People shifted from the hunter gatherer lifestyle to an agricultural and settlement society. Because the agricultural world got a lot more recognised it meant that people were constantly able to get a good food supply which meant places got more densely populated because there was less competition for foods like meat. Also, things such as trade and political systems came about which helped transform the world. The Neolithic Agrarian revolution meant that our population was able to grow from around 1-15 million about 12,000 years ago to 554 million in 1600. lets look into this in a bit more detail:
15,000 thousand years ago humans were foragers and hunters. The foraging part meant people looked for fruit, nuts, grains and wheat but the hunting part ensured that people were able to get a protein rich diet. In the prehistoric world fishing was a great source of nutrients which is why if you look at where people were populated back then you can see that many made a move to the coast lines.
The Neolithic Agrarian revolution first started in what we call the fertile crescent in the Middle East. This was where the first practises of farming took place. From there many other people started to practise similar things leading to a rise in agriculture.
The farming of crops has seemed to have risen independently over the course of millennia in a large number of places from America to Africa to China. They used what was around them so for example in Mexico they used maize, in south-east Asia they used rice and in west Africa they used yams.
Historians don't know why the Agricultural revolution occurred because there are no written records because they have a few ideas. They think that maybe population pressure demanded for more agricultural even though it was much more work. Other historians questioned that people needed to domesticate grains in order to produce more alcohol. Some believed that the abundance gave people leisure to experiment with domestication. Another theory is that there wasn't an agricultural revolution at all but that agriculture came out of a desire to eat more to that people had to supply more food.
Many historians would also argue that without agriculture lots of bad things wouldn't have come from it for example patriarchy, war, inequality and sadly famine. When looking at the planet I feel that agriculture has really impacted the environment because now we have things such as huge dams, the clearing of forests and even more recently is the drilling for oil that we can now turn into fertiliser.
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