NEW ESSAY: Homebound: What Humans Gained and Lost​ in the Agricultural Revolution

This is the latest essay I published in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power. 

For most of human history, our ancestors lived very differently from us. Many did not build permanent homes, cultivate fields, or raise livestock. Instead, they moved across landscapes, gathering wild plants, fishing, and hunting animals. Then, beginning around 12,000 years ago in Southwest Asia, and later independently in several other parts of the world, some human communities gradually adopted forms of agriculture. What followed is commonly known as the Agricultural Revolution.

The word “revolution” can be misleading. This was not a sudden event but a gradual transformation that unfolded over thousands of years and in different ways across different regions. Likewise, the familiar term “hunter-gatherers” deserves a brief caveat. Scholars increasingly point out that it oversimplifies an extraordinary diversity of societies. Some communities relied heavily on fishing, while others managed landscapes by burning or planting; some lived in relatively permanent settlements, while others remained highly mobile. Throughout this essay, I use “hunter-gatherers” simply as a convenient shorthand for societies whose subsistence depended primarily on foraging rather than agriculture.

The Agricultural Revolution is often presented as one of humanity’s greatest achievements. It helped create the demographic and economic conditions under which larger settlements, cities, states, writing systems, specialized labor, and new forms of technology later developed in many regions. Yet it also transformed human life in ways that are easy to overlook. The same changes that gave many societies the capacity to produce more food, support larger populations, accumulate more possessions, and develop greater political and technological complexity also created new forms of dependence. In becoming settled, humans became homebound—not merely attached to a home, but increasingly constrained by it.

This essay does not take a position on whether the Agricultural Revolution should be judged as a mistake or a success. That framing may itself be too narrow for something so vast and complex. Instead, I want to use this transformation as an example of a larger paradox: power and powerlessness are inevitably intertwined in human lives. New possibilities give us greater ability to shape our circumstances. But once we reorganize our lives around those possibilities, they can also constrain us in ways we did not anticipate.

You can continue reading here.
[This essay will be included in Newsletter #26]