The bodies of Homo sapiens did not evolve to engage in these boring activities of tending crops such as wheat. They were more adapted to climbing fruit trees or chasing prey, rather than bending down to clear rocks or struggling to carry buckets of water.
As a result, human spines, knees, necks and soles of feet have to pay the price. Studies of ancient skeletons have revealed a host of ailments such as herniated discs, arthritis and hernias as humans entered the agricultural age.
Furthermore, new agricultural activities would take so long that humans would be forced to permanently settle next to wheat fields. This completely changed the way humans live.
So we didn’t actually domesticate wheat, but wheat domesticated us?
What did wheat do to make Homo sapiens give up his originally good life and switch to another miserable way of life? What compensation does it provide?
As far as Homo sapiens' diet is concerned, it's actually not better. Don’t forget, humans are originally omnivorous apes, eating a variety of foods. Before the agricultural revolution, grains formed only a small part of the human diet. Moreover, switching to a grain-based diet not only results in insufficient minerals and vitamins that are difficult to digest, but is also very harmful to teeth and gums.
As far as people's livelihood economy is concerned, wheat has not brought economic security.
Compared with hunter-gatherers, farmers' lives are actually less secure. Gatherers have dozens of different kinds of food that they can use to survive. Even if they don't have any food in stock, they don't have to worry about starving to death in times of famine. Even if the number of a certain species decreases, as long as more other species are collected and hunted, the required amount can be made up.
However, until modern times, most of the diets of agricultural societies relied on a few agricultural crops. In many areas, there was even only one staple food, such as wheat, potatoes or rice. Therefore, if there is a water shortage, a locust plague comes, or a fungal infection breaks out, the number of deaths among poor farmers may even reach one million.
In terms of human violence, wheat cannot provide physical safety. The characters of farmers in the early agricultural era were not necessarily gentler than those of foragers in the past, and they might even be more violent. After all, they now have more personal property and need land to farm it. If the land is robbed by nearby people, you may fall from the paradise of food and clothing to the hell of hunger, so there is almost no room for compromise on the matter of land.
In the past, if the gatherer tribe encountered a stronger opponent, it could be solved by retreating and moving. Although it is somewhat difficult and dangerous, it is at least a feasible option. But if farmers encounter a strong enemy, retreat means giving up their fields, houses and stored grain. Many times this is almost destined to starve to death. As a result, farmers often have to hold on to their fields and the two sides fight to the death.
Many anthropological and archaeological studies show that in agricultural societies with only basic village and tribal political structures, human violence caused 15% of total deaths, and 25% among men. There are now two agricultural tribal societies in New Guinea, and the percentages of male deaths caused by violence are 30% and 35% respectively. Among the Huarani people in Ecuador, about 50% of adults will die at the hands of another person’s violence!
Slowly, humans developed advanced social structures, such as cities, kingdoms, and modern states, and human violence was controlled. However, it took thousands of years for such a large and effective political structure to be finally established.
Of course, rural life did bring some direct benefits to the first-generation farmers, such as less need to worry about wild beast attacks, wind and rain, but for ordinary people, it may actually do more harm than good.
Modern society is prosperous and wealthy, but it may be difficult for us to understand the disadvantages. After all, all this wealth and security are based on the agricultural revolution, so we feel that the agricultural revolution is really a wonderful progress.
However, we cannot only look at these thousands of years of history from today’s perspective. For a prehistoric farmer who was dying of hunger, fatigue, and disease, what did wheat give them?
For an individual, wheat is nothing given. But for the Homo sapiens species as a whole, wheat’s impact has been profound.
Growing wheat provided more food per unit of land, and the number of Homo sapiens grew exponentially.
Around 13,000 B.C., when humans still relied on gathering and hunting for a living, a patch of fertile soil might have been enough to support a tribe of a hundred members, and the people would have been relatively healthy and well-nourished. By about 8500 B.C., the wilderness of wild plants had turned into fields of wheat. The land could now support a rural village of about a thousand people, but the population density also increased, and members were more susceptible to disease and malnutrition than It was too serious in the past.
If we want to measure the evolutionary success of a species, the criterion is the number of copies of its DNA helix in the world. If there are no more DNA copies of a species in the world, it means that the species is extinct. And if many individuals of a certain species exist in the world with copies of its DNA, it means that the species has evolved successfully and is thriving.
From this perspective, 1,000 copies of DNA is always better than 100 copies. This is the true essence of the agricultural revolution: allowing more people to survive in worse conditions.
Hidden behind the harvest of farmland and behind the large amount of grain seeds is actually a profound sociological issue.
The protagonist is relatively slow in this regard. He has not yet realized what profound impact he will have by forcing ants from a gathering society into an agricultural society.
He just felt that engaging in agriculture and animal husbandry could get more food, and more food meant more ant colonies, more powerful forces, and more... security.
As for the future, the worker ants under his command will no longer be able to spend a small amount of time every day gathering or hunting, and then rest in the nest doing nothing. From now on, they must go out early and come back late. During the busy farming season, they must work among the dense plants. They must not stop even during the slack farming season. They need to complete other tasks assigned by the upper level: construction, transportation, military service or other work.
He didn't think about these changes, and probably wouldn't care about them. He was the ruler, and he was always busy, another form of busy.
Ants are indeed hard-working creatures, but after being overworked, after being trained by labor to train their minds and bodies, what will happen to their social structure that extremely ignores individuals?
On the other side of the ocean, the butterfly's wings are flapping again. What kind of complex variables will appear when a new storm meets the cold wave from the north?
