are an example of Neolithic Village ownership ideas conflicting with Agriculture Age ownership ideas.
As groups get larger and more goods are owned, keeping track of who owns what gets more and more important. As strong language skill came into being the gene pool was pushed for better human memory skills. There was improvement, but the change that was happening wasn’t nearly fast enough. As a result, in Neolithic Village times people searched for memory enhancers. Primary among these were songs and poems. These used rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and other structures to enhance memory reliability. When the aboriginal people of Australia went on “walkabouts”, they walked “song lines” to see if they remembered tribal songs properly, using geography as a memory aid.
Writing systems were a huge memory-enhancing breakthrough. The first writing systems were used for business—things such as keeping track of who paid taxes and who paid marriage dowries.
The surprise uses of writing are mind-boggling, simply mind-boggling.
Here are some ways writing has changed human thinking.
The changes writing has made to the human lifestyle are almost as wide reaching as those that strong language skill has made.
Thanks to agriculture, humans now have mutually beneficial relations with thousands of kinds of plants and animals. And the same kinds of plants and animals are around for most of a human’s lifetime, not an ever-changing chaotic mix as the village moves from place to place and season to season. As a result human feelings toward plants and animals have changed—they are looked upon much more cooperatively. This change is reflected in the mixed feelings civilized humans have about hunting.
Human dietary experience changes. There is more regularity in what is eaten. There are still differences from season to season, but over the years, each season will bring a similar mix of foods.
These are some of the changes between Neolithic Village lifestyle and thinking and Agriculture Age lifestyle and thinking.
As you can see, the changes are big ones and the transition has not been quick or easy for humans. After agricultural systems were first invented, it took thousands of years for the majority of humans to embrace agricultural living as a lifestyle.
Many humans chose not to and this became a source of both conflict and legend. Hunter-gatherer tribes saw that agriculturists had lots of stuff and they were outsiders. So for millennia, farmers have had to protect themselves diligently from hunter-gatherer raiding tribes.
Farming is easiest in flat land, so it became easy to classify farm people as valley people and hunter-gatherer people as hill people. This strife between lifestyles is now the stuff of legend.
It goes even further. Those who are born with strong hunter-gatherer instincts don’t adapt well to farming life. If they try to live it anyway, other members of their community aptly label such people as “born losers”.
The Agricultural Age was the transition that began mankind’s Historic Age. It was a huge revolution in human thinking and for up to five hundred generations it has been pushing the gene pool to produce good farmer-lifestyle thinkers.
Adapting to hierarchy and virtual leadership, supporting formal government and class structures, and learning writing have been more successful where agriculture has become the primary lifestyle.
Concepts such as betraying those outside the family, men fighting over women, and respecting old people for their knowledge have been less successful in agricultural lifestyles but they certainly haven’t disappeared entirely.
The Agricultural Age rocked humanity but it wasn’t the last rock. Let’s now talk about the next big rock: The Industrial Age.