I was in Bangalore for a cousin’s wedding the past week and aside from the fantastic company and food, jet lag was the only other constant. I did get a lot of reading done during the flights though and *Energy and Civilization *****by Vaclav Smil has been extraordinary so far. I initially found it on GatesNotes, which I highly recommend as a book curator. Smil goes on this journey of defining the relationship between the state of civilization and its ability to develop and harness energy in the universe, starting from the very beginnings of mankind and the cultivation of food to produce human energy. What I found fascinating during the read was that the push towards agriculture was actually counter-productive at first. Compared to foraging, farming required larger energy inputs and actually produced less net energy outputs. So then why was agriculture pursued as the dominant food collection technique? This reminds me of Christensen’s bit in The Innovator’s Dilemma in which initial solutions of breakthrough innovations will actually be highly inefficient compared to the status quo and partly why I find this transition so fascinating.
I also read the free airport copies of FT during each of the layovers in Frankfurt and found some news worthy of mentioning:
“Any simplistic energy-driven explanation of agricultural origins is also weakened by the fact that the net energy returns of early farming were often inferior to those of earlier or concurrent foraging activities”. Smil’s arguments for why agriculture won was its ability to support higher population densities and increase the reliability of food supply throughout the year. Before moving forward, agriculture is **“**the active production of useful plants or animals in ecosystems that have been created by people”.
Why was foraging useful in the first place and what changes occurred that led to us finding farming more attractive? Initially, most tribes on the planet were nomadic hunter-gatherers. They would roam from one place to another while hunting and gathering what existed within that environment. They would hunt wild animals, gather plants or even raid other tribes for food and supplies. What happened next is hotly debated, but many regions independently began domestication of animals and plants. Tribes settled down and built fixed-home settlements. This is the Neolithic revolution as we know it, and it is still not definitive why we decided to settle down in the first place. According to A Short History of Progress by Robert Wright, a more stable climate was the answer. The Holocene era began roughly 11,6500 years ago, which began with rapid deglaciation and warming of ice sheets across North America and Europe, massively altering their landscapes. There is also new evidence that suggests social complexity introduced reason to be attached to a specific location.
Regardless, there was a massive underlying shift in the environment that necessitated farming even though it was less efficient. I don’t think the initial early adopters of farming had military motives in mind i.e. the ability to store more grain to feed more soldiers at any given time, but rather ways to support the new cultural affinity towards fixed settlements. Understanding you could even have a military advantage with farming required an exploration of such scale that would’ve been impractical to simply try. Especially when it was less efficient than foraging in the beginning.
There are still many questions I have like why these social dynamics of fixed communities happened in the first place. Is there a relationship between the altering of the biological climate and these dynamics?
This story is interesting to me because of the parallels that can be drawn to business/ startup literature. Yes it is a story about how humans went from reacting to their environment to controlling it and that is nice too! Also, it’s not like people observed a massive altering in the climate nor did they so intentionally think about the pressing needs of the community and how they could address it through domestication. In the same way that the Honda salesman in LA rode his Supercub to vent out his frustrations, not as a way to provide a recreational sports activity to Americans. This observation of innovation in this unknowable chaos is still a mystery to me, which is why I have to point it out when I see it in other places than the usual suspects.