Analysis of David Christian and Jared Diamond’s Discussion on Agriculture

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Big History is the in-depth study and outlook of world origin, the History, and information of everything we currently contextualize. On numerous occasions, the discussion of Big History in the scholarly world of anthropology, astronomy, History, and geology, the contention points are always on the theories and myths surrounding the story of creation. This debate always centers on the distinctive argument regarding religious concepts and the scientific viewpoint. However, both religious and scientific views come to a consensus regarding agriculture- all agree that people were hunters and gatherers before shifting their focus on agriculture during humankind’s origin. This essay delves into a comparative analysis focusing on similarities and differences in David Christian and Jared Diamond’s discussion on agriculture.
In his book, “Maps of Time,” David Christian expounds on how the spread of agriculture and civilization gave birth to robust learning networks. With the advent of agriculture, History sped up. Many years after the emergence of agriculture, the human population increased immensely. This spontaneous growth was a direct result of the scientific innovation increases. To enhance agriculture, farmers began developing irrigation forms, spread into semi-arid zones, built an array of new buildings, and domesticated animals. Christian avers that with the mushrooming of agrarian civilization, the innovation rates plummeted immensely. The agrarian revolution marked the start of professionalism with architects designing structures such as pyramids and temples, blacksmiths making tools and weapons, and writing made it easy to store and preserve valuable information for future reference. Goods and human transport became easy and sufficient with the domestication of horses and camels with ocean transport, getting easy with dhow, and cargo boat building. Taxation and trade were highly influenced by items such as jewelry, glassware, and coins. Finally, there emerged government and lawmaking establishment, which intervened in legislation that governed trade and businesses (Rose et al. 87).
David Christian asserts that since the advent of the human species, collective learning has exponentially increased with every generation. The human culture and society have complexly increased with recent History showing instances of inequality in complexity and collective learning that gave one group of humans a nudge over the other, leading to exploitation of the placed individuals. As a result, these inequality instances between humans are traced back to agriculture’s origins and the onset of agrarian revolution and eventual civilization.
According to Diamond’s argument on Agriculture, plants and...