What Happened After We Got Smart?
The Agricultural Revolution
“This was the turning point, they say, where Sapiens cast off its intimate symbiosis with nature and sprinted towards greed and alienation.” (Sapiens, 110)
Over the next few days, we’ll talk about the big questions of the Agricultural Revolution:
Why did unrelated settlements arise around the same time all across the globe? Who domesticated who?
What’s the biological economy?
Was the agricultural revolution “good” for humans?
Why did we start worrying about the future?
Is equality real… or an imagined belief?
And much more!
The Agricultural Revolution began 12,000 years ago. It happened very slowly generation by generation. No single person ever said “and now we will be sedentary and farm”. It was a gradual process that took so long, nobody was completely aware it was happening. And if they were aware, would they have still done it?
We went from living in large expanses to small muddy ‘houses’.
We went from a rich, varied diet to eating the same 1-2 things everyday for every meal.
We went from mountains and rivers to fenced in cesspools of disease and early childhood mortality.
Then why did we do it?
Why did we not just go back to hunting and foraging?
So many questions. This part of the book has some of the most memorable ideas in the book. There are plenty of mental models we can learn from the Agricultural Revolution to help us think about and interact with the world today.
Tomorrow, we’ll learn about History’s Biggest Fraud!
Question of The Day
Is trading thousands of years of pain worth it to arrive where we are today?
Have a beautiful day. Decide today will be a good one and will be!
Your Friend,
Noah “BigNerd” Sochaczevski