For hundreds of thousands of years humans lived as foragers. And then approximately ten thousand years ago humans began to farm. Why would people work so unbelievably hard? And to no appreciable advantage? The obvious answer is that there was an advantage, they certainly did not voluntarily reduce their quality and length of life.

In order to understand why they did something so obviously detrimental, we have to see what was happening at the time. The world had been in an ice age for a very long time. So long that any memory of a time before would have likely receded past myth into nothingness. And then the world began to enter an inter-glacial, that we call the Holocene. This had many results including facilitating a greater density of plant life. And with more plant life there was more food for all animals that ate plants, and a consequential increase in their population. With an increase in the population of animals, the carnivore populations increased as well. But this takes time, and the amount of food was increasing all the while. This offered the chance for humans to try something new: they did not have to move. In the most fertile places on Earth there was now sufficient food that foragers did not have to move. Some of the tribes that could now do this probably practiced some form of low-level horticulture.

Of course, this state of affairs could not last forever. The human population began to expand, and so did the population of their competition. Essentially, they reached a new balance, and they needed to move. This situation was helped along by the temperature beginning to cool again. In any case, the extra food that was sustaining their new sedentary lifestyle was slowly going away. When a nomadic band gets too large for their region they split into two smaller bands, and go their separate ways. But, a settlement is different. The group that goes cannot take half the town with them. Some groups undoubtedly simply got on with it and split up. But a couple, probably ones that already had a history of horticultural practices simply began to increase the amount of food they had around them. These horticultural practices slowly became more and more intensive. Eventually increasing the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere enough to counteract the general cooling trend. These two trends canceled each other out maintaining the climate as one that would support intensive horticulture and even agriculture.

During this time their population began to increase. Which, naturally, meant an increase in their social complexity. After all, with two people there is one connection. With three people there are three connections. And with four people there are six connections. This increases geometrically as you go on. At a certain point the human brain ceases to be able to properly process so many people and connections. This is called Dunbar’s number, and is about 150. Please note that 150 is not a hard and fast figure, but representative of a range. So, at about this time some innovation was needed in order for the town to maintain itself. This innovation was a mild form of hierarchy. In a hierarchal structure you only need to know the boss, the people in your class, and the people you boss around. This allows for a large number of people to remain in the same group, working towards the same goals, without ever having to overcome Dunbar’s Number.

So, these towns began to have Big Men-style leaders. They would try to out do each other by having large festivals during which they would demonstrate their wealth. So they began to encourage still greater yields, which meant not only more hours worked, but also more food. And more food means more people. At some point along this line several things began to come about. These included specialization, metal tools, and the use of grains. Grains have an incredibly high yield, but require special machinery to process: a mill. Once this was developed civilization was only a hop, skip, and jump away. Irrigation techniques are probably what ultimately clinched it. Irrigation projects are vast in their affect and work load to build and maintain. In some cases this might have been a different, but similarly complex, project. A centralized leadership would be the reasonable way of handling the job of organizing the needed work-gangs. And Big Men with implied power were replaced by Chiefs with hereditary power. This person would also begin to decide when farming would start, and would schedule the harvest.

For this we needed calendars, ones accurate enough to tell us the exact day to begin farming for the greatest yields. Farmers live such a precarious life that a bad start date might mean famine later on. This job was taken up by the people who always dealt with powers beyond humanity: the priests. The priesthood probably came about while these groups began to become hierarchal. The otherworld mirroring their own. But once this happened, they stopped being shamans and became priests, albeit, probably with some shamanic practices.

Now, we have several small city-states with expanding agricultural needs, because as soon as they began to grow vast amounts of grain they passed the line between horticulturist and agriculturalist. This required several other things, including means of maintaining records of what was grown. For this we got the first scribes. Most likely it was originally just a person with an unusually good memory. But at some point many of these civilizations developed a means of tracking these things using something physical. This was usually symbols written on clay tablets, or so we believe, they might have used a less permanent method as well. The Inca, for instance, used knots on string.

Another thing this eventually involved was the first war. Several city-states expanding along the same rivers are going to tend to run into each other. And since they both want the same resources, they’re going to try and take them from each other. This is different than the fighting from before the agricultural revolution. Then the point was only to make sure the other guys knew that they should tread carefully when dealing with you. There was no intention to take the other tribe’s resources, they had nothing to do with them. And while many tribes have neighbors they would love to wipe out of existence, they do not have the ability to do this. These emergent civilizations did.

War is a more complicated thing then we tend to believe in modern times, where war is a way of life and peace requires commentary. It requires not only weapons, but also a need to fight that out weighs the need to have people on the fields farming, something that was a very big deal in the days before the professional army. It also requires the political machinery of war, once the first war happened we know that the Chiefs had been replaced by a King. You need a certain minimal amount of power to order people to go out of their way to get themselves killed. Naturally, this is also when we start seeing cities built with defense in mind.

And so we have the agricultural revolution and civilization being founded, not as an act of unmitigated evil or a blessing from God. But, rather, a natural response to an unusual situation. Of course, it might have not happened this way, but that is not really the point. The point is that civilization was not formed as an evil act, but rather as a response to material reality. That these people were no different than us, just in a different situation. A relatively minor decision to intensify horticulture led directly to what Jared Diamond calls the “worst mistake in the history of the human race.” Hopefully this story will successfully serve two functions. First, I hope that this allows us to see our ancestors has they were: human, not demon or finally becoming human. And second, I hope that having this written out helps to demystify the rise of civilization. The agricultural revolution has always had something of a mystical sense about it. “And suddenly, people began to farm.” That kind of story is not very informative, and really only serves to support the cultural ideology of civilization: “this is the way we were meant to live, we only had to figure it out.” Maybe this story will help serve our new cultural ideology: “agriculture was a terrible mistake, but not one we have to live with.”