Domesticating plants and animals

For most of human history, everyone hunted wild animals and gathered wild plants for food. This way of life is called foraging. But starting around 12,000 years ago, things began to change. Some groups of foragers learned that they could have access to more food by raising animals and growing plants. Slowly, over the course of thousands of years, people chose the best plants and animals and made them dependent on humans. We call this process domestication. Domestication meant that more food could be produced in smaller areas. Foragers had to roam hundreds of miles to find enough food, but farmers could raise everything they needed to feed themselves within a short walk from home.

Domestication changed the way people collected and prepared their food. Some people gradually stopped foraging and became farmers. This transformed how humans lived. It changed their homes. It changed the relationships they had with each other, the kinds of music and art they made, the way they made decisions, and much more. The shift to farming was such a big change, it's often called a revolution—the Agricultural Revolution.

Where did cities come from?

One of the biggest effects of the shift to farming was the development of an agricultural surplus. This was when farmers produced more food than they needed to feed themselves. Since they grew more food than they needed, ancient farmers could sell their extra food to other people. That meant that some people didn’t have to farm to survive.

Having a food surplus made it possible for communities to get larger because they had enough food to feed more people. People started living in small, permanent villages. Some of these villages eventually became cities—much larger groups of people living in one place. Some of the first cities formed in Southwest Asia. These cities were in an area called the Fertile Crescent. It was called that because the rivers flooded regularly, which made the soil very good for growing crops. After 2500 BCE, cities spread rapidly to new areas, like South Asia, along the Indus River Valley. In the Americas, the earliest cities were Caral and Aspero, which formed around 3500 BCE, in present-day Peru.

More food, more problems?

Living in cities had many advantages. That’s why cities developed everywhere that agriculture did. Extra stored food meant that some people living in cities didn’t have to farm. They could do other jobs the city needed, like build houses, make tools, or protect the walls. Cities became centers of trade and creativity. Within cities, people could build permanent homes, create markets to trade goods, be creative through writing and art, and produce tools to make life easier. As a result, new jobs emerged. Specialists like carpenters, toolmakers, brewers, and bakers ate the surplus food produced by farmers while producing other things. Leaders made decisions about how to store, share, and protect surplus food. Soldiers and priests helped support the leaders’ decisions.

But cities also created new problems that foragers didn’t have to deal with. The development of new jobs gave some people more power or more money than others. These differences resulted in the development of hierarchies—social systems where some groups had control over others. These hierarchies helped large communities organize, allowing them to build big projects and solve everyday issues. However, hierarchies also meant that some people—especially farmers—could be treated badly by soldiers and leaders.

Summary

Let’s summarize: The domestication of plants and animals meant that for the first time, a group of people could produce more food than they needed. This surplus helped populations grow, and growing populations formed cities. But cities were large, confusing places, and they needed to be governed. Hierarchies emerged to manage the cities, with both good and bad effects.

Those early cities didn’t look like the cities we know today, but they had some of the same features. People generally built permanent houses. They recognized some sort of rulers, and they had some type of hierarchy. All cities had specialists—people who did jobs other than farming. These changes would not have been possible without the technology that started it all—the domestication of plants and animals. Thanks to this new technology and its impacts, human societies began to grow larger and more complex beginning around 12,000 years ago.