What Happened 10,000 Year Ago?
…that started the agriculture apocalypse?
Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
— Mathew 6:26
Just some quick thoughts about the beginning of agriculture and civilisation.
It is generally accepted that humans were hunter/gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years. Then agriculture was discovered and we became farmers, allowing the development of civilisation.
It turns out that that story is correct only in the very broadest strokes.
In fact, I read now, people had been sowing seeds to grow plants to supplement their hunting/gathering food supply for thousands of years. It ain’t rocket science to notice that plants grow from seeds, and to figure out that throwing down some seeds in certain types of soil would cause crops to grow there. After all, people were just as smart 100,000 years as we are today—we’ve just got different information and experience.
Therefore something must have changed around 10,000 years ago when agriculture grew to dominance and civilisation took off. It wasn’t just a remarkable discovery someone made, or a brilliant idea someone had. Something changed.
Maybe it was the ending of the last great Ice Age, such that it was the first time in human history that the climate was mild enough and stable enough for a long enough period to allow development of farming.
But maybe it was something else. Maybe it was because the pre-farming methods stopped working. The small-scale farmers tossing out their seeds exhausted the soils in which they grew their crops. And they ran out of new places to migrate to for fresh soil. And maybe the hunters killed off most of the game they depended on for food. Maybe necessity was the mother of invention, and more sophisticated and larger scale agriculture methods were developed because it was the only way to obtain enough food to feed growing populations.
Maybe that was the point at which mankind first overshot the carrying capacity of the earth.
Maybe we are reaching the endpoint of that overshoot in our lifetimes, today.
10,000 years is the blink of an eye in the history of the universe, of the earth, of mankind. We were here, and then we weren’t. Apparently agriculture was simply not an evolutionary successful strategy. Buh-bye, and thanks for all the fish. (As the dolphins said when they left the earth at the end of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.)
…therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. 24 He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. —Genesis 3:23–24
— Lannie Rose, January 2023
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
Written with NO HELP from ChatGTP or other AI resource
