This is one of those things I've written essay papers on but it's quite fascinating. If you look at our species as a whole the one thing we've been able to create that never existed in nature is surplus. Scarcity was the driving force behind evolution and what brought about our surplus of food was the practice of agriculture farming.
Humorously enough the practice of agriculture farming actually arose out of a need to create beer. They have found urns containing fermented barley that were thousands of years older than other farming products. So with out new technique of creating food we were able to stop moving around and create more permanent settlements. This in turn diversified our societal roles from just hunter and gatherers to more complicated positions and allowed for the development of societies, cities and nations. Everything we are today springs from just the simple fact that we had the ability to have food without spending all of our time searching for it - all because of agriculture farming and the serendipity of fermented grain thousands of years ago!
