Why did agriculture and civilization come later than tool making and artificial fire making?

Recently, I saw a netizen asking: After humans made tools and made fire, why didn't they master agricultural production technology? In other words, humans have a history of making tools of about 2.5 million years, a history of making fire of about 20,000-30,000 years, and a history of agricultural settlement of only more than 10,000 years. What is the reason for this? Why is there such a long gap in between?

The reason why there is such a long gap is that there is a qualitative change node in between: the Younger Dryas event . Let’s talk about it today!

01. Younger Dryas Event

This is a very iconic event in the eyes of people who study evolution, especially molecular anthropology. About 10,000 years ago, the earth experienced a sudden temperature change, called the Younger Dryas event. The reason why it is called the Younger Dryas event (Younger Dryas impact hypothesis) is that it is named after a herb called dryas, which was found in sediments in Europe.

In other words, the layout of this plant changed a lot at that time.

The characteristic of this event is global climate change. Before this, the earth was warm and pleasant, and even a considerable area of ​​the Arctic and Antarctic melted. However, in just a few decades, the temperature of the earth quickly cooled by seven or eight degrees, and this freezing lasted for nearly 1,000 years.

The result of this rapid change was that the ancient humans, who had previously been eating hot pot, singing songs, and hunting everywhere, suddenly faced the risk of famine.

02. Domestication of Agriculture

When people are poor, they seek change, so they start looking for things that can provide a more stable source of income, and thus the domestication of agriculture emerged.

You can even find many interesting traces in many legends and myths. For example, Shennong tasting hundreds of herbs has become a classic story, and behind this story is the human search for plants that can be cultivated and eaten, that is, crops.

As for Leizu's silkworm breeding, it is a similar behavior.

On a global level, wheat and rice were the main domesticated crops. In West Asia, local people began to domesticate wheat, while in East Asia, roughly in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River today, China began to domesticate rice.

The greatest contribution of all this time was the arrival of agriculture. In the agricultural age, people no longer migrated on a large scale and began to live and reproduce in a fixed place. Finally, villages, towns, and various more frequent businesses appeared in this place. The final result was: civilization.

03. The Birth of Civilization

When it comes to civilization, no matter how much you brag, it will not be more than 10,000 years old. The Paleolithic Age 10,000 years ago spanned 3 million years, which can be said to have started when humans first walked out of Africa (that wave of people included Neanderthals and China's Peking Man). Although Homo sapiens were very powerful, we can't see how superior their breakthroughs were in the Paleolithic Age (in comparison).

When faced with an absolute crisis, the superiority of Homo sapiens began to show, and they domesticated agriculture in a short period of time. With agriculture, humans had to stay and start to cultivate the land and settle down, so settlements appeared instead of hunting and gathering. Of course, you can also understand that the early civilizations in our human history were basically along rivers, because rivers can provide basic water sources and soil formed by erosion.

With agriculture, humans began to make better efforts in building their own settlements. The emergence of agriculture also put forward higher requirements for social cooperation, gave birth to more social forms, and finally civilization emerged.

The things we see and use today, such as writing, laws, government, and calendar, are all products of the civilized era. These things did not exist in the Paleolithic Age.

The sudden outbreak of the Younger Dryas event was only a very brief moment in the long history of human beings, but this sudden event triggered the emergence of human civilization, which can be called the butterfly effect.

04. Speculations about the Younger Dryas event

The Younger Dryas event also has another name, the Clovis Comet event. The impact of the Clovis Comet is one of the important speculations that caused this accident.

For example, one of the impact points should be in today's Syria, where there is an archaeological site called "Abu Hureyra", which has been submerged by Lake Assad (it is said that there is also an impact point in Greenland).

A large amount of molten glass was found in this place, and this requires a temperature of more than 2200℃. More than 10,000 years ago, humans could not achieve this temperature. So it is speculated that an extremely violent, high-speed, high-energy collision occurred here, that is, a comet hitting the earth.

According to current estimates, the event occurred about 12,850 years ago, and the comet (or possibly an asteroid) may have been more than 4 kilometers in diameter and continued to decompose. The fragments of the comet hit North America, South America, Europe and Western Asia, coinciding with the beginning of the Younger Dryas cooling event.

The impact of this event was huge, causing the extinction of mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and American horses; it also led to the disappearance of the Clovis culture in North America.

Of course, it should be pointed out here that there is still a lot of research to be done on the Younger Dryas event, such as why mammoths became extinct but polar bears did not?

For example, the "Black mats" hypothesis, and how did the global climate change caused by the Younger Dryas event actually happen?

By the way, it can also be seen from Zhu Kezhen’s classic work "A Preliminary Study of Climate Change in China in the Past Five Thousand Years" that there was a very low period during the ten thousand years.

Finally, it must be pointed out that domestication of agriculture was not achieved overnight. In the long-term gathering and hunting of human beings, ancient humans have actually accumulated certain agricultural knowledge, such as the change of seasons, which they must have known, and which crops are delicious, which they also have experience in. The isolated Amazon primitive people also have this kind of knowledge.

It is even possible that during this period, humans also tried to grow crops and store food to survive the winter.

But it was not as systematic as the large-scale agriculture that humans started 10,000 years later. We don't need to over-mystify these contents. There is no need to think that the ancient humans 10,000 years ago were pure savages. After all, at that time, they had already learned to paint and left their own traces on the rock walls.