For 10,000 generations the Neolithic Village environment was good enough. Mankind lived in it, and mankind's thinking became more and more adapted to it.
Then, 500 generations ago, some of the humans who had been living the Neolithic Village lifestyle found a better way to do things. They developed the agricultural lifestyle.
Developing agriculture from hunting-gathering is not a single invention, it's a whole bunch of innovations that, in the right environment, can do more for humanity than hunting-gathering can.
It's important to stress "in the right environment". At first, agriculture only worked better in a handful of places, such as the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East and the Indus River valley in Pakistan. But, where it did work better, it was steadily improved, and as it improved, the number of places it worked better grew and grew.
The spread of agriculture had two major consequences for humanity.
First, in the eyes of the adapters, it made human life a lot better. Those who chose not to adapt disagreed, more on that later.
Second, to do agriculture right required different thinking than doing hunter-gathering right. Agriculture pushes human thinking, and the human gene pool, in different ways than hunting and gathering does.
Lets look at those differences.
o Sedentary lifestyle
Humans who farm tend to farm the same fields over much of their lifetime. The semi nomadic lifestyle of hunting and gathering gave way to spending a lifetime within just miles of one's birthplace.
o Larger groups
Agriculture works better when large groups of people can be mustered to do things such as clear fields, harvest, and construct infrastructure such as granaries and irrigation works. One of the big challenges for human thinking was inventing ways to make larger groups work well.
o Rich and poor
Closely related to forming larger groups was the creation and acceptance of the concept of more privileged and less privileged people in the group.
o Writing
This one is big. With bigger groups, the need to keep track of more complex accounting-type activities became more and more important. A versatile memory improver was desperately needed. Writing was a huge breakthrough.
o Domesticating plants and animals
Dogs were domesticated by hunter-gatherers. Agriculturists lengthened the domestication list enormously.
Each of these, and many others, was a technological breakthrough. Each was first implemented to solve an existing problem that was being handled in a clumsy way by hunter-gatherer technology. Once each showed it could solve the "commodity problem" that it was invented to solve, each went on to have numerous surprise applications that became much more interesting and influential on human lifestyle.
Each of these calls for a different mix of skills than hunter-gatherers use, which means each is calling for a different style of thinking.
This means that for up to five hundred generations, the gene pool has been pushed in a dramatically different direction than it is when living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Lets talk next in detail about each of these changes, the surprises they brought, and how they have pushed the gene pool.
o Sedentary lifestyle
In hunter-gatherer times, humans moved around regularly. This kept the human community light on its toes. One question that haunted every decision to acquire new goods was, "Am I ready to carry this with me to the next place we live?"
With farming, that motion stopped. This meant that the range of goods a family found it valuable to acquire grew. The range of tools and structures that humans could afford to build and keep grew enormously.
It was in this sedentary setting that the notion of property ownership grew. If you are constantly moving around, saying you own specific property is a crazy statement. If you're going to spend most of your life in a specific place, then saying you own things makes sense.
o Larger groups
One of the hardest innovations for humans has been enlarging the size of workable groups. In Neolithic Village, the largest group that had to work together on a day-to-day basis was the extended family. There were family insiders, and there were outsiders. Outsiders could be dealt with fairly, but they could also be betrayed without causing much recrimination within the family group.
In a farm setting, larger groups are valuable for all sorts of activities such as farming, building and fighting.
Humans invented two basic solutions to the building-larger-groups problem. One solution was inventing hierarchy -- the concept that there are leaders and there are followers, and they are not treated the same.
The second solution was inventing virtual leaders -- leaders who would be followed, even if they weren't present. The virtual leader concept allowed two or more local leaders to cooperate in circumstances where they would otherwise first have a dominance contest, or not feel bad about betraying each other.
One of the surprise applications of learning how to live in larger groups was building cities. As mankind learned how to live in larger groups, cities became possible.
Other surprise applications were making governments and formal religious organizations.
Yet another was specialization of labor. It wasn't necessary for every human to know how to do every human activity well.
o Rich and poor
In Neolithic Village there is little to own because everything the village owns will get packed up and moved regularly. Likewise, much of what is owned tends to be owned communally -- he or she who needs it, uses it.
As humans become sedentary, and develop hierarchy to manage larger groupings, the community's stock of goods grows dramatically, and ownership becomes uneven. There are leaders who own more, and followers who own less.
This means there is a big change in thinking about both ownership and access to resources. Poachers hunting in the King's Forest is an example of Neolithic Village ownership ideas conflicting with Agriculture Age ownership ideas.
o Writing
As groups get larger and more goods are owned, keeping track of who owns what gets more and more important. As strong language skill came into being, the gene pool was pushed for better human memory skills, but the change hasn't been nearly fast enough. As a result, even in Neolithic Village times, people have searched for memory enhancers. Songs and poems are examples of using rhyming for memory enhancing. Another famous example is the "song lines" of the aboriginal people of Australia. When the aborigines went on "walkabouts" they were walking song lines to see if they remembered tribal songs properly -- they were using geography as a memory aid.
Writing systems were a huge memory-enhancing breakthrough. The first writing systems were used for business -- things such as keeping track of who paid taxes and who paid marriage dowries.
The surprise uses of writing are mind-boggling, simply mind-boggling.
Here are some ways writing has changed human thinking:
oo Humans respect the written word.
oo Humans respect a person who has mastered writing.
oo Humans will spend a lot of their resource on educating their children in writing and related skills.
oo Writing has displaced old people as the prime repository of community knowledge.
The changes writing has made to the human lifestyle are almost as wide reaching as those strong language skill has made.
o Domesticating plants and animals
Thanks to agriculture, humans now have symbiotic relations with thousands of kinds of plants and animals. And, the same kinds of plants and animals are around for most of a human's lifetime. As a result, human feelings about plants and animals have changed -- they are looked upon much more cooperatively. This change is reflected in the mixed feelings civilized humans have about hunting.
Human dietary experience changes. There is more regularity in what is eaten. There are still differences from season to season, but over the years, each season will bring a similar mix of foods.
These are some of the changes between Neolithic Village lifestyle and thinking and Agriculture Age lifestyle and thinking.
As you can see, the changes are big ones, and the transition has not been quick or easy for humans. After agricultural systems were first invented, it took thousands of years for the majority of humans to embrace agricultural living as a lifestyle.
Many humans chose not to, and this became a source of both conflict and legend. Hunter-gatherer tribes saw that agriculturists had lots of stuff, and they were outsiders. So, for millennia farmers have had to protect themselves diligently from hunter-gatherer raiding tribes.
Farming is easiest in flat land, so it became easy to classify farm people as valley people and hunter-gatherer people has hill people. This strife between lifestyles is now the stuff of legend.
It goes even further, those who are born with strong hunter-gatherer instincts don't adapt well to farming life, but if they try to live the farming lifestyle, other members of their community aptly label such people as "born losers". More stuff of legend.
The Agricultural Age was the transition that began mankind's Historic Age. It was a huge revolution in human thinking, and for up to five hundred generations it has been pushing the gene pool to produce good farmer lifestyle thinkers.
Human thinking concepts such as accepting hierarchy and virtual leadership, supporting formal government and class structures, and learning writing, have been more successful where agriculture has become the primary lifestyle.
Human thinking concepts such as betraying those outside the family, men fighting over women, and respecting old people for their knowledge, have been less successful in agricultural lifestyles, but they certainly haven't disappeared entirely. (update: Here is an 18 Mar 10 Science News article that talks about an experiment documenting this change in thinking: Farming's Rise Cultivated Fair Deals by Bruce Bower.)
The Agricultural Age rocked humanity, but it wasn't the last rock. Lets now talk about the next big rock: the Industrial Age.