The plough
An ox dragging a shaped stick multiplies the land one family can work.
- When
- Known to
- ± 300 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
The ard, a simple scratch-plough drawn by cattle, appears in the Near East and Europe in the fourth millennium BCE. It is the first machine to substitute animal muscle for human muscle on a large scale, and it roughly transforms the area a household can cultivate. It also has social consequences: ploughing favours upper-body strength and larger holdings, and the shift from hoe agriculture to plough agriculture correlates strikingly with more rigid gendered divisions of labour.