Imagine catastrophe.
The end of civilization. This complex, intricate modern world of ours is finished. Don’t worry about why. Maybe it was swine flu or nuclear war, killer robots or the zombie apocalypse. And now imagine that you—lucky you—are one of the few survivors. You have no phone. Whom would you phone, anyway? No Internet. No electricity. No fuel.1
Four decades ago, the science historian James Burke posed that scenario in his TV series Connections. And he asked a simple question: Surrounded by the wreckage of modernity, without access to the lifeblood of modern technology, where do you start again? What do you need to keep yourself—and the embers of civilization—alive?
And his answer was a simple yet transformative technology.2 It’s a plow. And that’s appropriate, because it was the plow that kick-started civilization in the first place. The plow, ultimately, made our modern economy possible. And by doing that, it made modern life possible, too, with all its conveniences and frustrations: the satisfaction of good, plentiful food; the ease of a quick Web search; the blessing of clean, safe water; the fun of a video game; but also the pollution of air and water, the scheming of fraudsters, and the grind of a tedious job—or no job at all.
Twelve thousand years ago, humans were almost entirely nomadic, hunting and foraging their way into every niche they could find all around the world. But at the time the world was emerging from a cold snap: things were starting to get hotter and drier. People who had been hunting and foraging in the hills and high plains found that the plants and the animals around them were dying. Animals were migrating to the river valleys in search of water, and people followed.3 This shift happened in many places—more than eleven thousand years ago in Western Eurasia, nearly ten thousand years ago in India and China, more than eight thousand years ago in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Eventually it happened almost everywhere.4
These fertile but geographically limited river valleys changed the way people got enough to eat: it was less rewarding to roam around foraging for food, but more rewarding to give the local plants some encouragement. That meant breaking up the surface of the soil, which brought nutrients to the surface and let moisture seep deeper, out of sight of the harsh sun. At first they used sharp sticks, held in the hand, but soon they switched to a simple scratching plow, pulled by a pair of cows. It worked remarkably well.
Agriculture began in earnest. It was no longer just a desperate alternative to the dying nomadic lifestyle, but a source of real prosperity. When farming was well established—two thousand years ago in Imperial Rome, nine hundred years ago in Song dynasty China—these farmers were five or six times more productive than the foragers they had replaced.5
Think about that: It becomes possible for a fifth of a society’s population to grow enough food to feed everyone. What do the other four-fifths do? Well, they’re freed up to specialize in other things: baking bread, firing bricks, felling trees, building houses, mining ore, smelting metals, constructing roads—making cities; building civilization.6
But there’s a paradox: More abundance can lead to more competition. If ordinary people live at subsistence levels, powerful people can’t really take much away from them—not if they want to come back and take more the next time there’s a harvest. But the more ordinary people are able to produce, the more powerful people can confiscate. Agricultural abundance creates rulers and ruled, masters and servants, and inequality of wealth unheard of in hunter-gatherer societies. It enables the rise of kings and soldiers, bureaucrats and priests—to organize wisely, or live idly off the work of others. Early farming societies could be astonishingly unequal—the Roman Empire, for example, seems to have been close to the biological limits of inequality: if the rich had had any more of the Empire’s resources, most people would simply have starved.7
But the plow did more than create the underpinning of civilization, with all its benefits and inequities. Different types of plows led to different types of civilization.
The first simple scratch plows used in the Middle East worked very well for thousands of years—and spread west to the Mediterranean, where they were ideal tools for cultivating the dry, gravelly soils. But then a very different tool, the moldboard plow, was developed—first in China more than two thousand years ago, and much later in Europe. The moldboard plow cuts a long, thick ribbon of soil and turns it upside down.8 In dry ground, that’s a counterproductive exercise, squandering precious moisture. But in the fertile wet clays of Northern Europe, the moldboard plow was vastly superior, improving drainage and killing deep-rooted weeds, turning them from competition into compost.
The development of the moldboard plow turned Europe’s natural endowment of fertile land on its head. People who lived in Northern Europe had long endured difficult farming conditions, but now it was the north, not the south, that enjoyed the best and most productive land. Starting about a thousand years ago, thanks to this new plow-based prosperity, cities of Northern Europe emerged and started to flourish. And they flourished with a different social structure from that of cities around the Mediterranean. The dry-soil scratch plow needed only two animals to pull it, and it worked best with a crisscross plowing in simple, square fields. All this had made farming an individualistic practice: a farmer could live alone with his plow, oxen, and land. But the wet-clay moldboard plow required a team of eight oxen—or, better, horses—and who had that sort of wealth? It was most efficient in long, thin strips often a step or two away from someone else’s long, thin strips. As a result, farming became more of a community practice: people had to share the plow and draft animals and resolve disagreements. They gathered together in villages. The moldboard plow helped usher in the manorial system in Northern Europe.9
The plow also reshaped family life. It was heavy equipment, so plowing was seen as men’s work. But wheat and rice needed more preparation than nuts and berries, so women increasingly found themselves at home preparing food. There’s a study of Syrian skeletons from nine thousand years ago that finds evidence that women were developing arthritis in their knees and feet, apparently from kneeling and twisting to grind grain.10 And since women no longer had to carry toddlers around while foraging, they had more frequent pregnancies.11
The plow-driven shift from foraging to farming may even have changed sexual politics. If you have land, that is an asset you can hand down to your children. And if you’re a man, that means you might become increasingly concerned about whether they really are your children—after all, your wife is spending all her time at home while you are in the fields. Is she really doing nothing but grinding grain? So one theory—speculative but intriguing—is that the plow intensified men’s policing of women’s sexual activity. If that was an effect of the plow, it’s been slow to fade.12
The plow, then, did much more than increase crop yields. It changed everything—leading some to ask whether inventing the plow was entirely a good idea. Not that it didn’t work—it worked brilliantly—but along with providing the underpinnings of civilization, it seems to have enabled the rise of misogyny and tyranny. Archaeological evidence also suggests that the early farmers had far worse health than their immediate hunter-gatherer forebears. With their diets of rice and grain, our ancestors were starved of vitamins, iron, and protein. As societies switched from foraging to agriculture ten thousand years ago, the average height for both men and women shrank by about six inches, and there’s ample evidence of parasites, disease, and childhood malnutrition. Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, called the adoption of agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”
You may wonder why, then, agriculture spread so quickly. We’ve already seen the answer: The food surplus enabled larger populations and societies with specialists—builders, priests, craftsmen, but also specialist soldiers. Armies of even stunted soldiers would have been sufficiently powerful to drive the remaining hunter-gatherer tribes off all but the most marginal land. Even so, today’s few remaining nomadic tribes still have a relatively healthy diet, with a rich variety of nuts, berries, and animals. One Kalahari Bushman was asked why his tribe hadn’t copied their neighbors and picked up the plow. He replied, “Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?”13
So here you are, one of the few survivors of the end of civilization. Will you reinvent the plow and start the whole thing over again? Or should we be content with our mongongo nuts?