How the Beginning Began
In the beginning we were wanderers.
We didnât wander because we were trying to find ourselves; we wandered because we were HONGRY. We wandered with the seasons to places with more abundant roots, nuts, and berries. We wandered up and down elevation bands to forage for different plants. We followed the animal migrations because thatâs where the steaks were. What passed for shelter was what you could find when you needed it. Typically, we would not stay in the same place for more than a few weeks because weâd forage and hunt the yard to nothing in no time. Our stomachs would force us to start wandering anew.
The limitations of it all were pretty, well, limiting. The only power source an unaided human has are muscles, first our own and later that of the handful of animals that we could tame. Starvation, disease, and injury were common and had the unfortunately high likelihood of proving lethal. And any provided-by-nature root or rabbit that you ate was one that someone else would not be eating. So, sure, we lived in âharmony with natureâ . . . which is another way of saying we tended to beat the crap out of our neighbors whenever we saw them.
Odds are, whoever won the fight ate the loser.
Pretty exciting, eh?
Then, one miraculous day, we started something new and wondrous that made life less violent and less precarious and our world fundamentally changed:
We started gardening in our poo.
THE SEDENTARY FARMING REVOLUTION
Human poo is an odd thing. Since humans are omnivores, their poo boasts among the densest concentrations of nutrients in the natural world. Since humans know where their poo gets, er, deposited . . . letâs call it âinventoryingâ and âsecuring fresh suppliesâ was a simple process.*
Human poo proved to be one of the best fertilizer and growth mediums not just in the pre-civilized world, but right up until the mass introduction of chemical fertilizers in the mid-nineteenth centuryâand in some parts of the world, even today. Managing poo introduced us to some of our first class-based distinctions. After all, no one really wanted to gather and inventory and distribute and . . . apply the stuff. It is part of why Indiaâs Untouchables were/are so . . . untouchableâthey did the messy work of collecting and distributing ânight soil.â*
The Great Poo Breakthroughâmore commonly referred to as humanityâs first true technological suite, sedentary agricultureâalso introduced humans to the first rule of geopolitics: location matters, and which locations matter more changes with the technology of the day.
The first Geography of Success, that of the hunter/gatherer era, was all about range and variety. Good nutrition meant being able to tap multiple types of plants and animals. No one likes moving house, so we wouldnât relocate until an area had been picked clean. Since we tended to clear out an area pretty quickly, and because hunger would mercilessly nudge us to greener pastures, we needed to be able to easily relocate. We tended to concentrate, therefore, in areas with a great deal of climatic variety in a fairly dense footprint. Mountain foothills proved particularly popular because we could access several different climatic zones in a relatively short amount of horizontal distance. Another popular choice was where the tropics bled into the savanna so we could tap game-rich savannas in the wet season, and the plant-rich rain forests in the dry.
Ethiopia was particularly favored by hunter/gatherers as it blended savanna, rain forest, and vertical striations into a single neat package. But that was utter crap for (poo) farming.
Getting all the food you needed from one place required a single large-ish chunk of flattish groundânot the sort of spread or variety that could sustain hunter/gatherers. The seasonality of movement of the hunter/gatherer diet was largely incompatible with the constant attention requirements of crops, while the seasonal nature of harvesting crops was largely incompatible with the needs of humansâ desires to eat year-round. And just because you were staying put and farming didnât mean your neighbors were. Without proper disincentives, theyâd tend to forage right through your garden and youâd be out months of work and back into starvation mode. Many tribes started farming only to abandon it as unworkable.
Squaring these particular circles not only required that we learn a different way of feeding ourselves, it also forced us to find a different sort of geography from which we could source the food.
We needed a climate with a sufficient lack of seasonality so crops could be grown and harvested year-round, thus eliminating the starving season. We needed consistent water flows so that those crops could be relied upon to sustain us year-in, year-out. We needed places where nature provided good, sturdy natural fences so that the neighbors couldnât just walk in and help themselves to our labor-fruits. We needed a different Geography of Success.
THE WATER REVOLUTION
The only places on Earth that sport all three criteria are rivers that flow through low-latitude and low-altitude deserts.
Some parts of this are obvious.
»As any farmer or gardener knows, if it doesnât rain, youâre screwed. Yet if you set up shop on the banks of a river, youâll never run out of water for irrigation unless some bearded dude starts writing a Bible.
»Low-latitude regions get long, sun-filled days all year; the lack of seasonal variation enables multi-cropping. More crops at more times means less hunger, and hunger sucks.
»High-elevation rivers flow fast and straight and cut canyons in the landscape as they go. In contrast, low-altitude rivers are more likely to meander through flat zones, bringing their water into contact with more potential farmland. As an added bonus, when a braided river overflows its banks with the spring floods, it leaves behind a nice thick layer of nutrient-rich sediment. Silt is a great poo enhancer.
»Being in a desert region keeps those pesky foraging neighbors at bay. No sane hunter/gatherer is going to get to the edge of a desert, gaze into the endless mass of heat ripples, and dreamily opine, âI bet there are some awesome rabbits and rutabagas that-a-way.â Especially in an era when loose sandals were the most durable footwear available.
Rivers also hold a couple of less obvious advantages that are just as critical.
The first of them is transport. Moving stuff around isnât all that easy. Assuming you have access to an asphalt or concrete roadâthe sort of road that didnât even exist until the early twentieth centuryâit takes about twelve times as much energy to move things on land as compared to water. In the early years of the first millennia BCE, when a top-notch road was gravel, that energy disconnect was more likely in the neighborhood of 100 to 1.*
Having a slow-moving desert river running through the hearts of our first homelands enabled humans to relocate everything from where it was in surplus to where it was in demand. Labor distribution enabled early humans to exploit more fields and so increase plantings and food supplies, and to do so in places that didnât need to be within a short walk of where we lived. Such advantages were often the difference between spectacular success (that is, everybody doesnât starve) and equally spectacular failure (everybody does starve). There was also the not-even-remotely-insignificant issue of security: soldier distribution via the waterways enabled us to fend off those neighbors dumb enough to cross our desert lawns.
This transport issue, all by itself, separated the early agriculturalists from everyone else. More lands under more secure production meant more food produced, which meant larger and more stable populations, which meant more lands under more secure production, and so on. We were no longer wandering tribes, we were established communities.
The second issue rivers solve is one of . . . digestion.
Just because something is edible does not mean that it is edible right off the plant. Things like raw wheat can certainly be chewed, but they tend to be hard on every part of the digestive system, contributing to bloody mouths, bloody stomachs, and bloody poo. Not good things in any age.
Raw grains can be boiled to make a gruel that is disgusting in taste, appearance, and texture, but boiling both wrecks the grainsâ nutrient profile and anyway requires substantial fuel. Boiling might work as a supplementary food stream for a tribe that wanders from place to place and often has a supply of fresh firewood and only a few mouths to feed, but itâs a complete nonstarter in a terminal desert valley. Deserts never have many trees in the first place. Where deserts and trees overlap would of course be along rivers, putting fuel sourcing in direct competition with farmlands. Anywho, the point is that successful riverine agriculture generates big local populations. Boiling food for a lot of peopleâfor a communityâevery day simply isnât feasible in a world before coal or electricity.
Bottom line? Clearing land, digging irrigation trenches, planting seed, tending crops, and harvesting and threshing grain are the easy parts of early agriculture. The really brutal work is getting two pieces of rock and grinding your harvestâa few grains at a timeâinto a coarse powder that can then be prepared into easily digestible porridge (without needing heat), or, if you lived with a foodie, baked into bread. Our only available power was muscle powerâboth humans and our crittersâand the sad physics of the grinding process required so much labor that it kept humanity in a technological rut.
Rivers helped us flush this problem. Waterwheels enabled us to transfer a bit of a riverâs kinetic energy to a milling apparatus. So long as the water flowed, the wheel would turn, one big rock would grind against another, and we just needed to dump our grain into the grinding bowl. A bit later, presto! Flour.
Waterwheels were the original labor saver. At first nearly all that savings was simply folded back into the backbreaking work of irrigated agriculture, bringing more land under cultivation, enabling larger and more reliable yields. But with the farm-to-table process becoming somewhat less labor intensive, we started generating food surpluses for the first time. That too freed up a bit of labor, and we had inadvertently come up with something for them to do: manage the food surpluses. Bam! Now we have pottery and numbers. Now we need some way to store our urns and keep track of the math. Bam! Now we have basic engineering and writing. Now we need a way to distribute our stored food. Bam! Roads. All our stuff needed to be kept, managed, and guarded in a centralized location, while all our skills needed to be passed on to future generations. Bam! Urbanization and education.*
At each stage, we pulled a bit of labor out of agriculture and into new industries that managed, leveraged, or improved the very agriculture the labor had originally come from. The steadily increasing levels of labor specialization and urbanization first gave us towns, then city-states, then kingdoms, and eventually empires. Sedentary agriculture may have given us more calories while deserts provided better security, but it took the power of rivers to put us on the road to civilization.
During these early millennia, there . . . wasnât much traffic.
River-driven agricultural systems couldâand didâpop up all along the worldâs many rivers, but cultures enjoying that crunchy desert coating were rare birds. Our first good choices for sedentary agriculture-based civilizations were the Lower Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile, the mid-Indus (todayâs Pakistan), and to a lesser degree, the Upper Yellow (thatâs todayâs north-central China), and . . . thatâs about it.
Cultures may have been able to carve out nichesâor kingdoms, or even empiresâfor themselves along the Missouri or Seine or Yangtze or Ganges or Kwanzaâbut none of them would have enough insulation from the neighbors to persevere. Other groupsâwhether civilized or barbarousâwould wear these echo cultures down with unrelenting competition. Even the biggest and most badass of all those echo empiresâthe RomansââOnlyâ survived for five centuries in the dog-eat-dog world of early history. In contrast, Mesopotamia and Egypt both lasted multiple millennia.
The real kicker is that the next technological change didnât make human cultures more durable by insulating them, but instead less durable by ratcheting up the competition.
THE WIND REVOLUTION
In the seventh century CE, humanityâs milling technologies finally ground through a series of technical barriers and married the milling wheel to a new power source. Instead of using paddle wheels to reach below a structure to tap the power of moving water, we used fins and sails to reach above and tap the power of moving air. The rest of the apparatusâa crankshaft and a pair of grinding surfacesâstayed more or less the same, but shifting the power source shifted the geography of where human development was possible.
In the water era, the only places that enjoyed surplus labor and labor specialization were those anchored into river systems. Everyone else had to reserve a chunk of their labor force for the grueling work of grinding. By tapping the wind, however, almost anyone could use a windmill to mill flour. Labor specializationâand from it, urbanizationâcould occur anywhere with rainfall and the occasional stiff breeze. It wasnât so much that these newer cultures were more stable or secure. They werenât. On the whole they suffered from far less strategic insulation than their pre-wind peers. But wind power expanded the zones where farming could generate surplus labor by a factor of one hundred.
This widespread spamming of new cultures had a rapid-fire series of consequences.
First, civilized life may have become far more common as the straitjacket terms for the Geographies of Success loosened somewhat, but life became far less secure. With cities popping up anywhere the rain fell and the wind blew, cultures found themselves in each otherâs faces all the time. Wars involved players with better food supplies and increasingly capable technologies, meaning that war didnât simply become more common, it also became more destructive. For the first time, the existence of a human ...