The Agricultural Revolution

c. 9000 BCE — Fertile Crescent, Neolithic Near East

Today: The Fertile Crescent — today's Iraq, Syria, and southeastern Turkey

Around twelve thousand years ago, in the arc of well-watered land curving up from the Persian Gulf — the Fertile Crescent — people began planting wheat and barley and penning animals instead of chasing them. In some ways it was a worse deal: the first farmers were shorter, sicker, and worked longer hours than the foragers they replaced. But farming produced storable surplus, and surplus is the seed of everything that follows — cities, kings, writing, war. It is the first time a technology remade what human work even is, faster than any society could adapt.

Worth knowing: Skeletons show the earliest farmers were shorter and had worse teeth than the hunter-gatherers before them — the 'progress' of agriculture cost people their health for thousands of years.

Pattern: Labor displacement — A new technology destroys and creates work faster than institutions and people can adapt, producing dislocation and backlash.

Entry 2 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.