Write a opinion paper on the most significant consequences of the Agricultural Revolution.

Question

We have Neolithic Farmers to thank for early settlements, villages and then towns. They made all that happen by dint one one simple factor - food surplus.

You don't get food surplus in Hunting, nor Gathering. You get it from crops and here's the sequence and it's quite logical, all in all.

Agriculture was at first a fortuitous chance happening. No-one stood up the caves and said, 'Brothers, we must learn to grow crops..!' What happened was this. The Group, or Clan, had a semi-perminent camp and moved on, when resources started dwindling, away to seek better hunting and better gathering.

They regularly returned to a previous camp and often had a cycle of settlements.

Each camp had a midden or garbage dump. Clearly, someone noticed that there were things growing in the compost, vegetables from discarded seeds. Someone carefully replanted the young sprouts and noticed, when harvested, the vegetables were a bit bigger than the original wild produce. The very first Neolithic Farmer probably took a sharp stick and made the first furrow.

Over time (and Time was what they had plenty of..) they learned something about what makes things grow better. As they became versatile and actually started seeking out seeds and propagating them, they increased the vegetable's size from, say a 2'.inch carrot to a 5'.inch carrot, and so forth.

All this happened simultaneously all over the planet, in Five Places which are now deemed 'Mediterranean Climates.' There are five such areas all over and some produced many varieties and others less. The Middle Eastern Fertile Crescent brought forth 27 different varieties, The American version in North America only produced nine, and so on and so forth.

Eventually producing an actual crop would have changed the whole survival game and tilted it towards permanent bigger Human Settlements, growing crops, doing animal husbandry and increasing in population.

So it was the farmer that we can thank for Towns and skyscrapers and Suburbia. Farmers did all that.