why did the practice of settled agriculture lead to the emergence of more complex civilization?
609865
Brace yourself - this is long, but hopefully worth your time. Here goes---> During the 10 million years humans were living as nomads, there was no concept of locking up food... food grew and walked around outside, and people went out when they were hungry and killed something or picked something and ate it. There was always farming, because they recognized that fruit came from seeds - and it does not take a genius to think to poke a few seeds into the dirt so there would be more of the plants they liked best when the tribe came back that way again. But then there were a few people who wanted more of the favored foods than they had before, and they invested more time in farming. And then there were those who wanted still more, and still more. Those few tribes became settled in the area of the Fertile Crescent and farmed like crazy. They consequently wound up with a surplus of food, which led to a boom in population (that's a no-brainer). And when some said that it was silly to keep working in light of this surplus of tasty eats, it was pointed out that the tribe was bigger. And when some folks still felt lazy and missed the good old days of lounging about visiting and snacking on whatever was around, someone got the great idea that the people would have no choice but to work if the food was kept locked away - people would get so much food for so much work. And guards were appointed to mind the stores, which kept them from all that gardening (and for which they were probably grateful). And always this new surplus, and always more babies. So eventually there is a need for more land for farming, and the best way to get that is to kill off the neighbors - which they could do, since their numbers were greater and they had the food to sustain them through long campaigns of war. And so it went, on and on, until that one culture who decided to plunk themselves down in one spot spread all over the world. And that culture is now us. Wherever you are, if you are reading this, we are the same culture. So that's pretty much what happened. It was not necessarily this general "giving up" of the nomadic ways... it was forced. And the 2 big complexities we enjoy because of that are 1- WORK, as we know it. Management. Trading your services for money to get food (because if you could figure out how to eat without slaving at you crap job all day, would you bother to show up?)and 2- WAR, as we know it. Before this time, tribes were like Native Americans. There were skirmishes at their borders and the occasional night raid, but no one was trying to utterly destroy one another, which is what happened to tribes that tried to have the Fertile Crescent Totalitarian Agrarists Society as neighbors... and is still happening to "tribes" who resist the encroachment of our culture today. Wow, I got on a roll there. I think I'll take a nap now.
1180296
It was for colonization.  People were wanting to move farther into the country and they were mostly farmers.
1053511
From archaeological evidence it would appear that the first groups of people to stop being hunter-gatherers and set up permanent settlements with agriculture and domestic animals and a structured community was in Sumer. They also started us on the road to mathematics, geometry, poetry, fancy religious rituals, reading, writing and astrology. They seemed to have been pretty fair at homeopathic medicine and they were positively wizard at law. Politicking seems to have been another of their inventions, discoveries, whatever. They're the first we've ever found to record elections of local officials. Imagine that. And you thought the USA invented democracy. Or maybe the Athenian Greeks. Sorry, Sumer beat 'em both by about 3,000 years!\n\nLocation: Modern-day Basra area, in southern Iraq.
1102445
Agriculture\n\nAbout two-thirds of all Indians derive their livelihood directly from agriculture, a proportion that is not much smaller than it was at the beginning of the 20th century. The area cultivated, however, has risen steadily and is now considerablymore than half of the nation's total area, a proportion matchedby few countries in the world. Inthe more fertile regions, such as the Indo-Gangetic Plain or the deltas of the eastern coast, the proportion of cultivated to total land often exceeds 90 percent.\n\n\nAlthough the average farm size is only about five acres (two hectares) and is declining, that figure masks the markedly skewed distribution of landholdings. More than half of all farms are less than three acres in size, while much of the remainder is controlled by a small number of relatively affluent peasants and landlords. Most cultivators own farms that provide little more than a bare subsistence for their families. Further, nearly one-third of all agricultural households own no land at all and, along with many submarginal landowners, must work for the larger landholders or must supplement their earnings from some subsidiary occupation, often the one traditionally associated with their caste.\n\nAgricultural technology has been undergoing rapid change inIndia. Government-sponsored, large-scale canal irrigation projects, begun by the British in the mid-19th century, were greatly extended after independence, but there has been a shift in emphasis toward deep wells (called tube wells in India), often privately owned, from which water is raised either by electric or diesel pumps. Important in several parts of India, especially the southeast, is “tank” irrigation, in which water is drawn from small reservoirs created along the coursesof minor streams.\n\nThe demand for chemical fertilizers also has been steadily increasing, although since the late 1960s the introduction of new hybrid, high-yielding varieties of seeds (HYVs), mainly for wheat and secondarily for  rice, has brought about the most dramatic increases in production, especially in Punjab (where their adoption is virtually universal), Haryāna, western Uttar Pradesh, and Gujarāt. So great has been the success of the so-called Green Revolution that India was able to build up buffer  grain stocks sufficient for the country to weather several years of disastrously bad monsoons with virtually no imports or starvation and even managed to become, in some years, a modest net food exporter. During the same period, the production of coarse grains and pulses, which were less in demand than rice and wheat, either did not increase significantly or decreased. Hence, the total per capita grain production has been notably less than that suggested by many protagonists of the Green Revolution, and the threat of major food scarcity has not been eliminated.\n\nMost Indian farms grow little besides food crops, especially cereal grains, and these account for more than three-fifths of the area under cultivation. Foremost among the grains, in terms of both area sown and total yield, is rice, the crop of choice in almost all areas with more than 40 inches (1,000 millimetres) of average annual precipitation, as well as in someirrigated areas. Wheat ranks second in both area sown and total yield, and, because of the use of HYVs, leads all grains in yield per acre. Wheat is grown mainly on the fertile soils of northern and northwestern India in areas with 15 to 40 inchesof average annual precipitation, often with supplementary irrigation. Unlike rice, which is mainly grown during the kharif (summer) season, wheat is primarily a rabi (cool-season) crop. Other important cereals, in descending order of sown acreage, are sorghum (called jowar in India), pearl millet (or bajra), corn (maize), and finger millet (or ragi). All of these typically are grown on relatively infertile soils unsuitable for rice or wheat, while corn cultivation is also favoured in hilly and mountainous reg
348395
..corn...grew large crops of corn... according to a source I read.\n\nIt is true that many sites of the towns of the ancient tribes who built the mounds of the Mississippi valley were found in dense forests and their earthworks were overgrown with trees of a large size when they were first seen by white men. Their extensive earthworks, such as that at Fort Ancient, indicate an extensive population. \n\nThey were too numerous to live by hunting and fishing alone, and they as well as the more recent doubtless grew large crops of corn.
766283
we got alliens more developed than humans
127182
Good question.  I think you may be on to something.  Our ancestors went from small clans roaming from cave/tree to cave/tree.  Then grew from towns and cities to states and countries in just several hundred years.  So as beliefs between people become more assimilated we may see a further melding of the worlds population into larger and larger countries.  Might take hundreds of years?
966560
I see civilisation as a group who carry out tasks that are beneficial for the group as a whole, and not just the individual. Therefore the following animals have a basic form of civilisation:\n\n\nGenerally pack animals (eg lions/wolves): Have a hierarchy and look after each other. Hunt for the young and teach them how to hunt.\nColony insects: gather food and build nursery's for their young, have a sort of collective "brain" and job structure.
824513
Industrialization born out of necessities.  Population has grown and demand  for commodities as well.  Families working together makes more time in working in other fields and thus having an ample time at each other.  Opportunities grew also fused by competition.  Education and knowledge has become imperative in the industry.  People then became self sufficient.  The society is still there the same, what changed is the culture.
1153988
Agriculture generally requires large area of land and is land intensive. Land is ever becoming a scarce resource as world population is keeping exploding as a result of which the existing household per capita land is decreasing and hence people are cutting down forests in search of additional land for agriculture. On the other hand household lands are being monopolized by big commercial farms driving household farmers into towns. Still in some places household farmers are changing int producing high value products that do not need big land area.This has brought about a change in agriculture pattern in many areas of the world.
551559
Globalization can usefully be conceived as a process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions, generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction and power. \nIt is characterized by four types of change:\n- First, it involves a stretching of social, political and economic activities across political frontiers, regions and continents.\n- Second, it suggests the intensification, or the growing magnitude, of interconnectedness and flows of trade, investment, finance, migration, culture, etc.\n- Third, the growing extensity and intensity of global interconnectedness can be linked to a speeding up of global interactions and processes, as the evolution of world-wide systems of transport and communication increases the velocity of the diffusion of ideas, goods, information, capital, and people.\n- Fourth, the growing extensity, intensity and velocity of global interactions can be associated with their deepening impact such that the effects of distant events can be highly significant elsewhere and even the most local developments may come to have enormous global consequences. In this sense, the boundaries between domestic matters and global affairs can become increasingly blurred. \nIn sum, globalization can be thought of as the widening, intensifying, speeding up, and growing impact of world-wide interconnectedness. By conceiving of globalization in this way, it becomes possible to map empirically patterns of world-wide links and relations across all key domains of human activity, from the military to the cultural.\n\nFrom the pre-modern, through to the early modern (1500-1800), modern (19th to early 20th century), to the contemporary period, distinctive patterns of globalization can be identified in respect of their different systemic and organizational features - uneven as they often are. These patterns constitute distinctive historical forms of globalization. By comparing and contrasting these changing historical forms, it is possible to identify more precisely what is novel about the present epoch. \nAccordingly, to advance an account of globalization it is necessary to turn from a general concern with its conceptualization to an examination of the key domains of activity and interaction in and through which global processes evolve.
445416
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, agricultural growth in the region was slow compared to the rates achieved in the past thirty years. Agricultural development in the recent past has been characterized by an extraordinary diversity both within and between countries. Many largely traditional farming systems that were sustainable with a low density of population are becoming increasingly strained by, and vulnerable to, the pressure of rising population. Spectacular environmental damage exemplifies the consequences of this pressure as land-hungry cultivators push into the tropical forests and up the hillsides. A growing prosperity among some groups contrasts with the deepening poverty among others less fortunate.
860481
In simple terms farming provided lots more food for a lot less work. This increased the population of humanity that the world could sustain.\n\nFarming was started accidentally by gathering. When food and berries were eaten, the waste would always be thrown away in the same field by some tribes. When they returned to the site the next year they found their waste had grown into plants- since the gatherer had subconciously selected the best fruits the best food eventually came to be found in these fields (especially if the same field was also the cat-holes or latrines site). Farming was born- as a pleasant surprise to those who discovered it rather than an ingenious invention.
1017577
Civilization" can also describe the culture of a complex society, not just the society itself. Every society, civilization or not, has a specific set of ideas and customs, and a certain set of items and arts, that make it unique. Civilizations have even more intricate cultures, including literature, professional art, architecture, organized religion, and complex customs associated with the elite. Civilization is such in nature that it seeks to spread, to have more, to expand, and it has the means by which to do this.a classic example being Chinese (Asia)civilization and its influence on Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and so forth). Many civilizations are actually large cultural spheres containing many nations and regions. The civilization in which someone lives is that person's broadest cultural identity.
286901
Well increased efficency results in more product and less work.  This mean more money and available resources for the civilization which also mean since the people dont have to worry as much about food they can focus on other advances in society like science and math etc...
750948
Technological development in the Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations was based on a sense of practicality while societies in the Eastern Hemisphere were able to advance their technology on the scholarship of others before them.
1141457
Determining the origin of agriculture is problematic since it pre-dates the invention of writing. Some authorities insist localized farming took place more than 10,000 years ago, while others believe the earliest systematic plantings/harvestings took place no more than 7,000 years ago. \n\nThe practice of agriculture is often used to distinguish the neolithic period from earlier parts of the stone age. The first crops that humans domesticated included wheat (einkorn and emmer) and barley. \n\nIt is clear that farming was invented at least twice, probably more often: once in the Fertile Crescent (some say by the Natufian culture, others say by the Sumerians), once in East Asia (rice), and once in Central America (maize, squash). \n\nMost likely, there was a gradual transition from a hunter-gatherer economy to an agricultural one, via a lengthy period when some crops were deliberately planted, and other foods were gathered from the wild. The reasons for the earliest introduction of farming may have included climate change. \n\nFarming allows a much greater density of population than can be supported by hunting and gathering, and the ability of farmers to feed large numbers of people whose activities have nothing to do with material production was the crucial factor in the rise of standing armies. \n\nAfter 1492, the world's agricultural patterns were shuffled in the widespread exchange of plants and animals known as the Columbian Exchange. Crops and animals that were previously only known in the Old World were now transplanted in the New, and vice versa. \n\nArchaeobotanists/Paleoethnobotanists have traced the selection and cultivation of specific food plant characteristics, such as a semi-tough rachis and larger seeds, to just after the Younger Dryas (about 9,500 BC) in the early Holocene in the Levant region of the Fertile Crescent. Limited anthropological and archaeological evidence both indicate a grain-grinding culture farming along the Nile in the 10th millennium BC using the world's earliest known type of sickle blades. \n\nThere is even earlier evidence for conscious cultivation and seasonal harvest: grains of rye with domestic traits have been recovered from Epi-Palaeolithic (10,000+ BC) contexts at Abu Hureyra in Syria, but this appears to be a localised phenomenon resulting from cultivation of stands of wild rye, rather than a definitive step towards domestication. It is not until ca. 8,500 BC, in middle-Eastern cultures referred to as Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB), where there is the first definite evidence for the emergence of a widespread subsistence economy that was dependent on domesticated plants and animals. \n\nIn these contexts lie the origins of the eight so-called founder crops of agriculture: firstly emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, then hulled barley, pea, lentil, bitter vetch, chick pea and flax. These eight crops occur more or less simultaneously on PPNB sites in this region, although the consensus is that wheat was the first to be sown and harvested on a significant scale. \n\nThere are many sites that date to between ca. 8,500 BC and 7,500 BC where the systematic farming of these crops contributed the major part of the inhabitants' diet. From the Fertile Crescent agriculture spread eastwards to Central Asia and westwards into Cyprus, Anatolia and, by 7,000 BC, Greece. Farming, principally of emmer and einkorn, reached northwestern Europe via southeastern and central Europe by ca. 4,800 BC. \n\nThe reasons for the earliest introduction of farming may have included climate change, but possibly there were also social reasons (e.g. accumulation of food surplus for competitive gift-giving). Most certainly there was a gradual transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural economies after a lengthy period when some crops were deliberately planted and other foods were gathered from the wild. Although localised climate change is the favoured explanation for the origins of agriculture in the Levant, th