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→Spread of Impact
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. First, the environment greatly suffered. Plant domestication leads to the need for clearing more land, including burning of fields to fertilize them and clear them. This, already after 8000 before present, began to have an impact on societies and even likely global temperature. 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.
==Spread Intensification of ImpactAgriculture== 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. 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. 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 key in some of the earliest empires from the 3rd millennium BCE to the 1st millennium BCE.
==Continued Modern Impact==
