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In the previous segment, we saw that
the agricultural revolution was a very gradual affair.
And that what happened was that a collection of attempts to
improve life, resulted in more difficult living conditions for most humans.
Why did people make such a fateful miscalculation?
Well, they did it for the same reason that people throughout
history miscalculated on many other occasions.
People are though simply unable to foresee the full consequences of their decisions.
Whenever they decided to do a bit of extra work, say for example to carry
water in buckets from the river or from the well, and to water the wheat fields.
People thought, yes we will have
to work a little harder.
But in exchange, the harvest will be much more bountiful,
and we wont have to worry any more about drought and
lean years and our children will never go to sleep hungry,
as we went when we were children; life will be great.
And this makes sense, that the basic plan was if you worked harder you
would have a much better life for yourself and for your children.
This was the plan.
Now the first part of the plan went smoothly, people indeed worked harder, say
for example they started spending many hours
carrying water from the river to the field.
But, unforeseen factors wrecked the second part
of the plan, the part about having a better life.
people simply did not foresee that the number of children would increase
with time and therefore, that yes they will have more bountiful harvests.
They will have more wheat.
But this more wheat will have to be
divided between more children so each child would
not receive a
[INAUDIBLE]
bigger portion than previously.
Another thing that the early farmers did not understand, did not
foresee is that feeding children with more porridge and gruel instead
of mother's milk would weaken their bodies and their immune system, and that
permanent settlements like villages are hotbed for infectious diseases and
therefore that the children would actually die
in larger and larger numbers from these diseases.
Another thing that early farmers did not foresee, is
that by increasing their dependence on a single source
of food, like wheat, they were actually exposing themselves,
even more than before, to the dangers of drought.
Yes, if there is a, if, if, if there
is a good year, we'll have bountiful harvests, but if there is
a bad year, then we, many of us will die of hunger.
And one more thing that the farmers did not foresee is that even
in good years when they have granaries bulging full of grain,
these granaries would tempt thieves and enemies to come and,
conquer the village and steal all this, all this grains all of this food.
And therefore, even in good years, they will have to
start building walls and they will have to start doing
guard duties and they will have to start fighting all
kinds of wars which previously they did not have to do.
So all these unforeseen factors ruined the initial plan of working harder
in exchange for a better life. How come, then, when the plan
backfired, and did not fulfil the expectation, why did people
not simply abandon it, and went back to, to the previous way of life?
Well,
[INAUDIBLE]
one reason that they did not abandon this plan is that it took generations
to realize that things are not working as, as they hoped
and by then, nobody really remembered that they'd ever lived in a different way.
Utmost, people sometimes could remember and tell their children, when
I was young, or at the time of, of my grandfather,
my grandfather told me that at their time there
was far less wheat, that the fields were far less
bountiful and I don't know how they managed to,
to feed all the village with such a small harvest.
So this is what people remembered, that yes, a
generation or two earlier, we had far less, food.
Another reason why people did not go
back is that, population kept growing and growing all the time, and therefore,
even if they wanted to go back, to the way that they lived in the time of their grand
parents they're too may people around already living
in order to do so at the time
of the grandparents maybe they're just 100 people
in the village and now they are 150.
So which 50 individuals would be willing to die from starvation,
so that the villages as a whole could go back to living as in previous
generations without watering the wheat fields,
nobody was willing to volunteer for this
so they kept watering the wheat fields and, feeding all these extra people.
This is how the pursuit of an
easier life, the desire to have a better and easier life actually
trapped human kind in in harder living conditions.
And this is not the last time it happened, it happened
throughout history again and again and it happens even to us today.
There are many people who can experience in, in a,
in, in a small way what happened to humanity in the agricultural
revolution, in their own lives for example, many college students.
They won't say there is some college students whose dream is to be a musician.
But he says, you can't really get, you can't really,
get a lot of money by being a musician, and
support yourself.
So I will go instead and study economics or computers or
something that they don't really like and I'll work very hard in
computers, I'll have a start up, and work very hard in
computers for five years or eight years, and make loads of money.
And then when I'm 30, I will retire with all that money from that
I did from work in computers and then I could live as I really
wanted to live and be a musician, even if nobody will pay, pay
me for it because I'll have all the money from working in, in computers.
But, the same thing happens to that college students
that happened to our ancestors in the agricultural revolution.
What most college, many college students have this fantasy.
And what they don't realize, is that there are
, that there are many unforeseen factors that, in 99% of the cases,
will wreck their plans because yes by the time you'll be 30 you'll have
a lot of money from working in computers but you will also have a lot of
new obligations and habits which at present don't you don't think about.
Maybe you'll
have a spouse and children that you have to support and you have to, to see them
through a kindergarten and school and university and you
took a mortgage to,ah, to buy a house and
you have two cars and you are used to
all kinds of expensive habits like going abroad for
vacations for so forth and so on, so yes you have much more money when you are 30,
then what you had when you were 20, but you also have many
more obligations and most people when they are 30, they don't say okay now
I stop all this, I forget about the children and the house and
the mortgage, I'll go be a musician with all the money that I gained.
No, they keep slaving away, working in computers
or in the bank or something, because they can't
go back and they can't realize the dreams that they had.
But even when the dream doesn't come true, they are stuck with their new obligations.
And this is exactly what happened to our, to our peasant ancestors
10,000 years ago or so. It is actually one of the few
, iron laws of history.
And history has few laws which are always true.
But one of the laws which is mostly
true is that luxuries tend to become necessities.
Once people get used to a certain habit,
to a certain condition, to a certain luxury.
They begin to count on it and
to take it for granted and eventually they reached,
they reach the position when they can't live without it.
So even something that was not essential at first, will
tend with time to become essential and you can't go back.
Let's take another familiar example from our own days
from our own time to understand how it happens.
Over the last few decades we humans have invented countless devices
in order to save time and to have a more efficient life.
These devices are supposed to make our life more
relaxed because they save us a lot of time.
These devices for example like washing machines and
vacuum cleaners, and dish washers, and telephones, and mobile
phones, and computers and emails, mostly we think that they make our life easy,
because they save us a lot of time and trouble for example, take emails.
Previously, when I wanted to send a letter,
to write a letter, to somebody say, in
another continent or another city, it took a lot of work to write the letter and
then to buy an envelope and a stamp, and to put
the letter in the envelope and put the stamp on the envelope
and to write the address on the envelope and then take it
to the mail box or the post office and pay for it.
And then it took days, weeks, sometimes even months until the letter reached it's
destination and until I got a reply to my suggestion or my, my, my questions.
Nowadays,
I can do all of that within a matter of seconds or minutes.
I can write an email, send it halfway around the globe and
receive the reply within a minute or ten minutes or, or a day.
If I don't receive a reply within a day or two, I think that something
is the matter or that the other person doesn't want a, a, to answer me.
So email save us a, an awful
lot of trouble and a awful lot of time. But ask yourself do we
actually live a more relaxed life, thanks to the invention of emails.
The answer that most people give when they
start thinking about it is no, obviously not.
Yes, it's much more easy and comfortable to
write an email to somebody in the United States
from, from Israel, from where I live, than to write and send a letter.
But precisely because of that, today I write
and I receive dozens of emails each day.
And everybody expects me to reply to their emails
immediately or at least within a day or two.
If I don't reply within a week then they get upset, they get angry.
So where is say, 50 years ago I had to
deal with maybe one letter, two letters a week.
Today I spend more and more time reading and answering dozens
of emails that reach my email box everyday, so yes, emails are
much more easy than letters but the life of people who use emails is
not more easy and more relaxed, than the life of people who used
only letters.
Here and there there are people who refused to open an email account.
They don't want to get into the rat race of
the email account and there is nothing new about that.
If you went back thousands of years ago, to the time of the agricultural
revolution, you would have found that not all human bands made
this transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture.
The war bands who did not want to give up their lives
and to start growing wheat and potatoes and rice and so forth.
But the thing is that the agricultural revolution in order to happen did not
require that every band in a given region join in and start cultivating
wheat, or rice, or potato.
It required only one band in a region to do so.
Once one man, settled down and started to till
fields and to harvest wheat, whether it was in the
Middle East or in Central America, agriculture in that part of the world
was irresistible, because farming created the conditions
for swift demographic growth for a population explosion, and therefore,
farmers, numbers of farmers, multiplied far more quickly than the number of
foragers, and when it came to a conflict, farmers could always,
oh, could almost always win simply by the force of numbers.
So foragers, they could either run away to a different
place and abandon their territory to become wheat fields and rice fields or the
hunter gatherers could choose to become farmers
themselves in order to compete with their enemies.
Either way the old way of life of hunting and gathering was doomed.
You either went away or you would change yourself,
but you could not go on living as hunters,
as hunter gatherers. we see then that, that the
story of the agriculture evolution, the story of this luxury trap the,
the attempt to improve life, that ends up making life more difficult,
it carries with it a very important lesson for humanity.
Humanity's search for an easier life,
releases immense forces of change which transform the world in ways that nobody
[INAUDIBLE]
envisioned or wanted. In the cases of agricultural evolution,
nobody really envisioned or wanted the agricultural revolution.
It happened because it was a series of trivial decisions, and mostly,
just to fill a few stomachs with a little more food, and to gain a little security.
But, these decisions
taken together, a, resulted in our ancestors
changing completely their way of life and foragers becoming peasants
who spend their days carrying water buckets from
the river to the field under a scorching sun.
Such things happened again and again in history.
History is full
of a train of trivial decisions that lead to
big and unforeseen results, and history's full of far more
idiotic miscalculations than those that the first farmers did.
There is, however, an alternative
explanation to the Agricultural Revolution.
The story of the agricultural revolution thus
carries, carries with it a very important message or lesson, to human kind.
Humans are all the time, looking to make for ways to make their lives a bit easier.
But sometimes, as happened with agricultural revolution, this attempt
to make life easier releases immense forces of change that
completely transform the world and result, among other things, in
making the lives of human actually harder and not easier than before.
And another important message is, it is
extremely difficult to foresee all the results
of our actions and all the factors which, in order to make really good decisions,
we need to take into account, it's very difficult to foresee the
future, especially when we, you are doing something that
transforms the economy and society in the ways that people lived.
The agricultural revolution was not planned by
anybody, it was not envisioned by anybody.
It just was the accidental
result of a series of very, very small and
trivial decisions that accumulated together to transform the world.
So, this is one explanation for
the agricultural revolution, for how it happened
that people agreed to change their lives in ways that actually made life harder.
There is, however,
an alternative explanation to the way that the agricultural revolution
happened. The alternative explanation suggests
that what brought about the agricultural revolution was not the search
for an easier and more comfortable life, rather, it was the
attempt to fulfil some kind of cultural or
religious aspiration. Maybe people 12,000 years ago, were fully
aware of the sacrifices that agriculture demanded and they were
[INAUDIBLE]
consciously willing to make these sacrifices for
the, for the sake of some great ideal.
Now, it's difficult to tell what were the cultural ideals
and the religious beliefs of people at the time of the agricultural revolution.
However, archaeologists did discover one truly amazing
site, which gives credence to this, to this explanation, and which
sheds interesting light on the way that, the transition to agriculture happened.
In the year 1995, about 20 years ago, archaeologists became, began to excavate
a site in South Eastern Turkey, which is called Gobekli Tepe.
In the lowest, the oldest strata of the site,
they discovered no signs for a, a settlement like
houses or daily activities, but they did discovered, discover
monumental structures with huge pillars decorated with spectacular engravings.
You can see here before you a picture of the remains
of one of these monumental structures from Gobekli Tepe, this is just one.
Altogether, archaeologists have uncovered about 10 such structures,
the largest of which is nearly 30 meters
across, and there might be others around, which
we still have, a, a, a, haven't discovered yet.
And here you can also see one of the many decorated
stone pillars that supported these huge structures.
Each of these stone pillars weighed about up to seven
tons and reached a height of up to five meters
and the pillars as you can see, they are covered
with beautiful engravings of all kinds of animals, and mythical creatures.
Now archaeologists are familiar
with such monumental, monumental structures
from various sites around the world.
The best known of them, the best known example, is Stonehenge from Britain.
Yet as scholars began to study the, eh, monumental structures of the
they discovered an amazing fact. Stonehenge
dates to about 2500 BC and
Stonehenge was built by a developed agricultural
society of a, of peasants and herders. In contrast
[COUGH]
the structures at Gobekli Tepe are dated to about 9500
BC, 7,000 years before Stonehenge and all the
available evidence indicates, that the people who built the
structure at Gobekli Tepe were not farmers, they're hunter gatherers.
Now the archaeological community at first found it
very hard to credit these these findings.
But they did one test after another and all the tests confirmed the early
date of the structures and the pre-agricultural
nature of the people who build these structures.
So it seems that the key abilities of
ancient foragers and the complexity of those societies and
cultures were much more impressive than what scholars previously suspected.
Now, why should a foraging society build such amazing structures?
They obviously, they did not have an, an, a utilitarian purpose.
These were, these structures, they were not traps
for animals and they were not places to shelter
people from rain or to hide from lions, in all likelihood these structures had
some cultural or a religious purpose that,
archaeologists, simply don't know what it was.
They have a hard time to understand it, because we don't have enough evidence.
However, whatever the cultural purpose of the structures was,
foragers believed in these cultural, purpose, religious purpose enough in order
to invest a huge amount of time and effort building Gobekli Tepe.
The only way to build Gobekli Tepe was for thousands of foragers belonging
to different bands, perhaps even different tribes to cooperate together over
a long time over years and decades and to only a very sophisticated religious
or ideological system could sustain and motivate such efforts.
So, this is one amazing thing about Gobekli Tepe, that it hints at the fact
that hunter gatherers had some religion or ideology
that prompted them to invest all this effort.
However, Gobekli Tepe had an even more sensational secret hidden in its depth
and this involved agriculture, the, the transition to agriculture.
For many years, geneticists who studies a DNA of domesticated wheat,
wanted to know where and when wheat was domesticated for the first time.
And recent discoveries comparing domesticated wheat to all kinds of
wild wheat, recent studies indicate that at least one variant of domesticated
wheat originated was domesticated for the first time in the
[INAUDIBLE]
hills, which is an area in south-eastern Turkey, about
30 kilometres away from Gobekli Tepe. Now
this cannot be mere coincidence, it is very likely that the
cultural center at Gobekli Tepe was somehow closely
connected, to the initial domestication of wheat by
human kind and the initial domestication of human kind by wheat.
One leading theory,
[INAUDIBLE]
the leading theory actually argues that in order to feed the people who built and
then used the monumental structures at Gobekli
Tepe, humans needed particularly large quantities of food.
Now it
[INAUDIBLE]
well been that foragers in South-eastern Turkey
about a 9,500 BC switched for the first time,
from gathering wild wheat, to intense cultivation of
domesticated wheat, not in order to make their lives easier, not
in order to increase the normal supply of food, but, in order
to support the building and the maintaining
of this cultural center of this temple perhaps.
in the conventional picture, usually when we think
about it, we think that villagers come before temples.
That pioneers first build a village and then when
the village is prosperous enough, they sent up a temple.
But the Gobekli Tepe suggests that at least in some cases the temple was built
before it was built first and a village of villagers only later grew around it.
And that the initial reason for agriculture was for some
mysterious religious or cultural purpose, not for an economic purpose.
Now we don't know that for sure, because again, for the lack of evidence,
archaeologists are still, even today, continuing the excavation of Gobekli Tepe
and hopefully we will have a much better picture of what happened
there and of the people who built it, in the next few years.
now even if we do gain a better understanding of
what happened at Gobekli Tepe temple and even if it
turns out that indeed the agricultural revolution in that part
of the world was driven forward by religious and cultural reasons.
This obviously cannot explain the agricultural revolution in America
or in China which happened in complete independence of
events in the Middle East, however it will prove that the
switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture could have
occurred at least in some areas due to cultural reasons not due
to economic and demographic pressures.
There is, however, in all these discussion of the agricultural revolution and
the reasons for it, there is an important piece of the puzzle,
which so far we have not touched and we have not discussed.
And without this piece it's not really possible to understand the revolution.
So far we've discussed that the agricultural revolution is a deal between
humans and plants, like wheat and rice, however, there was a third party
involved in this deal of agriculture and this
third party in addition to humans and plants are the animals.
In the next segment we will see what was the role of animals, such as cows
and pigs and horses and chickens in
the agricultural
revolution.
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