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Plant domestication, which led to agriculture, arguably has had among the deepest or most profound impacts on modern societies relative to all other human innovations. Not only did it lead to greater availability of food, allowing societies to grow in population, but it enabled a large labor force to be freed to pursue other specialties. Additionally, technologies related to agriculture, even today, continue to have profound consequences on all societies, for better and worse. Finally, with domestication, the plant's environment has also profoundly changed.

While we often see these impacts, particularly as they spread across different agricultural regions, as having beneficial results for societies, the reality is much more mixed. One major result of domesticated agriculture is that the environment has been greatly altered, to the point where scientists today call the period after plant domestication as the Anthropocene, or when human societies began to have major impact on the plant. Plant domestication leads to the need for clearing more land, including burning of fields to fertilize them and clear them. This, already beginning by 10,000 years before present, began to have an impact on societies and even likely global temperatures through the release of carbon dioxide and methane. While we think global warming has been a modern effect of industry, agriculture arguably helped to create the first significant wave of human-induced climate change or at least increased emissions into the atmosphere.<ref>For more on environmental impact of agriculture and plant domestication, see: Balter, M. (2013). Archaeologists Say the “Anthropocene” Is Here--But It Began Long Ago. <i>Science</i>, 340(6130), 261–262. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.340.6130.261 </ref>

==Intensification of Agriculture==

After the initial innovation of plant domestication in many parts of the globe between 12,000-5,000 years ago, the next major wave of development occurred in how plant domestication enabled large cities to develop. Initially, plant domestication and agriculture allowed towns and villages to flourish. However, with increased accumulation of agricultural resources by fewer individuals, cities encouraged greater labor migration to them so that people could work in the new economies that had agriculture at their core. This is evident in the place that first had cities, southern Mesopotamia, but also appears to be the case in the Indus and the New Word. In these cases, social inequality in wealth distribution was closely associated with the rise of cities. However, that wealth was based on unequal ownership of agricultural holding. In effect, domestication helped to create our modern economic institutions that also created more wealth inequality across societies.<ref>For more on the origins of urbanism and how it was shaped by plant domestication, see: Bridge, G., & Watson, S. (Eds.). (2000). <i>A companion to the city.</i> Oxford, UK ; Malden, Mass: Blackwell.</ref>

Technologies also became more complex as the need to feed larger cities developed further after 5000 years ago. Large-scale irrigation networks, spanning hundreds of miles are found in the Old World, were required to intensify agriculture (Figure 2). These irrigation works not only required large labor forces, but they also required larger control of territory. One goal of now a new form of states, that is empires, was to control the food production process, where the control of water resources became paramount in some of the earliest empires from the 3rd millennium BCE to the 1st millennium BCE. This only continued and intensified in later states and empires. Technologies, on the one hand, enabled larger populations to grow, but they also created new social problems, as they required new social adaptation to enable them. In the case of irrigation technologies, intense labor and upkeep of major irrigation works, including canals, qanats, and aqueducts, required an enormous amount of labor but also led to state control of these resources because of their enormous investment required. The power of governments over people's lives subsequently increased as agriculture and irrigation of domesticated plants became ingrained.<ref>For more on the relationship between technology, government, and how this affects people's lives, see: Mollinga, P. P. (1998). <i>On the waterfront: water distribution, technology and agrarian change in a South Indian canal irrigation system.</i></ref>

==Continued Modern Impact==