invention of agriculture

The omnivore's dilemma: a natural history of four meals

by Michael Pollan  · 15 Dec 2006  · 467pp  · 503 words

of the plants and animals that take part in the grand coevolutionary bargain with humans we call agriculture. Though we insist on speaking of the "invention" of agriculture as if it were our idea, like double-entry bookkeeping or the lightbulb, in fact it makes just as much sense to regard agriculture as

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for world domination, by helping it outcompete the shrubs and trees.) The second phase of the marriage of grasses and humans is usually called the "invention of agriculture," a self-congratulatory phrase that overlooks the role of the grasses themselves in revising the terms of the relationship. Beginning about ten thousand years ago

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

by Francis Fukuyama  · 11 Apr 2011  · 740pp  · 217,139 words

impact was enormous. Depending on climatic conditions, hunter-gatherer societies have a population density from 0.1 to 1 person per square kilometer, while the invention of agriculture permits densities to rise to 40–60 per square kilometer.25 Human beings were now in contact with one another on a much broader scale

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made the transition from band-level to tribal societies, except to say that it was historically associated with the increased productivity made possible by the invention of agriculture. Agriculture made possible higher population densities, which in turn created a need for organizing societies on a larger scale. Agriculture also created the need for

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increases in labor productivity (output per person) as the result of technological innovation and change. But before 1800, productivity gains were much more episodic. The invention of agriculture, the use of irrigation, the invention of the printing press, gunpowder, and long-distance sailing ships all led to productivity gains,7 but between them

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

by Robert J. Gordon  · 12 Jan 2016  · 1,104pp  · 302,176 words

about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture—but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people’s lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to

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The transition of American agriculture between 1870 and 1940 to much higher levels of output per person and per acre relied on more than the invention of agricultural machinery by private entrepreneurs such as Cyrus McCormick and John Deere. The government played a major role in making modern agriculture possible through the Agricultural

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

by Nicholas A. Christakis  · 26 Mar 2019

significantly shape their physical and biological environments—by damming rivers, domesticating plants and animals, generating air pollution, using antibiotics, and so on. Prior to the invention of agriculture and cities, humans did not build their physical environments; they simply chose them. By contrast, humans have always made their social environments. Living socially places

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enhance fluency in such languages may be selected for.62 Innovations in farming or material technology can also have effects. It’s possible that the invention of agriculture may have made the ability to be patient (and wait for crops to grow) more adaptive and that it affected the utility of genes undergirding

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mutations are more likely to occur somewhere in the population simply by chance; these larger populations of our species may have been facilitated by the invention of agriculture. However, it is also the case that cultural impacts can cease or reverse, which would mean that the genetic changes would be incomplete (a “partial

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation

by Carl Benedikt Frey  · 17 Jun 2019  · 626pp  · 167,836 words

to connect two large bodies of scholarly research to put the Gates paradox in historical perspective. It tracks the expanding frontiers of technology from the invention of agriculture to the rise of AI, tracing the fates of humans as technology has progressed. I should warn the reader that this is not a balanced

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that concern preindustrial technologies and their effects on people’s standard of living. Chapter 1 gives a succinct summary of advances in technology from the invention of agriculture some 10,000 years ago up until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. It shows that many significant technologies emerged before the eighteenth century, but

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, in the absence of any technology for storing meat, instant consumption was inevitable, and no significant food surplus was attainable. It was only after the invention of agriculture that food could be stored, land could be owned, and individuals could accumulate a surplus of significance—which in turn introduced the concept of property

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disease, in addition to other distinguishing features of wealth such as ornaments and gold hair clips.9 The notion that political inequality stems from the invention of agriculture, as the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau suggested, thus seems to hold.10 Of course, the price of inequality might be low if the commoner also

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suggests that the post-Neolithic rise in inequality was accompanied by a fall in average standards of living. While it was long believed that the invention of agriculture dramatically improved the life of the commoner—relieving humanity of the burden of constant movement in the search for food—the body of data that

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in machinery were few. Before the Industrial Revolution, political power was firmly held by the landed classes. The structure of power was shaped by the invention of agriculture, which meant that for the first time food could be stored, land could be owned, and individuals could accumulate a surplus of significance. This, in

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber and David Wengrow  · 18 Oct 2021

of social equality. For Diamond and Fukuyama, as for Rousseau some centuries earlier, what put an end to that equality – everywhere and forever – was the invention of agriculture, and the higher population levels it sustained. Agriculture brought about a transition from ‘bands’ to ‘tribes’. Accumulation of food surplus fed population growth, leading some

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of language (in which he includes most of the modern inhabitants of North America and other actually observable ‘savages’); then finally, civilization, which followed the invention of agriculture and metallurgy. Each marks a moral decline. But, as Rousseau is careful to emphasize, the entire parable is a way to understand what made it

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complicate this picture, but the overall pattern of seasonal congregation for festive labour seems well established. Such oscillating patterns of life endured long after the invention of agriculture. To take just one example, they may be key to understanding the famous Neolithic monuments of Salisbury Plain in England, and not just because the

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being. As we’ve also seen, this idea is very much still with us. But so is Rousseau’s argument that it was only the invention of agriculture that introduced genuine inequality, since it allowed for the emergence of landed property. This is one of the main reasons people today continue to write

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can now put a final nail in the coffin of the prevailing view that human beings lived more or less like Kalahari Bushmen, until the invention of agriculture sent everything askew. Even were it possible to write off Pleistocene mammoth hunters as some kind of strange anomaly, the same clearly cannot be said

The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History

by Greg Woolf  · 14 May 2020

in the Holocene a one thousand-year-long cold snap, known as the Younger Dryas, may have provided the stimulus for one of the first inventions of agriculture. It happened in the Near East. From preserved plant and animal remains it is possible to reconstruct changes in the environment of a broad sweep

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degradation might have retreated to better territory, or simply collapsed in number. Our ancestors could do better than that. They stayed and farmed. The Natufian invention of agriculture is a very local story. Agriculture was invented many times around the globe, in radically different ecologies. Each local story must have been different, but

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth

by Michael Spitzer  · 31 Mar 2021  · 632pp  · 163,143 words

historical clock. Mapping contemporary hunter-gatherer music over the prehistorical timeline involves speculation of a rather higher order, however. From the Ice Age to the invention of agriculture between 12,000 and 9,000 years ago there was a gradual climatic warming, interrupted by a cold snap (12,900–9700 bc) called the

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Ice Age, and it may mark an important advance towards the social complexity entailed by Neolithic sedentary culture, and the cognitive revolution associated with the invention of agriculture. We must not forget that the Inuit are a modern culture. Drums are, perhaps surprisingly, a modern instrument: the technology to bake ceramics, or to

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

by Geoffrey West  · 15 May 2017  · 578pp  · 168,350 words

change with our discovery of fire, which is the chemical process that releases the sun’s energy stored in dead wood. When coupled with the invention of agriculture, this began the transition to the Anthropocene as we emerged from a purely biological organism to our present state as an urbanized socioeconomic creature no

Europe: A History

by Norman Davies  · 1 Jan 1996

’, which is now usually taken to be just one vital part, or one stage, of the overall process. ‘No change in human life since the invention of agriculture, metallurgy, and towns in the New Stone Age has been so profound as the coming of industrialisation.’4 By general consent, modernization was first experienced

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

by Matt Ridley  · 17 May 2010  · 462pp  · 150,129 words

The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world

by Michael Pollan  · 27 May 2002  · 273pp  · 83,186 words

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World

by Deirdre N. McCloskey  · 15 Nov 2011  · 1,205pp  · 308,891 words

The Ages of Globalization

by Jeffrey D. Sachs  · 2 Jun 2020

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

by J. Bradford Delong  · 6 Apr 2020  · 593pp  · 183,240 words

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

by Ian Morris  · 11 Oct 2010  · 1,152pp  · 266,246 words

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

by Stewart Brand  · 15 Mar 2009  · 422pp  · 113,525 words

A History of Western Philosophy

by Aaron Finkel  · 21 Mar 1945  · 1,402pp  · 369,528 words

Hunger: The Oldest Problem

by Martin Caparros  · 14 Jan 2020  · 684pp  · 212,486 words

1491

by Charles C. Mann  · 8 Aug 2005  · 666pp  · 189,883 words

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines

by William Davidow and Michael Malone  · 18 Feb 2020  · 304pp  · 80,143 words

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality

by Oded Galor  · 22 Mar 2022  · 426pp  · 83,128 words

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

by David S. Landes  · 14 Sep 1999  · 1,060pp  · 265,296 words

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet

by Jeffrey Sachs  · 1 Jan 2008  · 421pp  · 125,417 words

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

by David Reich  · 22 Mar 2018  · 372pp  · 110,208 words

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium

by Carl Sagan  · 11 May 1998  · 272pp  · 76,089 words

In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays

by Bertrand Russell  · 1 Jan 1935  · 12pp  · 5,028 words

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

by Joseph Henrich  · 7 Sep 2020  · 796pp  · 223,275 words

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World

by Gaia Vince  · 22 Aug 2022  · 302pp  · 92,206 words

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking

by Michael Bhaskar  · 2 Nov 2021

The Locavore's Dilemma

by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu  · 29 May 2012  · 329pp  · 85,471 words

A Short History of Progress

by Ronald Wright  · 2 Jan 2004  · 225pp  · 54,010 words

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

by Angus Deaton  · 15 Mar 2013  · 374pp  · 114,660 words

Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler  · 1 Jun 1984  · 286pp  · 94,017 words

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity

by Byron Reese  · 23 Apr 2018  · 294pp  · 96,661 words

Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease

by Gary Taubes  · 25 Sep 2007  · 936pp  · 252,313 words

An Optimist's Tour of the Future

by Mark Stevenson  · 4 Dec 2010  · 379pp  · 108,129 words

Global Catastrophic Risks

by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic  · 2 Jul 2008

The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention

by Simon Baron-Cohen  · 14 Aug 2020

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time

by James Suzman  · 2 Sep 2020  · 909pp  · 130,170 words

Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

by Edward Slingerland  · 31 May 2021

Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI

by John Cassidy  · 12 May 2025  · 774pp  · 238,244 words

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

by Matt Ridley  · 14 Aug 1993  · 474pp  · 136,787 words

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence

by George Zarkadakis  · 7 Mar 2016  · 405pp  · 117,219 words

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

by Laurence C. Smith  · 22 Sep 2010  · 421pp  · 120,332 words

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall

by Mark W. Moffett  · 31 Mar 2019  · 692pp  · 189,065 words

A History of the World in 6 Glasses

by Tom Standage  · 1 Jan 2005  · 231pp  · 72,656 words

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

by Daniel Markovits  · 14 Sep 2019  · 976pp  · 235,576 words

Jaws

by Sandra Kahn,Paul R. Ehrlich  · 15 Jan 2018

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

by David Quammen  · 30 Sep 2012  · 669pp  · 195,743 words

The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World

by John Michael Greer  · 30 Sep 2009

Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen

by James Suzman  · 10 Jul 2017

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization

by Richard Baldwin  · 14 Nov 2016  · 606pp  · 87,358 words

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells  · 19 Feb 2019  · 343pp  · 101,563 words

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

by Robert W. McChesney  · 5 Mar 2013  · 476pp  · 125,219 words

The Evolution of God

by Robert Wright  · 8 Jun 2009

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together

by Bruce Schneier  · 14 Feb 2012  · 503pp  · 131,064 words

A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies

by Matt Simon  · 24 Jun 2022  · 254pp  · 82,981 words

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World

by James D. Miller  · 14 Jun 2012  · 377pp  · 97,144 words

How the Mind Works

by Steven Pinker  · 1 Jan 1997  · 913pp  · 265,787 words

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

by Douglas Rushkoff  · 21 Mar 2013  · 323pp  · 95,939 words

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

by Jerry Kaplan  · 3 Aug 2015  · 237pp  · 64,411 words

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

by Nicholas A. Christakis  · 27 Oct 2020  · 475pp  · 127,389 words

Planet Ponzi

by Mitch Feierstein  · 2 Feb 2012  · 393pp  · 115,263 words

Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design

by Alvin E. Roth  · 1 Jun 2015  · 282pp  · 80,907 words

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker  · 1 Jan 2002  · 901pp  · 234,905 words

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

by Clay Shirky  · 28 Feb 2008  · 313pp  · 95,077 words

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

by Jerry Mander  · 1 Jan 1977

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence

by Calum Chace  · 28 Jul 2015  · 144pp  · 43,356 words

Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America

by Charles Murray  · 14 Jun 2021  · 147pp  · 42,682 words