Bi product of agriculture was war

Definitely not true.

In the Paleolithic Era (before the Agricultural Revolution), humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers. This has two major implications.

• Since they did not yet have the technology to grow food, they were limited to the food available within their reach for hunting and gathering. In a bad year, there wasn't enough food to support the entire tribe.
• They had no wheels or draft animals, so everything they "owned" had to be carried. Pottery is too fragile to be handled this way, so no convenient carrying technology better than loose sacks made of hide (or waterproof otter skin if they happened to live where there were otters) was invented until after the Agricultural Revolution. Furthermore, the youngest children had to be carried so this even limited the carrying capacity of the adults. So if there was occasionally a surplus of food, they had no way to take it with them, and no way to store it in a way that the scavengers could not eat it.

The result of this was that, except during bountiful years when people could afford to be generous, and perhaps even during summer when food was more plentiful and festivals were sometimes held, every tribe had to zealously guard its own hunting and gathering territory. Every other tribe was a band of hated and feared competitors for scarce resources.

When times got tough, in order to survive, tribes had no choice but to attack each other and try to steal each other's precious food.

Using modern instruments, anthropologists have examined the many reasonably-well preserved skeletons and other remains of our Paleolithic ancestors, and this is exactly the scenario they discovered. The most common cause of death among humans in the late Stone Age, when population pressure began to be felt, was violence. The majority of these corpses show obvious evidence of wounds that could only have been created by human attacks. More early humans were killed by other humans than by all other causes of death combined!

Obviously it would have been the older people who were not as strong and nimble who would have been attacked and killed first. I'm sure that at some point both tribes would pause to catch their breath, look around, and say, "Hmmm, it looks like the old people on both sides are all dead. I think there's now enough food for everybody who's still alive. We'll see you later, maybe at next summer's festival."

There has never been an era in human history since then when the primary cause of death was attacks by other humans. The bloodiest wars in history were waged by Genghis Khan, and he only killed ten percent of the people his armies could reach. The armies in World War II could reach everyone on the planet, but they only killed three percent of the earth's population.

Today murder is among the top ten causes of death for American children, but only because infant mortality from disease, starvation and predators is no longer 80%. Most children grow up without knowing anyone who died that way. By the time they die in adulthood, the leading causes of their deaths are heart disease, cancer and accidents (depending on the particular country).

Agriculture created the first food surplus this planet had ever seen. It did not cause strife among rival tribes, but in fact just the opposite. Economies of scale (a larger workforce exploits resources more productively than a smaller one) and division of labor (a larger workforce allows some people to specialize, making the entire culture more efficient) increased the size of the surplus to the point that starvation was no longer a credible threat to human life.

And in fact the Neolithic Era (the Stone Age after the Agricultural Revolution) did indeed see once-rival tribes clustering together into ever-larger villages, and finally cities, living in more-or-less harmony and cooperation.

Of course each of us still has a caveman lurking inside us, and human nature occasionally takes a turn for the ugly and we find reasons to hate and attack each other that have nothing to do with a shortage of food. But the early Neolithic people had a vested interest in maintaining peace, because larger communities, as I noted, were more prosperous. When two villages became cities, growing large enough to extend into each other's range of influence, they were more likely to trade the things they specialized in (plus a few of their sons and daughters to keep the gene pool chlorinated) than to find any reason to make war. Peaceful trading networks of large villages and small cities were common in the few advanced Neolithic cultures that existed recently enough to be documented, such as in eastern North America.

The invention of metallurgy inaugurated the Bronze Age, making the first "weapons of mass destruction" possible. For the first time, one man with a bronze sword, spear and/or armor could kill a considerable number of unarmed people without being taken down--far more than a man with a stone club, a flint spearpoint and/or wooden arrows. Yet the two ores required to alloy bronze, tin and copper, are almost never found in close proximity. The Bronze Age required cities to maintain a modicum of peace among themselves, in order to ensure a supply of the ore they needed to make their tools and other artifacts.

Of course war did eventually break out at the end of the Bronze Age, leading to the Bronze Age Collapse, when the advance of civilization was halted or even reversed in many parts of Eurasia. But the truly horrible wars did not begin until the Iron Age. The invention of technology to create hotter fires allowed iron ore--which is rather easy to find--to be melted down and shaped into weapons and other tools, without needing to be alloyed with any other metal. (Yes, steel is iron alloyed with other metals and it's much stronger than pure iron, but still, pure iron resulted in much fiercer weapons than the old bronze ones.) Iron technology did not require any peace treaties between cities; on the contrary, it allowed every "barbarian" tribe to build its own smelter, manufacture its own weapons, and start calling itself a "kingdom."

Cities everywhere were attacked by people from outside the zones of civilization and many fell. Our English word "Vandal" is in fact the name of one of the Gothic tribes that brought down the Roman Empire.

So it turns out that humans made war long before they invented the twin technologies of farming and animal husbandry that together comprise agriculture. War as we know it, however, with weapons created specifically for the purpose of killing humans, was indeed a result of our discovery of technology. Nonetheless, you picked the wrong technology. It wasn't agriculture that turned us into warriors. It was metallurgy.

 

But the whole point of the technology of agriculture is that cultivated plants and domesticated animals produce more food than humans can obtain by hunting and gathering. Within a few generations of perfecting this technology, a steady surplus of dried, pickled, salted, smoked and otherwise preserved food is in storage so that a bad year, or even two or three bad years, can be survived. This greatly reduces the need to make war in order to survive.

And BTW, your description of agriculture is vastly oversimplified and emphasizes the wrong practices. I suspect your family has never actually grown food, as mine has--both plants and animals. For one thing, agriculture includes the domestication and herding of animals ("animal husbandry") as well as the cultivation and raising of plants ("farming"). In societies with assigned gender roles the herding is often done by the men.

Planting seeds is by no means the complete essence of farming. In all archeological sites identified as the beginning of agriculture, hybrid plants are found, for example figs in Mesopotamia and peppers in Mesoamerica. Various species or subspecies of plants are cross-bred in an effort to develop one that is superior to all the natural ones from the standpoint of feeding humans: higher yield, easier cooking, better flavor, bigger fruit, drought-resistant, etc. (The same is done with animals. Many, if not most, of the standard breeds of farm animals were created artificially by selective breeding.)

Furthermore, planting the seed does also not tell the whole story. In many farms, even ancient ones, the farmers invented the technology of irrigation. They built channels and diverted streams to bring the water directly to their gardens, so they were not dependent on rainfall.

My point is that it was not the technology of agriculture that inspired men to be so warlike. It was the technology of metallurgy, which was invented six thousand years later.