COMPLEXITY EXPLOSION OF AGRICULTURE

COMPLEXITY EXPLOSION OF AGRICULTURE

With the rise of agriculture 12000 years ago, human farmers weren’t just looting the products of nature like the foragers were, they were also manipulating them, domesticating plants and animals that were more directly geared towards human sustenance, thus harnessing a greater fraction of the Sun’s energy flows, to allow for much higher populations in a much smaller area… higher populations meant more innovators  and packed much more closely together to communicate those innovations… collective learning went into overdrive and with it human societies grew more intricate and complex… in comparison to the last 13.8 billion years the last twelve thousand years have been a blur of milestone after milestone of rising complexity

THE FORAGER-AGRICULTURE TRANSITION

Imagine you are a forager 12000 years ago… for the past 2000 years the ice age has slowly come to an end, the weather was growing more temperate and certain regions of the world were much more hospitable… in fertile river valleys, ecosystems had grown with plenty of trees, edible plants, fruits and animals to hunt.. your people arrived in one of the “Gardens of Eden” a few generations ago… you live in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East which 12000 years ago was greener with a temperate climate… your people, the Natufians, have lived in this lush region for years… you didn’t have to move around as much, people had gone their whole lives within a few dozen square miles and everywhere they went there were more gazelles to hunt, fish to catch and wild grains to harvest and cook… unlike your distant ancestors, you did not have to leave because the land never ran out of food… but something had changed recently, food was growing scarce… previously your people had enough food for everyone and you didn’t have to carry children far, so couples were having more kids… four or five perhaps sometimes more… infanticide had gone into decline, suddenly your lands were crowded with people and there was not enough to feed them… people began to starve to death… usually your ancestors would have moved on to a fresh region, leaving the lush gardens of the Fertile Crescent alone for a few years to replenish themselves, but in neighbouring regions there were already other people… a hostile people who claimed those regions as their own and any rate, food was beginning to run out in those regions as well… worse still, even if you could leave, your people hadn’t used their foraging skills in several decades, for the longest time your people were spoiled, they didn’t have to squeeze every last scrap of food out of the landscape, because it was so abundant for so many generations… because this was an age before writing, knowledge was only passed down orally from one generation to another, why did they need to pass on skills and knowledge that was no longer useful in this Garden of Eden… now those  ancestral foraging skills, useful for tough times were hazy or forgotten… you can’t leave, you vforage even if you tried to leave and meanwhile your people are dying… you have to get more out of the land you’re on… you do know a bit about the plants and animals around which you’ve spent your entire life… what if you gave nature a helping hand instead of leaving it to replenish itself… you begin to plant seeds and raise animals for your own use, you begin to chop down forests and bushes and clear rocks for access to the soil… after you die, your descendants continue domesticating plants and animals… they cease to be nomadic and have become farmers

This process repeated itself in East Asia, in the Indus River Valley, in West Africa, in Papua New Guinea and in Mesoamerica… by five thousand years ago the world was dotted with regions that had independently come up with the practice of agriculture… they harnessed more of the Sun’s power, produced more innovators and began to dream up new ideas at a faster pace and posed either a numerous threat or a tantalising prize to the foragers and raiders on their borders

COLLECTIVE LEARNING AND COMPLEXITY

Complexity made up of building blocks and energy flows… foragers used the ingredients in nature around them as building blocks to keep themselves alive , collecting nuts, fruits, wild grains etc from nature in order to sustain the complexity of their own bodies… they hunt animals which are slightly more complex, and cook them on a fire in order to achieve the same thing as fruits and vegetables… essentially, foragers made good use of the building blocks in a range of diverse ways, but they are plucking those blocks from the environment as they need them… but when we arrive at the early agrarian era we’re talking about humans that adapt the entire environment to better suit their complexity… instead of plucking food from a wild forest, they are moving around all the building blocks that make up that local forest to become more efficient at producing food… cut down trees to make room for fields… plow the soil to soften the minerals and allow plants to take root and tap into the ground’s nutrients… take the animals you would usually hunt in the wild and place them in a pen or a barn next to your farmhouse and use them for milk and meat… the farmhouse itself is a rearrangement of building blocks to provide shelter, necessary for sedentary living… suddenly you aren’t looking for building blocks to keep yourself fed from day to day… there’s an entire field of hundreds of vegetables that you can nurture, grow and stockpile for the winter… everything you need is outside your door, no more traveling for miles and miles… because the farmers were able to get more food out of a smaller area, you have way more people living in a denser population… this is good for collective learning because you have more potential innovators living closer together which facilitates a more rapid pace of exchange and improvement of ideas… in the long run this can only continue to raise human complexity…

The second ingredient for higher complexity is energy flows, and plants and animals in nature ultimately derive their energy flows from the Sun… as an early agrarian farmer you have a whole field of plants that are collecting the Sun’s energy like a Neolithic set of solar panels, trapping and concentrating it for you and your family’s consumption… the same goes for the grasses and feed that your goats, cattle and chickens might eat… all that ultimately comes from the Sun and then the eggs, milk and meat from the livestock goes towards sustaining your own complexity by feeding and nourishing you… essentially agriculture represents an energy bonanza for humans compared to the foraging era… in terms of energy flows, the average human forager would make use of fire and use about 40000 ergs/g/s on average in energy density in order to sustain their own complexity… the average for an agricultural society uses way greater density of energy flows to sustain the complexity of each human – roughly 100000 ergs/g/s and that bonanza comes from the simple act of picking up a few tools and starting a fire….

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

Over the next millennium, agriculture spread from Turkey and Mesopotamia into Egypt, across Persia into the Indus Valley and down the Indian Peninsula … made less headway in East Asia where the land was less hospitable, heading down the Nile Delta to the west and down south into Sudan, agriculture also petered out in the less accommodating lands of Ethiopia… to the west of Egypt, the Sahara momentarily posed a barrier to the transmission of fertile crescent agriculture into West Africa who would have to invent it for themselves 5000 years later… meanwhile 10000 years ago, domestication and farming emerged entirely independently in the Yangtze and Yellow River basins… from here it spread into Indochina, the Philippines, Indonesia and eventually joining up with Middle Eastern knowledge in India… over the next few thousand years, East and South Asia domesticated rice with a very efficient yield supporting a much higher number of people per square mile than wheat, which gave China and India such a boost in population numbers… meanwhile in Europe and the Mediterranean, wheat yields were generally lower, resulting in lower populations that were not as densely packed together… between 6000 and 9000 years ago, PNG made a foray into agriculture, the difference being that there was never the population density and surplus food to support cities and states, so PNG rested in the early agrarian era much longer than other world regions… in the most densely populated regions of West Africa – modern Nigeria today – there was another independent discovery of farming 5000 years ago… from there, nomads in Africa took farming east and south slowly converting foragers into this new method of harnessing the power of the Sun and soil… a number of environments in Africa were not ideal for primitive agriculture and many hunter gatherer groups refused to adopt it due to the decline in standards of living it would entail… vast regions stayed with more traditional life ways until only a few centuries ago, with many still maintaining that lifestyle today… in the Americas, agriculture rose independently as well, between 4000 and 5000 years ago it emerged in Peru and Central Mexico… it spread across Amazonia and down South America and north into the modern United States around 3000 to 4000 years ago… like Africa and central Asia, large parts of North and South America stubbornly refused to adopt agriculture and remained in a foraging lifestyle until only a few centuries ago

All across the world, dense populations of farms and villages were springing up growing in the number of building blocks and component parts which formed their complex societies, and increasing in the amount of free energy they harnessed from the sun in order to create, sustain and increase their complexity… instead of a vast area needed to support a few hundred people, that same area could support thousands or millions, each channelling the sun’s energy into crops that were designed for eating, or to feed animals that would also be eaten… by 5000 years ago the human population of the Earth had risen from 6 million to 50 million… a lot of people who needed to fit in to some form of social order and who needed to fill different societal functions in order to survive and a lot more potential innovators who could raise complexity further… higher complexity and higher energy flow to power it, which fits into the theme – even before the stage of early farming, before the rise of states, humans were moving towards great concentrations of energy to a degree unprecedented in the biosphere, on Earth or in the Universe… those energy flows that are crucial to creating sustaining and increasing complexity and moving further away from the state of thermodynamic equilibrium where no complexity no history and no change can exist.