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The Agricultural Revolution: Crash Course World History #1

CrashCourse

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1.Introduction to World History and the Test

0:00 / 0:53

John Green introduces Crash Course World History and explains that the 'test' for this course is life itself, measuring one's ability to be an informed, engaged, and productive citizen of the world.

  • World History
  • Informed Citizen
  • Life-long Learning

What's inside this course

  1. 0:00

    1. Introduction to World History and the Test

    John Green introduces Crash Course World History and explains that the 'test' for this course is life itself, measuring one's ability to be an informed, engaged, and productive citizen of the world.

  2. 0:53

    2. The Modern World and the Cheeseburger

    The video highlights the extraordinary journey of humanity from hunting and gathering to complex modern society, using a ninety-nine cent double cheeseburger as an example of the intricate processes involved in food production and global economy.

  3. 3:38

    3. Life as Foragers and Hunters

    This chapter describes the life of humans 15,000 years ago as foragers and hunters, noting that fossil evidence suggests they had healthier lives and more leisure time compared to early agriculturalists.

  4. 5:39

    4. Advantages and Disadvantages of Agriculture

    The video explores the pros and cons of agriculture, including controllable food supply, food surplus leading to cities and specialized labor, but also environmental changes and the potential for social inequality like slavery.

  5. 8:48

    5. Herding and Animal Domestication

    This section discusses herding as an alternative to foraging and agriculture, highlighting its benefits like meat, milk, and materials, but also the challenges of constant movement and the limited number of animals suitable for domestication.

  6. 10:50

    6. Open Letter to Elephants: Evolutionary Advantage

    John Green writes an open letter to elephants, humorously pointing out that their long gestation period and single offspring prevented them from being as useful to humans as cows, thus limiting their population growth and potential for global dominance.

Every chapter ends with a checkpoint (quiz, flashcards, retell, diagram, or prediction) and the course closes with a final boss-fight. More courses →

Full transcript of “The Agricultural Revolution: Crash Course World History #1”

— 178 segments
0:00Hello, learned and astonishingly attractive pupils. My name is John Green and I want to
0:04welcome you to Crash Course World History. Over the next forty weeks together, we will
0:08learn how in a mere fifteen thousand years humans went from hunting and gathering...
0:13Mr. Green, Mr. Green! Is this gonna be on the test?
0:15Yeah, about the test: The test will measure whether you are an informed, engaged, and
0:19productive citizen of the world, and it will take place in schools and bars and hospitals
0:24and dorm-rooms and in places of worship. You will be tested on first dates; in job interviews;
0:29while watching football; and while scrolling through your Twitter feed.
0:32The test will judge your ability to think about things other than celebrity marriages;
0:35whether you'll be easily persuaded by empty political rhetoric; and whether you'll be
0:39able to place your life and your community in a broader context.
0:42The test will last your entire life, and it will be comprised of the millions of decisions
0:47that, when taken together, make your life yours. And everything — everything — will
0:53be on it. I know, right? So pay attention.
1:00[theme music]
1:04In a mere fifteen thousand years, humans went from hunting and gathering to creating such
1:08improbabilities as the airplane, the Internet, and the ninety-nine cent double cheeseburger.
1:13It's an extraordinary journey, one that I will now symbolize by embarking upon a journey
1:17of my own ... over to camera two.
1:18Hi there, camera two ... it's me, John Green. Let's start with that double cheeseburger.
1:22Ooh, food photography! So this hot hunk of meat contains four-hundred and ninety calories.
1:25To get this cheeseburger, you have to feed, raise, and slaughter cows, then grind their
1:29meat, then freeze it and  ship it to its destination;
1:32you also gotta grow some wheat and then process
1:33the living crap out of it until it's whiter than Queen Elizabeth the First; then you gotta
1:37milk some cows and turn their milk into cheese. And that's not even to mention the growing
1:40and pickling of cucumbers or the sweetening of tomatoes or the grinding of mustard seeds, etc.
1:46How in the sweet name of everything holy did we ever come to live in a world in which such
1:49a thing can even be created? And HOW is it possible that those four-hundred and ninety
1:54calories can be served to me for an amount of money that, if I make the minimum wage
1:58here in the U.S., I can earn in ELEVEN MINUTES? And most importantly: should I be delighted
2:03or alarmed to live in this strange world of relative abundance?
2:07Well, to answer that question we're not going to be able to look strictly at history, because
2:11there isn't a written record about a lot of these things. But thanks to archaeology and
2:15paleobiology, we CAN look deep into the past. Let's go to the Thought Bubble.
2:19So fifteen thousand years ago, humans were foragers and hunters. Foraging meant gathering
2:23fruits, nuts, also wild grains and grasses; hunting allowed for a more protein-rich diet
2:28... so long as you could find something with meat to kill. By far the best hunting gig
2:32in the pre-historic world incidentally was fishing, which is one of the reasons that
2:35if you look at history of people populating the planet, we tended to run for the shore
2:38and then stay there. Marine life was: A) abundant, and
2:41B) relatively unlikely to eat you.
2:43While we tend to think that the life of foragers were nasty, brutish and short, fossil evidence
2:47suggests that they actually had it pretty good: their bones and teeth are healthier
2:51than those of agriculturalists.  And anthropologists
2:53who have studied the remaining forager peoples
2:55have noted that they actually spend a lot fewer hours working than the rest of us and
3:00they spend more time on art,  music, and storytelling.
3:03Also if you believe the  classic of anthropology, NISA,
3:05they also have a lot more  time for skoodilypooping.
3:07What? I call it skoodilypooping.  I'm not gonna apologize.
3:10It's worth noting that cultivation of crops seems to have risen independently over the
3:13course of milennia in a number of places ... from Africa to China to the Americas ... using
3:19crops that naturally grew nearby: rice in Southeast Asia, maize in in Mexico, potatoes
3:24in the Andes, wheat in the Fertile Crescent, yams in West Africa. People around the world
3:28began to abandon their foraging for agriculture. And since so many communities made this choice
3:33independently, it must have been a good choice ... right? Even though it meant less music
3:38and skoodilypooping. Thanks, Thought Bubble.
3:40All right, to answer that  question, let's take a look
3:41at the advantages and  disadvantages of agriculture.
3:44Advantage: Controllable food supply. You might have droughts or floods, but if you're growing
3:48the crops and breeding them to be hardier, you have a better chance of not starving.
3:52Disadvantage: In order to keep feeding people as the population grows you have to radically
3:57change the environment of the planet.
3:59Advantage: Especially if you grow grain, you can create a food surplus, which makes cities
4:03possible and also the specialization of labor. Like, in the days before agriculture, EVERYBODY'S
4:08job was foraging, and it took about a thousand calories of work to create a thousand calories
4:14of food ... and it was impossible to create large population centers.
4:16But, if you have a surplus agriculture can support people not directly involved in the
4:21production of food. Like,  for instance, tradespeople,
4:23who can devote their lives to better farming
4:25equipment which in turn makes it easier to produce more food more efficiently which in
4:30time makes it possible for a corporation to turn a
4:33profit on this ninety-nine  cent double cheeseburger.
4:37Which is delicious, by the way. It's actually terrible. And it's very cold. And I wish I
4:43had not eaten it. I mean, can we just compare what I was promised to what I was delivered?
4:47Yeah, thank you. Yeah, this is not that.
4:49Some would say that large and complex agricultural communities that can support cities and eventually
4:54inexpensive meat sandwiches are not necessarily beneficial to the planet or even to its human
5:00inhabitants. Although that's a bit of a tough argument to make, coming to you as I am in
5:04a series of ones and zeros.
5:05ADVANTAGE: Agriculture can be practiced all over the world, although in some cases it
5:09takes extensive manipulation of the environment, like y'know irrigation, controlled flooding,
5:13terracing, that kind of thing.
5:15DISADVANTAGE: Farming is hard. So hard in fact that one is tempted to claim ownership
5:20over other humans and then have them till the land on your behalf, which is the kind
5:24of non-ideal social order that tends to be associated with agricultural communities.
5:29So why did agriculture happen?
5:30Wait, I haven't talked about herders. Herders, man! Always getting the short end of the stick.
5:34Herding is a really good  and interesting alternative
5:37to foraging and agriculture. You domesticate
5:39some animals and then you take them on the road with you. The advantages of herding are
5:42obvious. First, you get to be a cowboy. Also, animals provide meat and milk, but they also
5:47help out with shelter because they can provide wool and leather.
5:50The downside is that you have to move around a lot because your herd always needs new grass,
5:54which makes it hard to build cities, unless you are the Mongols. [music, horse hooves]
5:59By the way, over the next forty weeks you will frequently hear generalizations, followed
6:03by "unless you are the Mongols" [music, hooves].
6:07But anyway one of the main reasons herding only caught on in certain parts of the world
6:10is that there aren't that many animals that lend themselves to domestication. Like, you
6:14have sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, horses, camels, donkeys, reindeer, water buffalo, yaks, all
6:20of which have something in common. They aren't native to the Americas. The only halfway useful
6:24herding animal native to the Americas is the
6:26llama. No, not that Lama,  two l's. Yes, that llama.
6:31Most animals just don't work for domestication. Like hippos are large, which means they provide
6:35lots of meat, but unfortunately, they like to eat people. Zebras are too ornery. Grizzlies
6:40have wild hearts that can't be broken. Elephants are awesome, but they take way too long to
6:45breed. Which reminds me! It's time for the Open Letter.
6:52Elegant. But first, let's see what the Secret Compartment has for me today. Oh! It's another
6:57double cheeseburger. Thanks, Secret Compartment. Just kidding, I don't thank you for this.
7:02An Open Letter to elephants.
7:04Hey elephants, You're so  cute and smart and awesome.
7:07Why you gotta be pregnant for 22 months? That's
7:09crazy! And then you only have one kid. If you were more like cows, you might have taken
7:14us over by now. Little did  you know, but the greatest
7:17evolutionary advantage: being useful to humans.
7:21Like here is a graph of cow population, and here is a graph of elephant population. Elephants,
7:27if you had just inserted yourself into human life the way cows did, you could have used
7:31your power and intelligence to form secret elephant societies, conspiring against the
7:35humans! And then you could have risen up, and destroyed us, and made an awesome elephant
7:40world with elephant cars, and elephant planes!
7:43It would have been so great! But noooo! You gotta be pregnant for 22 months and then have
7:48just one kid. It's so annoying!
7:50Best wishes, John Green.
7:52Right, but back to the agricultural revolution and why it occurred. Historians don't know
7:56for sure, of course, because there are no written records. But, they love to make guesses.
7:59Maybe population pressure necessitated agriculture even though it was more work, or abundance
8:04gave people leisure to  experiment with domestication
8:07or planting originated as a fertility rite
8:09- or as some historians  have argued - people needed
8:12to domesticate grains in  order to produce more alcohol.
8:15Charles Darwin, like most 19th century scientists, believed agriculture was an accident, saying,
8:20"a wild and unusually good variety of native plant might attract the attention of some
8:24wise old savage." Off topic, but you will note in the coming weeks that the definition
8:28of "savage" tends to be be "not me."
8:31Maybe the best theory is that there wasn't really an agricultural revolution at all,
8:34but that agriculture came out of an evolutionary desire to eat more. Like early hunter gatherers
8:40knew that seeds germinate when planted. And, when you find something that makes food, you
8:45want to do more of it. Unless it's this food. Then you want to do less of it. I kinda want
8:50to spit it out. Eww. Ah, that's much better.
8:55So early farmers would find the most accessible forms of wheat and plant them and experiment
8:59with them not because they were trying to start an agricultural revolution, because
9:02they were like, you know what would be awesome: MORE food!
9:05Like on this topic, we have evidence that more than 13,000 years ago humans in southern
9:09Greece were domesticating snails. In the Franchthi Cave, there's a huge pile of snail shells,
9:14most of them are larger than current snails, suggesting that the people who ate them were
9:17selectively breeding them to be bigger and more nutritious.
9:20Snails make excellent domesticated food sources, by the way because
9:23A) surprisingly caloric B) they're easy to carry since they come with
9:26their own suitcases, and C) to imprison them you just have to scratch
9:30a ditch around their living quarters.
9:32That's not really a revolution, that's just people trying to increase available calories.
9:35But one non-revolution leads to another, and
9:37pretty soon you have this,  as far as the eye can see.
9:40Many historians also argue  that without agriculture
9:42we wouldn't have all the bad things that come
9:44with complex civilizations like patriarchy, inequality, war, and unfortunately, famine.
9:49And, as far as the planet  is concerned, agriculture
9:51has been a big loser. Without it, humans never
9:53would have changed the environment so much, building dams, and clearing forests, and more
9:58recently, drilling for oil that we can turn into fertilizer.
10:01Many people made the choice for agriculture independently, but does that mean it was the
10:04right choice? Maybe so, and maybe not, but, regardless, we can't unmake that choice. And
10:10that's one of the reasons I think it's so important to study history.
10:12History reminds us that revolutions are not events so much as they are processes; that
10:17for tens of thousands of years people have been making decisions that irrevocably shaped
10:21the world that we live in today. Just as today we are making subtle, irrevocable decisions
10:26that people of the future will remember as revolutions.
10:29Next week we're going to journey to the Indus River Valley - whoa - very fragile, our globe,
10:34like the real globe. We're going to travel to the Indus River Valley. I'll see you then.
10:39Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan Muller. Our script supervisor is Danica Johnson.
10:44The show is written by my high school history teacher, Raoul Meyer, and myself, and our
10:48graphics team is Thought Bubble.
10:50If you want to guess at the phrase of the week, you can do so in comments. You can also
10:53suggest future phrases of the week. And if you have a question about today's video, please
10:56leave it comments where our  team of semi-professional
10:58quasi-historians will aim to answer it.
11:00Thanks for watching, and as we say in my hometown, Don't Forget To Be Awesome.