What is the Deep Impact of Plant Domestication

Plant domestication, which led to agriculture, arguably has had among the deepest or most profound impacts on modern societies relative to all other human innovations. Not only did it lead to greater availability of food, allowing societies to grow in population, but it enabled a large labor force to be freed to pursue other specialties. Additionally, technologies related to agriculture, even today, continue to have profound consequences on all societies, for better and worse. Finally, with domestication, the plant's environment has also profoundly changed.

Initial Impact on Societies

Plant domestication was initially thought to have first appeared in the Fertile Crescent, with later societies in the Nile, Yellow River, and Indus valleys also adopting domesticated plants. However, now it has become evident that various societies have independently discovered how to domesticate given plants for food production. These plant staples have included wheat, barley, rice, lintels, beans, millet, corn/maize, and others.

Several results ultimately developed with the domestication of these plants. First, the benefits of plant domestication was to increase food supplies and make them more predictable. Although plants, as they become domesticate, are susceptible to disease and other detrimental results, over time genetics of plants begin to alter. For wheat, barley, and other grains, these developments can take hundreds of years before fully domesticated varieties form. However, once domesticated varieties form, they now require societies to more fully invest in them. This includes removing weeds, providing fertilizer, and harvesting at appropriate times so that yields are not lost. Thus, the first major impact is increased plant domestication requires societies to be settled. Greater dependence on plant domestication ultimately makes societies live in villages, towns, and even cities.

The other major development evident in New and Old World societies is the freeing up of labor. While plant domestication can be labor intensive, the greater output of food allows larger populations to form. Most or if not all settled societies show evidence of families becoming larger, where even social norms and systems evolved so that women began having more children. Once labor increased, then more people were able to focus on other activities, including the production of other goods that supported agriculture. Innovations often lead to other innovations to support them. Agriculture led to many secondary innovations that helped to support it. This included new technologies such as plows, the need for mathematics to calculate field areas, and eventually writing became one result in some societies that needed to account for agricultural goods being produced.

While we often see these impacts, particularly as they spread across different agricultural regions, as having beneficial results for societies. The reality is much more mixed. First, the environment greatly suffered. Plant domestication leads to the need for clearing more land, including burning of fields to fertilize them and clear them. This, already after 8000 before present, began to have an impact on societies and even likely global temperature. While we think global warming has been a modern effect of industry, agriculture arguably helped to create the first significant wave of human-induced climate change.

Intensification of Agriculture

After the initial innovation of plant domestication in many parts of the globe between 12,000-5,000 years ago, the next major wave of development occurred in how plant domestication enabled large cities to develop. Initially, plant domestication and agriculture allowed towns and villages to flourish. However, with increased accumulation of agricultural resources by fewer individuals, cities encouraged greater labor migration to them so that people could work in the new economies that had agriculture at their core. This is evident in the place that first had cities, southern Mesopotamia, but also appears to be the case in the Indus and the New Word. In these cases, social inequality in wealth distribution was closely associated with the rise of cities. However, that wealth was based on unequal ownership of agricultural holding.

Technologies also became more complex as the need to feed larger cities developed further after 5000 years ago. Large-scale irrigation networks, spanning hundreds of miles are found in the Old World, were required to intensify agriculture. These irrigation works not only required large labor forces, but they also required larger control of territory. One goal of now a new form of states, that is empires, was to control the food production process, where the control of water resources became key in some of the earliest empires from the 3rd millennium BCE to the 1st millennium BCE.