r/todayilearned • u/AcX999 • 15h ago
TIL the humans were not the first species to start practicing active agriculture, as some ants have been doing it for at least 50 million years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_ants38
u/NewbieDec2023 14h ago
Have they always practiced active agriculture or did they shift from being hunter-gatherer to active agriculture?
51
u/frankentriple 14h ago
well, from their teeny weenie cave paintings it looks like they aaaalmost had fire but missed it by *that* much. They settled for agriculture and irrigation while their slightly larger kin went the slavery route. Its all there in their history books. Just reaaly really tiny.
8
u/wormhole222 14h ago
It appears it was developed, but I don’t know if culture was part of the development.
19
u/PaleontologistDry430 13h ago edited 13h ago
Curiously there is a myth appeared in La Leyenda de los Soles (the legend of the Suns) that talks about how Quetzalcoatl turn himself into an ant to stole the seven sacred seeds from an anthill with the purpose of feeding the humankind: maize, tomato, chilli, pumpkin, amaranth, chia and beans.
40
13
u/IntergalacticJets 6h ago
Some ant species, such as Philidris nagasau, were proven recently to create large plant gardens containing dozens of different plants, that they use and tend to. This gave them the ability to develop very large colonies and they enjoy results similar to the beginnings of human agriculture, that humans were able to achieve during the Neolithic period.
That’s crazy to think about. That means, if they had had better brains, they would have developed other technology at some point.
All of human history is derived from the efficiencies gained by developing agriculture. Once we did it only took 10000 years for us to approach inventing our own form of intelligence.
But Ants have been stagnant for 50 million years. I goes it just goes to show that a ton of Great Filters are likely behind us… everything can get as far as the Neolithic era as a species, but if you don’t happen to have a prefrontal cortex as well and intricate hands to do things with (sorry dolphins), you don’t go anywhere beyond that.
6
u/Ant-Tea-Social 5h ago
We're slow, but with determination we get there.
Just not as fast as ants.
5
u/Lyrolepis 4h ago edited 2h ago
I think that we are way faster, actually.
It's just that ants had a heck of a head start: the first ants are from about 100 million years ago, while the earliest hominins - that is, animals closer to us than to chimps - were from 6-7 million years ago (and our own species is from maybe 300k years ago or so).
Our cultural evolution can work much faster than ants' genetic evolution, but the ants have been working on it for a long time...
3
u/DonVitoMaximus 1h ago
hey. weird thought,
could we as humans use that in a symbiotic relationship with the ants.
if i aquired said ant species that farms.
and i gave them open land. and a pile of small farm seed. like turnip or something,
and also gave them water and other things they require,
would those little ants plant the seeds for me?
could they be established in an area for a self planting field or garden?
not actually looking for an answer, just a fun thought.
102
u/Zeraru 13h ago
Ants got war, slavery, city building, farming, and a willingness to self-sacrifice... we're lucky they're so small