Biological scalability is the ability to support a larger, denser, and/or wealthier population in a given ecosystem.
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Farming was the big breakthrough in biological scalability. Less obvious but still very important were advances in hygiene, such as the use of boiled water (as herbal or proper tea) or alcohol to avoid drinking disease-carrying village water.
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East Asia was probably the biggest early innovator biological scalability: pottery to protect stored food from vermin; alcoholic beverages (made from wild plants) and tea to avoid the need to drink village-polluted water. https://www.penn.museum/sites/biomoleculararchaeology/?page_id=247 …https://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/why-europeans-drank-beer-and-asians-drank-tea/ …
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The same East Asian regions that innovated in biological scalability prior to agriculture also were the first to domesticate dogs. Dogs likely served as intruder alarms for early villages, making them more secure: an increase in social scalability.
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Life itself underwent revolutions that increased its scale. One of the earliest was when it evolved the ability to break the triply-bonded N2 to create the single-N-containing molecules needed to make all amino acids, and thus all proteins. https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2010/10/elements-evolution-and-nitrogen-crisis.html …
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Don't forget the other catalizing event, the industrial revolution that allow food and people to be transported long distances.
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And parallel to the industrial revolution, huge breakthroughs in agriculture. However my thread focuses on some major advances in biological scalability that likely actually preceded the invention of agriculture.
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I’ve always wondered why so many cultures developed alcohol. Never considered it was a substitute for bad water
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You're talking about natural selection. Nothing new here.
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