The Cognitive Revolution

[TheRealJoeFish]

Meh, it was like, 35,000 years ago when the dust started to come down.

But you can only see it with an amber spyglass...

[Neo-Scholastic]

I've often wondered the same as the OP. We can speculate but I doubt the full answer will ever be known. In the meantime we can write all kinds of just-so stories and pretend that those are sufficient. Tycho monolith?

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

[Angrboda]

Jared Diamond's Gun, Germs, and Steel has been made into a television documentary if you have no patience for books.

[Alex K]

Jared Diamond's Gun, Germs, and Steel has been made into a television documentary if you have no patience for books.

Interesting!

[Heat]

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.

Thanks for the reply, and everyone's for that matter. I understand it a bit better now.



Does anyone know why out of the blue after 60,000 years, agriculture started emerging? Like why then, was there any specific reason, or was it just chance, as in the right time period with the right people and right resources? Because like for instance we can say the industrial revolution happened as a result of the invention of the steam engine(with the addition of other factors), was there any equivalency of this that spurred the Agricultural Rev.? Also I understand the conditions now a bit better. However, I still can't stop thinking that 70,000 years is a crazy amount of time, even given all the other factors mentioned.

[Thumpalumpacus]

I'm not sure there's a "why" at all.

[ignoramus]

It's a bit like trying trying to pick the specimen where prehistoric man turned into a human!
It evolved over tens of thousands of years!

I'd like to know how long the ancient Chinese or Japanese have been growing rice?
Just because one part of the world does it doesn't mean the idea will spread like wildfire.

I know the American Indians were good at spreading rumours of whose rooting who via smoke signals though!

[The Grand Nudger]

Does anyone know why out of the blue after 60,000 years, agriculture started emerging?

Sort of, with corrections.  It wasn't out of the blue.  The idea that we went from not doing anything to full on farming is not a factual appraisal of the scenario.  We'd been developing the cultivars for thousands of years....unintentionally.  We'd been developing the land for ag for thousands of years, unintentionally.  Even if we had the tools for ag (more on this in a minute) they wouldn't have worked without adequate cultivars and adequate land.   

Consider this.  To prepare twenty acres of woodland for agriculture, today....with a 400hp tractor with a beefy pto all necessary attachments front and rear, and small tools like chainsaws; ..all of that...takes months of continuous operation and maintenance.  That's just to get the land ready to accept seed and fertility and irrigation.  That work has to be done regardless of what you plan to crop, regardless of when.  We started that work before we began farming and we're -still- at it.  All the tractors in the world have yet to finish the task set before them.  

Now imagine the time it would take to do that with sticks and rocks.........you can actually do the math if you follow any current commercial ag publication.  They'll tell you how many man hours of labor it is, there's a conversion.  Our cropland in total contains more work in time than we've been working it (because of our use of machinery as a labor multiplier).  It contains hundreds of thousands of years worth of labor.  

Like why then, was there any specific reason, or was it just chance, as in the right time period with the right people and right resources? Because like for instance we can say the industrial revolution happened as a result of the invention of the steam engine(with the addition of other factors), was there any equivalency of this that spurred the Agricultural Rev.? Also I understand the conditions now a bit better. However, I still can't stop thinking that 70,000 years is a crazy amount of time, even given all the other factors mentioned.

Why then.  Well, the climate began to shift into a state that better supported it, enough clearing had been done, there were enough hands available, food was becoming less available by other means, we'd developed wild forage crops into wild cultivars...and, importantly, we developed tools which could provide marginal tillage (and so those hundreds of thousand of years of labor could begin in earnest).  

70 thousand years is, by reference to work required, actually a drop in the bucket.  We started by hand picking wild forage grains for food and clearing thickets for heat, then by hand clearing and hand hoeing small forage plots, then by simple plow of proto-staples..then heavy plow with draft animals and staple crops proper (which both have their own work requirements behind them), then replacing the draft animals with engines and the plows with modern implements.  It's a lot of work, with alot behind us and still more ahead.

Consider, also, that a grain based staple diet, in addition to -all- of the above, required human adaptation. To this very day, such adaptation is not uniform in our global population and some staples are more suitable than others along those metrics. Our adaptation to dairy predates our adaptation to wheat, mull that one over.

Lastly, because I can't talk about this without mentioning it. It didn't take any specific people. That's plain enough as ag developed all over the world independently. Farming is just very very advanced foraging, it;s something that all human beings are capable of. Chimps..today, have taken over old fruit operations covered in by jungle and they now work those areas much like our distant ancestors would have worked the wild cultivars. It might not even be a particularly -human- attribute, let alone limited to a particular group therein.

@Igno, that q about the chinese and rice, it;s a good one. How long have they been farming rice.

-Like they do now? 50 years or so.
-Like they did before that? 8k years, starting in the Yangtze Valley - the origin of both the wild cultivar and the cultural and mechanical practices associated with "traditional" rice production.
-How long have they been picking and eating rice in significant amounts? Longer than the above, up to 13k years..... that's how we recognized that it was a candidate for production in the first place. We had it available, we were already eating it, we could see how it grew. This, according to carbon ratios found in human teeth...which tell an interesting story about -all- staple crops. There's another lag between their domestication and their ascension to staple status. The 5k year span here is like the more pronounced lag in wheat in western europe....which was domesticated by 8k years ago as well, had been used noticeably for 13k years...but would still take another 6k years before it became a staple. Corn is even more pronounced. Similar domestication profile, historically - did well in central america for a short time in context - it's trial run-...but wouldn't become a staple crop in our modern sense of the term until 1940.