The best and worst thing to ever happen to humanity
The decision to plant food in the ground and wait for it to grow until it produced edible food was the trigger that allowed all civilization after it to follow. Skyscrapers, electricity, the combustion engine and airplanes are a result of agriculture. But so are wars, genocides and serial killers and even malnutrition.
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One of the most important foundations upon which the civilization we live on sits. As a kid I never gave much thought to the importance of agriculture. I knew at a basic level that farms provided me with food, but the extent to which it is vital to the human world functioning was never made clear to me. If a button existed that could eradicate agriculture from the face of the earth, humanity would instantly descend into a world war and over 99% of humans would be dead within a week. Every technological innovation from steam and nuclear power, to electricity and structural engineering would be rendered useless in a matter of minutes. Every human would instantly resort to their primal instinctual selves and it would be a biggest bloodbath the world has ever known.
But is agriculture obvious? If you were a hunter gatherer living 10,000 years ago in the modern day middle east would you have just come to the realization one day “well shit, what the fuck am I doing going out to search for my food everyday with no guarantee that I will be successful, when I can just plant seeds of some edible plants right here and in a few dozen days I will have tons of food right here at my disposal!”
Yeah… no.
Obviously I don’t know for sure, I wasn’t around back then, but I am fairly certain it did not go down like that. Agriculture wasn’t obvious. To plant food in the ground, means to give up a nomadic lifestyle. You would suddenly be bound to one geographical location making it more difficult to move yourself due to weather or wild animal problems. It restricted the variety of food you consumed which caused a weaker immune system leading to greater risk of disease. It also required more work than hunting gathering. The typical hunter gatherer would spend 6-8 hours a day searching for food, and the typical early agriculturalist would spend 12+ back breaking hours a day to produce only a small surplus of food needed to feed themselves. So why did anyone farm at all?