Starting around 12,000 years ago, agriculture (New Stone Age) began to unfold. The arrival of agriculture represented a genuinely revolutionary transformation of human life across the planet and provided the foundation of almost everything that came after: growing populations, settled villages, animal-borne diseases, horse-drawn chariot warfare, cities, states, empires, civilizations, writing, literature, etc. For example, farmers in the Americas transformed corn from a plant with a cob of an inch or so to one measuring about 6 inches by 1500. Farmers everywhere marked the landscape with a human imprint in the form of fields with boundaries, terraced hillsides, irrigation ditches, and canals. Animals were also transformed. But, people in the agricultural era lost the skills of their gathering and hunting ancestors in the event were there were too many people who lived that way. Farmers and herders became dependent on their domesticated plants and animals.
The Agricultural Revolution intertwined with the end of the last Ice Age which ended 11,000 years ago. The Ice Age led to the migration of Homo sapiens across the planets who then created new conditions that made agriculture grow. Gathering and hunting peoples in various resource-rich areas were able to settle down and establish their permanent villages. They didn't move from place to place anymore.
The globalization of agriculture lasted around 10,000 years or more after it first arose in the Fertile Crescent. By the beginning of the Common Era, the global spread of agriculture had reduced gathering and hunting peoples to a small and decreasing minority of humankind. During the common era, the beginning of human dominance over other life forms truly began. The major factor was the environmental transformation. Places, forests, and grasslands became cultivated fields and grazing lands. Human life, especially farming, involved more hard work than in many gathering and hunting societies. Wine and Beer also came about as both a blessing and a curse.
In all of their diversity, many village-based agricultural societies flourished well into the modern era, organizing themselves in kinship groups or lineages. This system provided the foundations to build a society with rules - to maintain order and settle arguments/fights without going to war. This was government without the formal apparatus. Chiefdoms emerged everywhere in the Pacific islands which had been colonized by the Polynesian peoples. Chiefs usually came from a senior lineage, tracing their descent to the first son of an imagined ancestor. They led important rituals and ceremonies, organized the community for warfare, directed its economic life, and sought to reserve eternal conflicts. The Agricultural Revolution transformed both the human journey and the evolution of life on the planet.
Nissa's Story
Nissa's story gives a great perspective on how the Paleolithic peoples might have been like. Nissa mentions that they are people who live and belong "in the bush." They are poor but they do their best to survive and meet their needs every day. Sometimes her father would bring home meat other times just honey. Nissa was always happy and grateful whenever she received food. She didn't like people who didn't share, no matter how little they had. She faced hardships when she lost both her husband and infant daughter; and she blamed God. From the way Nissa lived, I think that the Paleolithic peoples also had similar ways of living like Nissa did. Hunting, gathering, marriages, lovers, healing, and trying to survive were all a part of life. The Paleolithic peoples might not have been always wealthy in food, land, etc. but most of them shared and bonded with one another when they needed each other's help.
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