Another way of putting this is to say that agriculture implies “intensi¿ cation.”
While the extensive technologies of the Paleolithic era allowed human
populations to spread to new regions, the intensive technologies of the
Agrarian era allowed more humans to live in a given area. This is why
agriculture was able to start increasing the social “pressure” of human
communities, just as gravity increased the pressure within the solar nebulae
of early stars.
Larger, denser communities posed new problems and created new
opportunities. Human populations grew rapidly as humans acquired
more energy and resources. Human communities became larger. Even
the earliest forms of farming could support 50–100 times as many people
as foraging technologies from the same area (Christian, Maps of Time,
pp. 208–09).
Larger, denser communities generated new forms of power and hierarchy
because they required new rules to prevent conÀ ict. They also stimulated
collective learning and innovation by increasing the amount of people
exchanging information and ideas. These changes accelerated change and
transformed human societies. Niles Eldredge writes, “Agriculture represents
the single most profound ecological change in the entire 3.5 billion-year
history of life” (Eldredge, “The Sixth Extinction”).
This lecture has discussed what agriculture is and why its impact was
so revolutionary. The next lecture tries to explain why it appeared
when it did in a number of different parts of the world, from about
10,000 years ago. Ŷ
Christian, Maps of Time, chap. 8.
Fagan, People of the Earth, chaps. 7, 8.
Ristvet, In the Beginning, chap. 2.
Essential Reading