How everything can collapse5/10/2023 ![]() ![]() Diversity, community, and opportunity draw restless youth to urban centers. Today Americans willingly move to big cities. The transition from sedentism to domestication took at least four thousand years. In his fascinating new book, Against the Grain, the Yale professor concurs with Tudge’s assessment: our ancestors did not submit readily to the state. Political scientist and anthropologist James C Scott is the latest to take a stab at this agriculture myth. People did not invent agriculture and shout for joy they drifted or were forced into it, protesting all the way. The changes of the Neolithic Revolution were not really revolutionary, but merely a consolidation of established trends. ![]() He dated porto-farmers back forty thousand years, into the late Paleolithic: ![]() In 1998 British science writer Colin Tudge tore apart the notion of a sudden appearance of agriculture. The reasons for pretty much everything are complex. History has never been neatly wrapped up in a tidy bundle. Humans have short memories and long for fantasy. Sure, a few tribes resisted, but the urban life that grain and livestock provided proved too seductive. ![]() About 10,000 years ago a group figured out agriculture, settled down in the Fertile Crescent, and the seeds of industrial farms were planted. For 250,000 years humans were hunters and gatherers. ![]()
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