Question

using "Nor could wheat offer security against human violence. The early farmers were at least as violent as their forager ancestors, if not more so. Farmers had more possessions and needed land for planting. The loss of pasture land to raiding neighbours could mean the difference between subsistence and starvation, so there was much less room for compromise. When a foraging band was hard-pressed by a stronger rival, it could usually move on. It was difficult and dangerous, but it was feasible. When a strong enemy threatened an agricultural village, retreat meant giving up fields, houses and granaries. In many cases, this doomed the refugees to starvation. Farmers, therefore, tended to stay put and fight to the bitter end " "

Many anthropological and archaeological studies indicate that in simple agricultural societies with no political frameworks beyond village and tribe, human violence was responsible for about 15 per cent of deaths, including 25 per cent of male deaths. In contemporary New Guinea, violence accounts for 30 per cent of male deaths in one agricultural tribal society, the Dani, and 35 per cent in another, the Enga. In Ecuador, perhaps 50 per cent of adult Waoranis meet a violent death at the hands of another human!3 In time, human violence was brought under control through the development of larger social frameworks – cities, kingdoms and states. But it took thousands of years to build such huge and effective political structures. " and "Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe's surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous? " How did geographic, environmental and agricultural factors influence how early societies develop using irrigation in one paragraph

Answer 1

Geography and environment determined where irrigation was possible—river valleys, alluvial plains and seasonally wet regions concentrated fertile soils and reliable water, while arid zones made irrigation essential—so communities in those places could intensify production, generate surpluses and support larger, denser populations; agriculturally, irrigation raised yields and allowed crops to be grown beyond their native ranges, but it also tied people to fixed fields, stored food and borders, increasing the value of land and provoking competition and violence. Building and maintaining canals and flood-control works required coordinated labor, technical knowledge and dispute resolution, which favored the emergence of centralized authorities, bureaucracies and social hierarchies to organize construction, allocate water and extract surplus; at the same time environmental constraints—droughts, floods, costly salinization—made these societies vulnerable, so trade, military power and administrative complexity grew to manage risks and expand influence, shaping the trajectory from village-level farming to city-states and early empires.