Hello, learned and astonishingly attractive pupils. My name is John Green, and I wanna welcome you to crash course world history. Over the next 40 weeks, together, we will learn how in a mere 15000 years humans went from hunting and gathering Mister Green. Mister Green. Mister, is is this gonna be on the test? Yeah. About the test. The test will measure whether you are an informed, engaged, and productive citizen of the world, and it will take place in schools, and bars, and hospitals, and dorm rooms, and in places of worship. You will be tested on on first dates, in job interviews, while watching football, and while scrolling through your Twitter feed.

The test will judge your ability to think about things other than celebrity marriages, whether you'll be easily persuaded by empty political rhetoric, and whether you'll be able to place your life and your community in a broader context. The test will last your entire life, and it will be comprised of the millions of decisions that when taken together make your life yours. And everything, everything will be on it. I know. Right? So pay attention. In a mere 15000 years, humans went from hunting and gathering to creating such improbabilities as the air plane, the internet, and the 99¢ double cheeseburger. It's an extraordinary journey, one that I will now symbolize by embarking upon a journey of my own. Over to camera 2.

Hi there, camera 2. It's me, John Green. Let's start with that double cheeseburger. Oh, food photography. So this hot hunk of meat contains 490 calories. To get this cheeseburger, you have to feed, raise, and slaughter cows, then grind their meat, then freeze it, and ship it to its destination. You also gotta grow some wheat, and then process the living crap out of it until it's whiter than Queen Elizabeth the first. Then you got to milk some cows and turn their milk into cheese.

And that's not even to mention the growing and pickling of cucumbers, or the sweetening of tomatoes, or the grinding of mustard seeds, etcetera. How in the sweet name of everything holy did we ever come to live in a world in which such a thing can even be created? And how is it possible that those 490 calories can be served to me for an amount of money that if I make the minimum wage here in the US, I can earn in 11 minutes? And most importantly, should I be delighted or alarmed to live in this strange world of relative abundance? Well, to answer that question, we're not gonna be able to look strictly at history because there isn't a written record about a lot of these things. But thanks to archaeology and paleobiology, we can look deep into the past. Let's go to the thought bubble. So, 15000 years ago, humans were foragers and hunters. Foraging meant gathering fruits, nuts, also wild grains and grasses. Hunting allowed for a more protein rich diet, so long as you could find something with meat to kill. By far, the best hunting gig in the prehistoric world incidentally was fishing, which is one of the reasons that if you look at the history of people populating the planet, we tended to run for the shore and then stay there.

Marine life was, a, abundant, and b, relatively unlikely to eat you. While we tend to think that the lives of foragers were nasty, brutish, and short, fossil evidence suggests that they actually had it pretty good. Their bones and teeth are healthier than those of agriculturalists, and anthropologists who've studied the remaining forager peoples have noted that they actually spend a lot fewer hours working than the rest of us, and they spend more time on art, music, and storytelling. Also, if you believe the classic of anthropology nisse, they also have a lot more time for skoodily pooping. What? I call it skoodily pooping. I'm not gonna apologize. It's worth noting that cultivation of crops seems to have arisen independently over the course of millennia in a number of places, from Africa to China to the Americas. Using crops that naturally grew nearby, rice in Southeast Asia, maize in Mexico, potatoes in the Andes, wheat in the fertile Crescent, yams in West Africa, people around the world began to abandon their foraging for agriculture.

And since so many communities made this choice independently, it must have been a good choice. Right? Even though it meant less music and scootallypooping. Thanks, thought bubble. Alright. To answer that question, let's take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of agriculture. Advantage, controllable food supply. You might have droughts or floods, but if you're growing the crops and breeding them to be hardier, you have a better chance of not starving. Disadvantage.

In order to keep feeding people as the population grows, you have to radically change the environment of the planet. Advantage. Especially if you grow grain, you can create a food surplus, which makes cities possible, and also the specialization of labor. Like, in the days before agriculture, everybody's job was foraging, and it took about a 1000 calories of work to create a 1000 calories of food. And, it was impossible to create large population centers. But, if you have a surplus, agriculture can support people not directly involved in the production of food. Like, for instance, trades people who can devote their lives to better farming equipment, which in turn makes it easier to produce more food more efficiently, which in time makes it possible for a corporation to turn a profit on this 99¢ double cheeseburger.

This is delicious, by the way. It's actually terrible, and it's very cold. And I wish that I had not eaten it.