RE: The Cognitive Revolution
February 19, 2016 at 10:25 am
(This post was last modified: February 19, 2016 at 10:48 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Quote:If 70,000 years ago there was a Cognitive Revolution happened, giving humans as we now know them a lot of their cognitive functions, how come the agricultural revolution took until 7,000-10,000 years ago to take place? The agricultural revolution as I understand it being when communication started playing a big factor, and different cultures started to emerge.
Right off the bat, it took a -long- time for us to develop the cultivars required to farm. Additionally, until the introduction of the heavy moldboard plow (...in the middle ages) substantial tillage was impossible for most of the western world. There was no such thing as irrigation. Poor seed, poor soil, no water. More than anything else, until the revolution in tools and cultivars of 7-10k ago agriculture was a negative sum game. You needed alot of people to do alot of work over alot of space.....for very little return.
You can imagine the barriers to any group finding itself in a position to do that, if that were the only problem...but it wasn't. The environmental conditions of the span of time between 70-10k years ago was not conducive to agriculture. It was colder, drier, and growing seasons were shorter. Meanwhile megafauna and the native flora (some of which would become wild-cultivar) were plentiful and human populations were smaller. Additionally the tools they used to those ends were much more developed than anything used in agriculture.
There are some problems you simply can't think your way around...... and there are those problems which you can, but even here it takes time and work. It would be unreasonable to expect people to suddenly understand how to farm...be in the position to farm, and even more so to suddenly feel the need to farm, just because they achieved some measure of cognitive modernity. You have full cognitive modernity...how do you feel about farming, what's your relationship? For most of us, it's the same as it would have been for people who lived during that span. We lack the knowledge, we lack the tools, we lack the opportunity. The need is not obvious, and the desire is non-existent.
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