I just watched a thought providing U-Tube video. “The beginnings of Civilization, 20,000 to
8000 BC. Civilization, (www.utube.com/watch $ v=bQxoZsHUw) by
which they (and I) mean cities, needs agriculture to feed the city
dwellers. You cannot feed even a small
town by having the citizens go out and hunt deer. Hunter gathering can feed a family, or even a
number of families living in a small village, especially in a location with
warm winters. But it cannot feed a city
population of perhaps 20% of the population.
Plus, the meat from hunting won’t keep where as grain, flour, will.
Obviously they
cannot start farming until the ice age glaciers melt out. Nothing will grow when there is snow on the
ground all year round. We used to think
that happened 10,000 years ago. Lots of
recent archeology has pushed that back to 20,000 years ago. We have some (not a lot yet) of archeological
evidence of some agriculture getting started way back then, 20,000 years before
present. We don’t see real cities until
10,000 years ago. Looks like it took
10,000 years for agriculture to develop into a city supporting force. What took so long?
Well there are a
number of technologies needed to make agriculture work. First of all you have to figure out how to
make grain (grass seed basically) edible by humans. I cannot eat the grass seed I have in my
garage for seeding the lawn; it’s mostly dried blades of grass, with very
little carbs to it. Wheat seeds are
better, more carbs and less blades of grass.
The milling process, using mill stones, separates the dried blades of
grass and grinds the carb part of the seed into flour. Once we have flour we can brew beer,
attractive because of the alcohol content and containing a fair amount of
nourishment. Today they sell Bud Light
to the many customers who don’t want to gain weight. More complex is learning how to get bread
dough to rise, and figuring out that baking the risen dough yields tasty
bread. That might have taken a few
thousand years.
Then we need some
tools to till the soil. I suppose with
enough hard labor you can till a small field with nothing better than a digging
stick, but I would not like to depend upon it.
To make a hoe takes metal. To
make a primitive plow (an ard they are called) needs a small amount of
metal. I suppose you can harvest the
grain with a flint sickle but I think a metal one will work better. Then you have to store the harvest in
something. Baskets, pots, or bags. All of these had not been invented 20,000
years ago. Pots only turn up 9000 years
ago.
And then there is animal husbandry, which must have started with sheep and goats and pigs, with cows coming later. Which needs shepherds and swineherds and goatherds to keep the stock on the farm. And sheep dogs. Must have taken generations to breed up sheep dogs from the hunting dogs and watch dogs.
