Crash Course Agricultural Revolution transcript

15 000 years ago humans were foragers and hunters foraging meant gathering fruits nuts also wild grains and grasses hunting allowed for a more protein-rich diet so long as you could find something with meat to kill by far the best hunting gig in the prehistoric world incidentally was fishing which is one of the reasons that if you look at the history of people populating the planet we tended to run for the shore and then stay there marine life was a abundant and b relatively unlikely to eat you while we tend to think that the lives of foragers were nasty brutish and short fossil evidence suggests that they actually had it pretty good their bones and teeth are healthier than those of agriculturalists and anthropologists who've studied the remaining forager peoples have noted that they actually spend a lot fewer hours working than the rest of us and they spend more time on art music and storytelling it's worth noting that cultivation of crops seems to have arisen independently over the course of millennia in a number of places from africa to china to the americas using crops that naturally grew nearby rice and southeast asia maize and mexico potatoes and the andes wheat in the fertile crescent yams in west africa people around the world began to abandon their foraging for agriculture and since so many communities made this choice independently it must have been a good choice right even though it meant less music and scootily pooping thanks daunt bubble all right to answer that question let's take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of agriculture advantage controllable food supply you might have droughts or floods but if you're growing the crops and breeding them to be hardier you have a better chance of not starving disadvantage in order to keep feeding people as the population grows you have to radically change the environment of the planet advantage especially if you grow grain you can create a food surplus which makes cities possible and also the specialization of labor like in the days before agriculture everybody's job was foraging and it took about a thousand calories of work to create a thousand calories of food and it was impossible to create large population centers but if you have a surplus agriculture can support people not directly involved in the production of food like for instance trades people who can devote their lives to better farming equipment which in turn makes it easier to produce more food more efficiently which in time makes it possible for a corporation to turn a profit on this 99-cent double cheeseburger was delicious by the way it was absolutely terrible and it's very cold and i wish that i had not eaten it i mean can we just compare what i was promised to what i was delivered yeah thank you yeah this is not that some would say that large and complex agricultural communities that can support cities and eventually inexpensive meat sandwiches are not necessarily beneficial to the planet or even to its human inhabitants although that's a bit of a tough argument to make coming to you as i am in a series of ones and zeros advantage agriculture can be practiced all over the world although in some cases it takes extensive manipulation of the environment like you know irrigation controlled flooding terracing that kind of thing disadvantage farming is hard so hard in fact that one is tempted to claim ownership over other humans and then have them till the land on your behalf which is the kind of non-ideal social order that tends to be associated with agricultural communities so why did agriculture happen wait i haven't talked about herders herders man always getting the short end of the stick herding is a really good and interesting alternative to foraging and agriculture you domesticate some animals and then you take them on the road with you the advantages of hurting are obvious first you get to be a cowboy also animals provide meat and milk but they also help out with shelter because they can provide wool and leather the downside is that you have to move around a lot because your herd always needs new grass which makes it hard to build cities unless you are the mongols but anyway one of the main reasons herding only caught on in certain parts of the world is that there aren't that many animals that lend themselves to domestication like you have sheep goats cattle pigs horses camels donkeys reindeer water buffalo yaks all of which have something in common they aren't native to the americas the only halfway useful herding animal native to the americas is the llama no not that llama two l's yes that llama most animals just don't work for domestication like hippos are large which means they provide lots of meat but unfortunately they like to eat people zebras are too ornery grizzlies have wild hearts that can't be broken elephants are awesome but they take way too long to breed right but back to the agricultural revolution and why it occurred historians don't know for sure of course because there are no written records but they love to make guesses maybe population pressure necessitated agriculture even though it was more work or abundance gave people leisure to experiment with domestication or planting originated as a fertility right or as some historians have argued people needed to domesticate grains in order to produce more alcohol maybe the best theory is that there wasn't really an agricultural revolution at all but that agriculture came out of an evolutionary desire to eat more like early hunter-gatherers knew that seeds germinate when planted and when you find something that makes food you want to do more of it unless it's just food then you want to do less of it a caramel spirit out oh that's much better so early farmers would find the most accessible forms of wheat and plant them and experiment with them not because they were trying to start an agricultural revolution because they were like you know what would be awesome more food like on this topic we have evidence that more than 13 000 years ago humans in southern greece were domesticating snails in the front cave there's a huge pile of snail shells most of them are larger than current snails suggesting that the people who ate them were selectively breeding them to be bigger and more nutritious snails make excellent domesticated food sources by the way because a surprisingly caloric b they're easy to carry since they come with their own suitcases and c to imprison them you just have to scratch a ditch around their living quarters that's not really a revolution that's just people trying to increase available calories but one non-revolution leads to another and pretty soon you have this as far as the eye can see many historians also argue that without agriculture we wouldn't have all the bad things that come with complex civilizations like patriarchy inequality war and unfortunately famine and as far as the planet is concerned agriculture has been a big loser without it humans never would have changed the environment so much building dams and clearing forests and more recently drilling for oil that we can turn into fertilizer many people made the choice for agriculture independently but does that mean it was the right choice maybe so and maybe not but regardless we can't unmake that choice and that's one of the reasons i think it's so important to study history history reminds us that revolutions are not events so much as their processes that for tens of thousands of years people have been making decisions that irrevocably shaped the world that we live in today just as today we're making subtle irrevocable decisions that people of the future will remember as revolutions