By Shiloh Fish

Advances in FarmingWhat I believe was one of the key building blocks for all further developments in history was the advancements in farming.

“This food-producing revolution… …surely marks the single most significant and enduring transformation of the human condition, providing the foundation for virtually everything that followed” (Strayer pg 5)

People learned to select seeds and grow their own gardens, allowing them to form more permanent settlements.

Due to the fact that people could now set up permanent establishments, they could now accumulate wealth, or excess harvest. In previous years it would have been too difficult to travel with large amounts of extra stuff so containers such as pottery were unnecessary. Now that they weren’t constantly on the move, the demand for pottery containers increased.

Pottery is invaluable to historians because their style and the etchings and artwork on them can tell us a lot about what life was like for the people of the era.

Because people no longer had to scavenge or hunt and had the security of a constant food supply, people were able to start experimenting with their newly domesticated resources.

“Thousands of years of selective adaption were required to develop a sufficiently large cob and number of kernels to sustain a productive agriculture, an achievement that one geneticist has called “arguably man’s first, and perhaps his greatest, feat of genetic engineering.”” (Strayer pg 42)

The Formation of Societies

Since the formation of permanent establishments, people have been forming societies and making “breakthroughs to a new way of life” (Strayer 56). The earliest civilizations began appearing around 3500 BCE and have only increased in number since.

A Mesopotamian Ziggurat

People began to specialize in a particular craft or trade and we saw the early beginnings of “careers” form with the rise of masons, copper workers, scribes, weavers, potters, and numerous other needed talents.

People no longer needed to be a Jack-of-all-trades and could instead focus on becoming an expert in the area they preferred and trade their products for those that they needed and didn’t specialize in.

A Scribe at work

The organization and hierarchy of gender also changed. Women had previously experienced more equality to men and would bring in about 70% of the food through their gathering of plants, while the men would bring in about 30% with the meat they had hunted. After societies formed, women slowly become more and more confined to the home and the idea of nurturing the children or meant for specific jobs such as weaving, pottery, or food preparation.

Technological Developments

Weapons advancements were a development that also became necessary, starting particularly around 500 BCE when large empires were arising, in order to defend the newly formed societies. Designs and materials for stronger walls and durable and effective weapons for battle were a need that arose and was constantly improved upon, and are still a constant need even in today’s present time in order to stay a step ahead of our enemies.

The Great Wall of China, built around 200 BCE

The formation of societies caused improvements in lifestyles and technologies to become a need. When mass amounts of people are living together, it becomes difficult to provide sufficiently for everyone, and technological developments can aid in providing effectively for them all. With these innovation incentives, advancements such as irrigation, drainage, terracing, plumbing, and improved plows and other tools to build and improve society arose.

This theme, along with the others I mentioned, can still be seen in with the same importance in today’s modern society.

Egyptians getting water from a canal off the Nile