The Agricultural Transformation

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Recommended: Brief history of agriculture

The agricultural transformation was the beginning of new way of life; it modified the way we lived and continues to affect us even in today’s society. It began when hunter-gatherer groups in Mesopotamia and in the New World started to settle in single places instead of continuously roaming in search of food. The ability to store food brought on Settling and some other new customs such as using more advance stages of preparing food (grinding grains), and eventually the early stages of agriculture. Originally nomadic foragers would follow herds of sheep and goat and eventually started to domesticate the herd animals around 12,000 years ago.

The hunter-gatherer groups of people started to domesticate plants and animals after 12,000 B.C., which was the beginning of food production. The earlier plants that were domesticated during the transformation were emmer, einkorn, and barley which came from the Near East and teosinte(corn), and opuntia(prickly pear) was domesticated along with wild runner bean and squash in the New World. In china domesticated plants consisted of different types of millet, a type of Chinese cabbage(Originating from the mustard family), and eventually rice. While the hunter-gatherers were sedentary, domesticating crops (Old World: mainly barley and wheat; New World: mainly corn and beans); the nomadic foragers domesticated herds of animals; this created an opportunity for trade. The foragers would trade an animal with the hunter-gatherers for a portion of their domesticated plants in the midst of their traveling. This trade in many ways was the beginning of agricultural entrepreneurships and the types of agricultural production that we see today.

In the midst of early farming communities started to form, mak...

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...ient Near East and North Africa." The Cambridge World History of Food. Eds. Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas. Cambridge University Press, 2000. Cambridge Histories Online. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 08 April 2010

"agriculture, origins of." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, 2010. Retrieved 8 Apr. 2010. http://0search.eb.com.opac.library.csupomona.edu/eb/article-10769.

Kreis, Steven. "The History Guide." Ancient Western Asia and the Civilization of Mesopotamia. 26 February 2006. Retrieved 08 April 2010. http://www.noodletools.com/quickcite/citwww1.html.

Thomas M. Whitmore, B. L. Turner II Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 82, No. 3, The Americas before and after 1492: Current Geographical Research September 1992. Retrieved 08 April 2010 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2563353

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