An Economic Prehistory to Economic Emperors

Abstract

The simple innovation of agriculture sprung upon the world a sequence of innovations that remain with us today. Perhaps the most important of all is the creation of economic systems that allowed us to manage the surpluses of agriculture to meet human needs and wants more than 23,000 years ago.

(Agriculture) … was a complex process and can now be viewed more legitimately as the paragon of evolutionary process that Darwin originally recognized. There are many interacting factors involved that we know about operating on a wide range of levels from the gene to the farmer and climate – the challenge is to integrate them into a single story.

(Robin Allaby, research scientist who discovered the first known examples of an agrarian economy, 2008)