hello, learned and astonishingly attractivepupils. my name is john green and i want to welcome you to crash course world history.over the next forty weeks together, we will learn how in a mere fifteen thousand yearshumans went from hunting and gathering... mr. green, mr. green! is this gonna be onthe test? yeah, about the test: the test will measurewhether you are an informed, engaged, and
crash diets disadvantages, productive citizen of the world, and it willtake place in schools and bars and hospitals and dorm-rooms and in places of worship. youwill be tested on first dates; in job interviews; while watching football; and while scrollingthrough your twitter feed. the test will judge your ability to thinkabout things other than celebrity marriages;
whether you'll be easily persuaded by emptypolitical rhetoric; and whether you'll be able to place your life and your communityin a broader context. the test will last your entire life, and itwill be comprised of the millions of decisions that, when taken together, make your lifeyours. and everything — everything — will be on it. i know, right? so pay attention. [theme music] in a mere fifteen thousand years, humans wentfrom hunting and gathering to creating such improbabilities as the airplane, the internet,and the ninety-nine cent double cheeseburger. it's an extraordinary journey, one that iwill now symbolize by embarking upon a journey
of my own ... over to camera two. hi there, camera two ... it's me, john green.let's start with that double cheeseburger. ooh, food photography! so this hot hunk ofmeat contains four-hundred and ninety calories. to get this cheeseburger, you have to feed,raise, and slaughter cows, then grind their meat, then freeze it and ship it to its destination;you also gotta grow some wheat and then process the living crap out of it until it's whiterthan queen elizabeth the first; then you gotta milk some cows and turn their milk into cheese.and that's not even to mention the growing and pickling of cucumbers or the sweeteningof tomatoes or the grinding of mustard seeds, etc. how in the sweet name of everything holy didwe ever come to live in a world in which such
a thing can even be created? and how is itpossible that those four-hundred and ninety calories can be served to me for an amountof money that, if i make the minimum wage here in the u.s., i can earn in eleven minutes?and most importantly: should i be delighted or alarmed to live in this strange world ofrelative abundance? well, to answer that question we're not goingto be able to look strictly at history, because there isn't a written record about a lot ofthese things. but thanks to archaeology and paleobiology, we can look deep into the past.let's go to the thought bubble. so fifteen thousand years ago, humans wereforagers and hunters. foraging meant gathering fruits, nuts, also wild grains and grasses;hunting allowed for a more protein-rich diet
... so long as you could find something withmeat to kill. by far the best hunting gig in the pre-historic world incidentally wasfishing, which is one of the reasons that if you look at history of people populatingthe planet, we tended to run for the shore and then stay there. marine life was:a) abundant, and b) relatively unlikely to eat you. while we tend to think that the life of foragerswere nasty, brutish and short, fossil evidence suggests that they actually had it prettygood: their bones and teeth are healthier than those of agriculturalists. and anthropologistswho have studied the remaining forager peoples have noted that they actually spend a lotfewer hours working than the rest of us and
they spend more time on art, music, and storytelling.also if you believe the classic of anthropology, nisa, they also have a lot more time for skoodilypooping.what? i call it skoodilypooping. i'm not gonna apologize. it's worth noting that cultivation of cropsseems to have risen independently over the course of milennia in a number of places ... fromafrica to china to the americas ... using crops that naturally grew nearby: rice insoutheast asia, maize in in mexico, potatoes in the andes, wheat in the fertile crescent,yams in west africa. people around the world began to abandon their foraging for agriculture.and since so many communities made this choice independently, it must have been a good choice... right? even though it meant less music and skoodilypooping. thanks, thought bubble.
all right, to answer that question, let's take a lookat the advantages and disadvantages of agriculture. advantage: controllable food supply. you mighthave droughts or floods, but if you're growing the crops and breeding them to be hardier,you have a better chance of not starving. disadvantage: in order to keep feeding peopleas the population grows you have to radically change the environment of the planet. advantage: especially if you grow grain, youcan create a food surplus, which makes cities possible and also the specialization of labor.like, in the days before agriculture, everybody's job was foraging, and it took about a thousandcalories of work to create a thousand calories of food ... and it was impossible to createlarge population centers.
but, if you have a surplus agriculture cansupport people not directly involved in the production of food. like, for instance, tradespeople,who can devote their lives to better farming equipment which in turn makes it easier toproduce more food more efficiently which in time makes it possible for a corporation to turn aprofit on this ninety-nine cent double cheeseburger. which is delicious, by the way. it's actuallyterrible. and it's very cold. and i wish i had not eaten it. i mean, can we just comparewhat i was promised to what i was delivered? yeah, thank you. yeah, this is not that. some would say that large and complex agriculturalcommunities that can support cities and eventually inexpensive meat sandwiches are not necessarilybeneficial to the planet or even to its human
inhabitants. although that's a bit of a toughargument to make, coming to you as i am in a series of ones and zeros. advantage: agriculture can be practiced allover the world, although in some cases it takes extensive manipulation of the environment,like y'know irrigation, controlled flooding, terracing, that kind of thing. disadvantage: farming is hard. so hard infact that one is tempted to claim ownership over other humans and then have them tillthe land on your behalf, which is the kind of non-ideal social order that tends to beassociated with agricultural communities. so why did agriculture happen?
wait, i haven't talked about herders. herders,man! always getting the short end of the stick. herding is a really good and interesting alternativeto foraging and agriculture. you domesticate some animals and then you take them on theroad with you. the advantages of herding are obvious. first, you get to be a cowboy. also,animals provide meat and milk, but they also help out with shelter because they can providewool and leather. the downside is that you have to move arounda lot because your herd always needs new grass, which makes it hard to build cities, unlessyou are the mongols. [music, horse hooves] by the way, over the next forty weeks youwill frequently hear generalizations, followed by "unless you are the mongols" [music, hooves].
but anyway one of the main reasons herdingonly caught on in certain parts of the world is that there aren't that many animals thatlend themselves to domestication. like, you have sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, horses, camels,donkeys, reindeer, water buffalo, yaks, all of which have something in common. they aren'tnative to the americas. the only halfway useful herding animal native to the americas is thellama. no, not that lama, two l's. yes, that llama. most animals just don't work for domestication.like hippos are large, which means they provide lots of meat, but unfortunately, they liketo eat people. zebras are too ornery. grizzlies have wild hearts that can't be broken. elephantsare awesome, but they take way too long to breed. which reminds me! it's time for theopen letter.
elegant. but first, let's see what the secretcompartment has for me today. oh! it's another double cheeseburger. thanks, secret compartment.just kidding, i don't thank you for this. an open letter to elephants. hey elephants, you're so cute and smart and awesome.why you gotta be pregnant for 22 months? that's crazy! and then you only have one kid. ifyou were more like cows, you might have taken us over by now. little did you know, but the greatestevolutionary advantage: being useful to humans. like here is a graph of cow population, andhere is a graph of elephant population. elephants, if you had just inserted yourself into humanlife the way cows did, you could have used your power and intelligence to form secretelephant societies, conspiring against the
humans! and then you could have risen up,and destroyed us, and made an awesome elephant world with elephant cars, and elephant planes! it would have been so great! but noooo! yougotta be pregnant for 22 months and then have just one kid. it's so annoying! best wishes, john green. right, but back to the agricultural revolutionand why it occurred. historians don't know for sure, of course, because there are nowritten records. but, they love to make guesses. maybe population pressure necessitated agricultureeven though it was more work, or abundance gave people leisure to experiment with domesticationor planting originated as a fertility rite
- or as some historians have argued - people neededto domesticate grains in order to produce more alcohol. charles darwin, like most 19th century scientists,believed agriculture was an accident, saying, "a wild and unusually good variety of nativeplant might attract the attention of some wise old savage." off topic, but you willnote in the coming weeks that the definition of "savage" tends to be be "not me." maybe the best theory is that there wasn'treally an agricultural revolution at all, but that agriculture came out of an evolutionarydesire to eat more. like early hunter gatherers knew that seeds germinate when planted. and,when you find something that makes food, you want to do more of it. unless it's this food.then you want to do less of it. i kinda want
to spit it out. eww. ah, that's much better. so early farmers would find the most accessibleforms of wheat and plant them and experiment with them not because they were trying tostart an agricultural revolution, because they were like, you know what would be awesome:more food! like on this topic, we have evidence thatmore than 13,000 years ago humans in southern greece were domesticating snails. in the franchthicave, there's a huge pile of snail shells, most of them are larger than current snails,suggesting that the people who ate them were selectively breeding them to be bigger andmore nutritious. snails make excellent domesticated food sources,by the way because
a) surprisingly caloricb) they're easy to carry since they come with their own suitcases, andc) to imprison them you just have to scratch a ditch around their living quarters. that's not really a revolution, that's justpeople trying to increase available calories. but one non-revolution leads to another, andpretty soon you have this, as far as the eye can see. many historians also argue that without agriculturewe wouldn't have all the bad things that come with complex civilizations like patriarchy,inequality, war, and unfortunately, famine. and, as far as the planet is concerned, agriculturehas been a big loser. without it, humans never would have changed the environment so much,building dams, and clearing forests, and more
recently, drilling for oil that we can turninto fertilizer. many people made the choice for agricultureindependently, but does that mean it was the right choice? maybe so, and maybe not, but,regardless, we can't unmake that choice. and that's one of the reasons i think it's soimportant to study history. history reminds us that revolutions are notevents so much as they are processes; that for tens of thousands of years people havebeen making decisions that irrevocably shaped the world that we live in today. just as todaywe are making subtle, irrevocable decisions that people of the future will remember asrevolutions. next week we're going to journey to the indusriver valley - whoa - very fragile, our globe,
like the real globe. we're going to travelto the indus river valley. i'll see you then. crash course is produced and directed by stanmuller. our script supervisor is danica johnson. the show is written by my high school historyteacher, raoul meyer, and myself, and our graphics team is thought bubble. if you want to guess at the phrase of theweek, you can do so in comments. you can also suggest future phrases of the week. and ifyou have a question about today's video, please leave it comments where our team of semi-professionalquasi-historians will aim to answer it. thanks for watching, and as we say in my hometown,don't forget to be awesome.
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