to to welcome you to Crash Course: World History. Over the next 40 weeks, together we will learn

how in a mere 15,000 years, humans went—

MR. GREEN, MR GREEN! WILL THIS BE ON THE TEST?

Sigh.

Right, about the test. Listen closely: The test will measure whether you are an informed,

engaged, and productive citizen of the world, and it will be administered in bars and offices

and dorm rooms and places of worship and hospitals and yes, even schools. You will be tested

on first dates, in job interviews, while watching football, while scrolling through your twitter

feed. The test will judge your ability to think

about things other than celebrity marriages, whether you’ll be easily persuaded by empty

rhetoric, and whether you’ll be able to place your life and your community in a broader

context. The test will last your entire life, and it

will be comprised of millions of decisions which, taken together, will make your life

yours. And everything—everything—will be on it.

Oh. Crap.

I know, right? So listen up: In just 15,000 years, humans went from hunting and gathering

to create such improbabilities as the airplane, the Internet, and the 99 cent double cheeseburger.

It’s an extraordinary journey, one that I will now symbolize by embarking upon a journey

of my own—over to camera 2.

Hi, there Camera 2. It’s me, John Green. Let’s start with that double cheeseburger,

which contains 490 calories.

To get that cheeseburger, you have to feed raise and slaughter cows, then grind their

meat, then freeze it and ship it to its destination.

You also have to grow some wheat and then process the living hell out of it until it

tastes like unsweetened marshmallow,

milk some cows and turn their milk into cheese,

which isn’t even to mention the growing and pickling of cucumbers or the sweeting

of tomatoes or grinding of mustard seeds, etc.

How in the sweet name of everything holy did we ever come to live in a world where such

a thing can even be created? And how is it possible that those 490 calories can be served

to me for—assuming I make the federal minimum wage here in the United States—

And most importantly, should I be delighted or alarmed to live in this strange world of

relative abundance? Well, this may not strictly be history, since we don’t have much of

a written record, but thanks to archaeology and paleobiology, we do have some idea of

the prehistoric world. let’s go to the thought bubble.

15,000 years ago, humans were foragers and hunters. Foraging meant gathering fruits,

nuts, and also wild grains and grasses. Hunting allowed for a protein-rich diet, so long as

you could find something with meat to kill. By far the best hunting gig in the prehistoric

world was fishing, which is one of the reasons that, if you look at the history of people

populating the planet, we tended to run for the coasts and stay there.

Marine life was A. abundant, and B. relatively unlikely to eat you. While we tend to think

that the lives of foragers (hunter/gatherers) was pretty bad, fossil evidence suggests that

they actually had it pretty good. Their bones and teeth are healthier than those of agriculturalists,

and anthropologists who have studied the remaining forager peoples have noted that they actually

work a lot fewer hours than the rest of us, and spend more time on art, music, storytelling—and

if you believe the classic of anthropology Nisa, they also have more time for skoodilypooping.

What? I call it skoodilypooping. Is that so wrong?

It’s important to note that cultivation of crops seems to have arisen independently

over the course of millennia in a number of places, from Africa to China to the Americas.

Using crops that naturally grew nearby—rice in Southeast Asia, maize in Mexico, potatoes

in the Andes, wheat in the fertile crescent, yams in West Africa —people around the world

began to abandon their foraging for agriculture. Since so many communities made this choice

independently, it must have been a good choice, right, even though it meant less music and

skoodilypooping?

Thanks, Thought Bubble. Okay, to answer that question, let’s first take a look at the

advantages and disadvantages of agrictulture.

Advantage: Controllable food supply. You might have droughts or floods but if you’re growing

the crops and breeding them to be healthier and heartier, you get a bit more say in whether

you starve.

Disadvantage: In order to keep feeding people as population grows, you have to radically

change the landscape of the planet.

Advantage: You can create a food surplus, especially if you grow grain, which makes

cities possible. As long as you’re hunting and gathering

food that will quickly become inedible, it’s impossible to create large population centers.

But if you have a surplus, agriculture can support people not directly involved in the

production of food, like, say, tradesmen who can devote their lives to creating better

farming equipment, which in turns makes it possible for you to produce more food more

efficiently, which in turn eventually makes it possible for a corporation to turn a profit

on a 99 cent double cheeseburger.

Disadvantage: Some would argue the whole complexity of large and complex agricultural communities

that can support cities and eventually inexpensive meat sandwiches is not actually beneficial

to the planet or even necessarily its human inhabitants, although that is a tough argument

to make coming to you, as I am, as a series of 1s and 0s.

Advantage: Agriculture can be practiced in many places all over the world, although in

lots of places it requires extensive manipulation of the environment; e.g., irrigation or controlled

flooding or terracing.

Disadvantage: Farming is hard work—so hard that one is tempted to for instance claim

ownership over other humans and then force them to till the land on your behalf—which

is the kind of non-ideal social order that has tended to emerge again and again in agriculturalist

communities.

So why did agriculture happen when it—wait, I haven’t talked about herders. HERDERS,

man, always getting the short end of the stick.

Herding is a very good and interesting alternative to foraging: Domesticate some animals, and

then take them on the road with you. The upsides of herding are obvious: You get

to be a cowboy, and animals are not only steady sources of meat and milk, they also help out

with shelter by providing wool and leather. On the downside, you have to move around a

lot because your herds always need new grass to eat, and it’s hard to build cities when

you’re constantly moving, unless you are the Mongols.

By the way, over the next 40 weeks, you will frequently hear generalizations followed by

the caveat “Unless you are the Mongols.”

But one of the main reasons herding only caught on in certain parts of the world is that there

aren’t that many animals that really lend themselves to domestication:

Like, you have sheep goats cattle pigs horses camels donkeys reindeer water buffalo yaks

all of which have something in common: They aren’t native to the Americas.

Llamas are the only halfway useful herding animals native to the Americas, and lots of

animals just don’t work for domestication.

Hippos are large and provide lots of meat, and they mostly eat plants, but they also

like to kill us, which makes them bad for herding. Zebras are too ornery; grizzlies’s

wild hearts can’t be broken; elephants are too slow to breed. Which reminds me…it’s

time for the open letter.

An Open Letter to Elephants:

Hey, Elephants. You’re so cute and smart and awesome; why you gotta be pregnant for

22 months? That’s crazy! And then you only have one kid! If you were more like cows,

you might have taken us over by now.

Like, here is the graph of cow population and here is the graph of cow population.

Elephants, if you’d just inserted yourself into human life the way cows did, you could

have used your intelligence and power to form secret societies conspiring against the humans

and then you could have risen up and destroyed us and made an awesome elephant world with

elephant cars and elephant planes, but nooooo you’ve gotta have 22-month pregnancies with

one offspring and tusks that people want to kill you for. It’s so depressing.

Best wishes, John

Right so but back to why the Agricultural Revolution occurred. We don’t have records,

but historians love to make guesses: Maybe population pressure necessitated agriculture

even though it was more work, or abundance gave people leisure time to experiment with

domestication or planting originated as a fertility right or—as some historians have

argued—people needed to domesticate grains in order to produce more alcohol. Darwin,

like most 19th century scientists, believed agriculture was an accident, saying:

“a wild and unusually good variety of native plant might attract the attention of some

wise old savage.”

Off-topic, but you will come to note that the definition of ‘savage’ tends to be

‘not me.’

Maybe the best theory is that there wasn’t really an agricultural revolution at all but

that it was part of an evolutionary desire to produce more to eat. After all, hunter

gatherers know that seeds germinate when planted and some groups will plant crops if the weather

and climate permit, while otherwise preferring to forage (since it’s less work, after all).

When you find something that’s edible, you try to get more of it. So early farmers would

take the most easily accessible seeds of einkorn and emmer wheat plants and plant those, hoping

that the results would become strains wheat that were easier to eat.

Like, for instance: We have evidence that as early as 13000 years ago humans in southern

Greece were domesticating snails for food. In a cave at Frankthi is a huge pile of snail

shells. Most of them are larger than current snails, suggesting that the people who ate

them were selectively breeding them to be bigger and more nutritious. Snails, btw, make

excellent domesticated food sources because A. they are nutritious, and

B. they’re easy to carry, since they come with their own suitcases, and

C. you can imprison them just be scratching a small ditch around their living quarters.

That’s not exactly a revolution. That’s just people wanting to increase the number

of their available calories.

But one non-revolution needs to another, and pretty soon you have this as far as the eye

can see. No doubt that the impact of the discovery and adoption of agriculture is probably the

most momentous “event” in human and the planet’s history.

I’m cold; let’s go inside. Without agriculture we couldn’t have large

groups of people in the same place (they’d starve) and therefore no complex societies,

cities, religions, writing, metalworking, all that good stuff.

It’s also true that without agriculture we wouldn’t have all the bad things that

come with complex civilizations, like inequality, patriarchy, war, and unfortunately, famine.

And as far as the planet is concerned, agriculture has been a big loser – without it humans

would never have changed the environment so much, clearing forests, moving rivers, building

dams to create and prevent floods, drilling wells for agriculture, and in the 20th and

21st century drilling for oil to process into fertilizer. Many people made these choices

independently from each other, but does that mean it was the right choice? Maybe so, but

it’s impossible to unmake that choice today, which is one of the reasons I think history

is worth our attention: It reminds us that revolutions are not events so much as processes,

that for tens of thousands of years people have been making decisions that irrevocably

shaped our world, just as today we’re making subtle, irrevocable decisions that the people

of the future will remember

as revolutions.