Early in the agricultural revolution, simple hand-held digging sticks or hoes would have been used in areas with good soil, such as the area near the Nile River in Africa. At the Nile, the annual flood makes the soil better by "rejuvenating" it, to create places where seeds could be planted. To help crops grow in areas where floods were rare, the soil had to be rejuvenated in a different way. This is when plowing was first used, and hoes were the first plows.