The Agricultural Revolution: Crash Course World History #1
This amusing and informative video provides a quick overview of the possible origins of agriculture, which is also referred to as "The Agricultural Revolution". However, it should be noted that agriculture did not develop rapidly, as the term "revolution" implies. Instead, it took over thousands of years to gradually develop and establish agriculture and the settled societies that came along with it. Hosted by John Green, this video investigates the effects of the transition from hunting and gathering to the domestication of plants and animals. According to the video, the origins of agriculture resulted from the need to eat more, which allowed humans to create permanent settlements and sustain large families and communities of people. However, hunter-gatherers were much healthier compared to agriculturalists, and many of the health problems we see today would not have been present in prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies; moreover, the concept of preventable diseases appearing after the establishment of agriculture is also known as "mismatched diseases", which is talked about in Daniel Lieberman's text "The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease", (Source #1). Lieberman discusses how humans are maladapted to their modernized lifestyle, and I will be elaborating upon and referring back to his text and the concept of mismatched diseases in future posts. Returning to the Crash Course World History video, John Green lists the advantages and disadvantages of agriculture as follows:
Advantages:
- Controllable food supply
- Food surpluses
- Can be practiced all over the world
Disadvantages:
- Must radically change the environment of the planet
- Difficult; requires intense manual labor
- Cause of inequality, famine, etc.
In addition, pastoralism provides a steady amount of resources such as meat, milk, wool, leather, etc. However, herding requires constant mobility in order to properly supply the animals with enough food. An interesting fact presented in the video is that there is evidence of snail domestication in Franchthi Cave, which is located in Southern Greece. The people living here were selectively breeding these snails to be larger and more nutritious than the smaller snails.
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