Agriculture : The Begining of Inventions || Role of Agriculture in Setting Up of the First Human Society
In between 5 million to 7 million years ago (MYA), man-like creatures roamed Africa. Between 1.9 to 1.3 MYA, the first modern man started his journey to take over the world. But, he merely knew about it, because he was too busy with his hunting and gathering lifestyle to even think about it, and probably we couldn't have come this far without a series of events that led man to understand that it is easier to take benefit from something that is not moving and regenerating, than something that can flee. And in the search for that “something” type of thing man invented agriculture, and this one event just changed the fate of mankind and every other lifeforms on earth, probably the most after microbes.
Actually, sowing was not unique to man, squirrels do it better. But, the difference is that they do it in hope to store the nuts safe from competitors, and eventually forget where they buried it causing new plants to come out, in this way they cause devastated forests to regain its glory, very fast. But they actually hadn’t got enough of brain to use this thing for their advancement, they couldn’t even recognize what they just did.
This sudden change in lifestyle and diet caused man to save a lot of energy, and now they could channelize this energy to brainly functions like observation, analysis, deduction and thinking and creating. And in this way that one observation and its deduction and implication caused us to live on a human dominated planet.
It was that single moment when humankind felt no more insecurity with their nutrition, so they got time for thinking about stuff other than food sources. And it was no less than a revolution, it made us think over the things that we never had in our hunter gatherer lifeform. This changed the way we look at the nature around us leading us to understand it better, and utilize things more efficiently, and hence a chain reaction began which is continuing till date.
As mentioned earlier agriculture solved the food problem and simultaneously brought the concept of society with it as now, they needn't roam and chase around in search of food. And hence they settled in a place and formed the earliest version of society. With society came the social relationships and other social things like the earliest economy, community health, festivals, occasions and customs of passing on acquired knowledge to the next generation and hence the very first serious education system.
And simultaneously there came problems related with society like community health, decision making, likes and dislikes and many more. But, this time they had time to sit and analyze the problem and solve it on the basis of their knowledge and past experiences. And as man is curious they didn’t just stop at solving the problem. They on the basis of their knowledge and experience started building things that guaranteed efficiency, and this way man got inventions, actually large scale inventions of tools.
Agriculture left no reason for man to roam and chase animals for their food. And this was enough good reason to settle in a place, this thing in turn allowed them to start working on time taking mega-projects and buildings. This also allowed them to decorate places around them and focus on improving lifestyles. While all these things were happening simultaneously, more and more individuals of the species gathered at a particular place, and had their contribution in building the first ever human society.
This coming together of humans resulted in greater security for the next generation, greater ability to do big things, and an accumulation of a larger number of brains that helped them make the most suitable decision for the problems ahead. These gathering of brains caused exchange of ideas and decisions that only bettered the conditions for living and greater fitness.
This accumulation of brains resulted in development of disciplines that take account to describe a particular phenomenon happening around them, this caused our ancestors to better understand our surroundings and hence obtain the greatest benefit from it than any other organism living or lived on this planet. These disciplines were like sparks on the heap of gunpowder, the only difference is that in this case the heap was of curiosity. They went deeper as they got more and more fascinated. This thing led to development of some apparently useless disciplines of that time, and tried to answer the questions of something more.
Some of them were so fascinated that they took a leap of faith in their discipline. And these things actually worked. We started predicting seasons by observing the position of the stars and sun in the sky. And this thing just kept on improving, and digging deeper until they found the whole new formalized version of stargazing as astronomy.
Agriculture has had its own need, that thing pushed man to innovate new devices that caused ease, mainly in agriculture as intended, but it ended up easing aspects of life. And with time the approach of inventions and techniques associated with it advanced, easing more inventions to come up.
Yes, without agriculture the world wouldn’t have been the same as today. That single event when a human brain first recorded coming out of a whole huge fruiting plant from a tiny seed changed everything.
And we still owe to agriculture, and noticing it, famous Irish politician Edward W. Stewart said that “Agriculture was the first occupation of man, and as it embraces the whole earth, it is the foundation of all other industries”.
