The Impact of the Agricultural Revolution
While the Agricultural Revolution came at a high price, particularly for the farmers who actually tilled the fields for thousands of years, there is no doubt that its impact on our species – although not on the rest of the planet – has been highly beneficial. By the evolutionary criterion of success – measured by a species’ survival and reproduction – we have been extremely successful in the past 10,000 years. Our population went from about 5 million worldwide at the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution, to over 7 billion today.
That success is based almost entirely on the Agricultural Revolution and our distant ancestors’ transition from hunting and gathering to settled farming. That made an increasingly larger population possible, as agricultural food production led to more intense extraction of calories from the land. That supported denser populations, which in turn supported larger sedentary communities.
However, the growth in population was not immediate, as the potential growth was offset for quite some time by an increase in warfare and diseases. Nonetheless, as succeeding generations of humans developed stronger resistance to diseases, the gap between births and deaths gradually began to widen. And as our ancestors inched their way towards governments that reduced violence within communities – cumulatively deadlier than wars – the population growth sped up even further.
Surplus food allowed for the emergence of social elites – warrior aristocrats and priests. They came to dominate their communities, seized a lion’s share of the resources, monopolized decision making, and laid the foundations for government and religion. The surplus food also allowed for the emergence of specialists, such as potters, toolmakers, and builders, who were able to subsist by trading their skills and services for the food produced by farmers. That in turn led to a technological revolution – starting with simple pottery and gradually accumulating until we arrive at our present breakneck pace of technological and scientific advances. For good and ill, where we are today, and where we are headed, would not have been possible without the Agricultural Revolution, history’s greatest revolution.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources & Further Reading
Christian, David – Origin Story: A Big History of Everything (2018)
Diamond, Jared – Guns, Germs, and Steel (2005)
Discover Magazine, May 1987 – The Worst Mistake In the History of the Human Race
Gonick, Larry – The Cartoon History of the Universe (1990)
Harari, Yuval Noah – Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015)
Harari, Yuval Noah – Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2017)
National Geographic Genographic Project – The Development of Agriculture: The Farming Revolution