How Farming Set the Stage for Civilization
The Neolithic Revolution came at a high price, particularly for the farmers who actually tilled the fields for thousands of years. However, there is no doubt that its impact on our species – although not on the rest of the planet – has been highly beneficial. By the evolutionary criterion of success – measured by a species’ survival and reproduction – we have been extremely successful in the past 10,000 years. Our population went from about five million worldwide at the dawn of the Neolithic Revolution, to eight billion today.
That success is based almost entirely on our distant ancestors’ transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyle to that of settled farmers. That made an increasingly larger population – and the civilization that followed – possible, as agricultural food production led to more intense extraction of calories from the land. That supported denser populations, which in turn supported larger sedentary communities. However, the growth in population was not immediate, as the potential growth was offset for quite some time by an increase in warfare and diseases.
