SPEAKER_02: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
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SPEAKER_01: Well, this is it. Episode 50. This is the 50th thing on my list coming right up. But thanks to your help, this isn't quite the end. There will be a little bit more. Details in around nine minutes time.
SPEAKER_04: 50 things that made the modern economy with Tim Harford.
SPEAKER_01: I want you to 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. Who would you phone anyway? No internet, no electricity, no fuel. 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. It's a plow. And that's appropriate because it was the plow that kick-started civilization in the first place. That ultimately made our modern economy possible. 12,000 years ago, humans were almost entirely nomadic, hunting and foraging their way into every niche they could find all around the world. But the world was emerging from a cold snap. Things started to get hotter and drier. People who'd been hunting and foraging in the uplands found that the plants and the animals around them were dying. Animals migrated to the river valleys in search of water and people followed. Confined to these fertile but geographically limited river valleys, people had to settle down and farm, which meant breaking up the crust of the soil, bringing nutrients to the surface and letting 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. When farming was well established 2,000 years ago in Imperial Rome, 900 years ago in Song Dynasty China, these farmers were five or six times more productive than the foragers they had replaced. Think about that. It becomes possible for a fifth of the population to grow enough food to feed everyone. What do the other four fifths do? Well, they're freed up to specialise in other things. Baking bread, firing bricks, felling trees, building houses, mining ore, smelting metals, constructing roads, making cities, building civilisation. But there's a paradox. More plentiful supplies of food mean more competition for control of the surplus. That competition creates rulers and ruled, masters and servants, and inequality of wealth unheard of in hunter-gatherer societies. 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. But the plow did more than create the underpinning of civilisation with all its benefits and inequities. Different types of plow led to different types of civilisation. The first simple scratch plows, used in the Middle East, worked very well for thousands of years and spread to the Mediterranean, where they were ideal tools for cultivating the dry, gravelly soils. But then a very different tool, the mouldboard plow, was developed, first in China more than 2,000 years ago, and much later in Europe. The mouldboard plow cuts a long, thick ribbon of soil and turns it upside down. In a dry soil, that's a counterproductive exercise. It squanders precious moisture. But in the fertile, wet clays of northern Europe, the mouldboard plow was vastly superior, improving drainage and killing deep-rooted weeds, turning them into mere compost. The dry-soil scratch plow needed only two animals to pull it, and it worked best with a criss-cross pattern 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 mouldboard 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 was more of a community practice. People had to share the plow and draft animals, and resolve disagreements. They gathered together in villages. The mouldboard plow helped usher in the manorial system in northern Europe. The plow 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 9,000 years ago, which finds evidence that women were developing arthritis in their knees and feet, apparently from kneeling, twisting and grinding grain. And since women no longer had to carry toddlers around while foraging, they had more frequent pregnancies. And agrarian societies may even have changed sexual politics. Think about it. If you have land, that's something 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. Is she really doing nothing but grind grain? All of this raises the question of whether inventing the plow was entirely a wise idea. Not that it didn't work. It worked brilliantly. But along with all the benefits 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 from their immediate hunter-gatherer forebears. With their diets of rice and grain, they were starved of vitamins and stunted. As societies switched to agriculture, the average height for both men and women shrank by around 15 centimeters. 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. But we've already seen the answer. The food surplus enabled larger populations and societies to afford soldiers. And armies, even of stunted soldiers, will have been sufficiently powerful to drive the remaining hunter-gatherer tribes off all but the most marginal land. Even there, the few remaining modern 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? So here you are, one of the few survivors of the end of civilization. Will you reinvent the plow and start the whole thing all over again? Or should we be content with our mongongo nuts?
SPEAKER_04: The idea that the plow lies at the basis of all civilization was unforgettably explored by James Burke in his book and TV series, Connections. For a full list of our sources, please see bbcworldservice.com slash 50 things.
SPEAKER_01: And that's it. That was number 50 of my 50 things that made the modern economy. So I should say two things. First, thank you. Thank you for listening. I hope you've enjoyed hearing my stories as much as I've enjoyed telling them. And please, if you have, leave a rating and a comment. It really does help other people to find the podcast. Second, as you hopefully know by now, there will be one more episode of the show. Many of you came up with suggestions for a 51st thing that made the modern economy. Even more of you voted for your favorite from my shortlist of six. So I will announce the winner, the 51st thing that made the modern economy. And I'll tell you all about it in a special extra episode next week.
