Agrarian Revolution
Causes
Prior
to the Agrarian Revolution, people then led nomadic lives, going around
searching and gathering food and hunting wild animals. This is because at that
time, they could obtain food easily from their surroundings and they were
satisfied with their way of life. This was because people of that time lived in
small groups, from 25 to 40 people. This method of survival is met easily with
small groups, as the amount of food to be gathered is also not very large. Even
though if the group increases to a number whereby they could not handle, they
would break up into even smaller groups and continue with this kind of way of
life. However, on a global scale, as all the small groups became bigger and
split into smaller groups, and these smaller groups grew bigger too and split
into smaller groups again, the total number of so-called small groups increase,
as well as the number of people in the group. Hence, the total population was
slowly increasing. Moreover, their kind of way of life was only suitable and
efficient only with the abundance of land. Taking the situation from a
mathematical perspective,
Amount of food µ Land area
Since amount of land does not change, thus the amount
of food collected is fixed.
Amount
of food collected
Amount of food per person =
---------------------------------------
Number
of people in the group
As time passes, the number of people in the group
would increase. From the equation, we can see that the amount of food one
receives would decrease with time. Considering the fact that the group would
split up into smaller groups if the number of people were too big to handle, on
the global perspective, the population of the world grew rapidly.
Land area
Amount of land per group = ----------------------------
Number of groups
From
the above equation, the amount of land available for each of these groups
would decline without fail since the splitting of groups would result in the
increase in number of groups, and when small groups are formed, people would
feed that it is alright to increase the size of their own group, in a way
for defence purposes as the saying goes "Safety in numbers". As
a result of their narrow perspective, they repeated the mistake over and over
again. This led to the formation of a vicious cycle. The people encountered
the heavy burden of their own group facing famine. As a result, after serious
considerations and thoughts, a new way of life, by agriculture was spearheaded,
which ignited the Agrarian Revolution.
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Team ID: C0116084
