6000 to 3000 BCE · Africanspan
Hamlets become villages as the share of farmed food climbs
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Each crop a community adopted and each animal it took into its herds raised the carrying capacity of the same piece of ground. Food from fields and pastures took a larger share of the diet and food from collecting and hunting took a smaller one, year on year, with no moment of rupture. Populations kept growing, and they grew in a particular way. Settlements got bigger and the people in them lived closer together. Hamlets turned into villages and villages thickened. Density has costs. More people in close quarters need agreed ways to settle quarrels, to divide land and water, and to organise work that no single household can do. Those arrangements are where institutions begin. The age of agricultural exchange was an age of concentration, of people and of the rules they had to invent to live at that spacing, and the institutions that came out of it are the ones later ages called civilisation.
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