Food Production Dbq Essay

For a long time, all groups of people on Earth were hunter-gatherers. Why did some of them being food production and why did they begin around 8500 B.C.? Thomas Hobbes described the life of hunter-gatherers as “nasty, brutish, and short.” They woke up each day knowing that they must obtain food to survive.
Before explaining how food production spread and why it did, a few misconceptions must be addressed. First, there was never a discovery or invention of food production. People could not have had farming as a set goal because they had never seen or experienced it before. Second, there was not a strict divide between hunter-gatherers and food producers. Some sedentary groups never made the transition to farming, while other nomadic groups produced some amount of food. The change from hunting and gathering to food production did not always come with the change from nomadic to sedentary lifestyles. Third, hunter-gatherers did often manage the land where they

lived. They increased the population of edible plants or encouraged the growth of shoots or trees.
From those pre existing practices of hunter-gatherers, farming developed in steps. These steps did not happen consistently or in a short period of time. Many groups who relied on farming took thousands of years to transition completely from hunter-gatherers to food producers, and in many cases, were both for a period of time. As stated previously, the first groups who transitioned to farmers could not have had a goal because they had never seen it before. However, once food production began, near-by tribes could pick it up as a whole, take certain aspects of it, or ignore it completely.
It is important to understand that before farming, people weren’t starving. Food production was simply an alternative to the hunting-gathering way of life. As we can see, over the last 10,000 years, the great majority of hunter-gatherers have shifted to food production, so we must ask what factors caused this? This question is still being debated by archaeologists today, but five main factors have been identified.
One factor is the decline of wild food availability. Many resources on which hunter-gatherers depended on to survive became scarce or extinct. Examples of this can be seen in New Zealand, where only after Polynesian settlers hunted moas and seal populations to near extinction did the natives’ food production grow.
A second factor is the increase of the availability of domesticable wild plants. Climate change made the environment where wild cereal grew expand, and huge crops of it could be harvested quickly. These harvests were precursors to the domestication of crops.
A third factor was the increased development of tools and technologies that are necessary for food production. Many new methods, tools, and implements were developed in response to the new abundance of wild cereals after 11,000B.C. All these new techniques, such as mortars and pestles, techniques for roasting grains, and underground storage pits were prerequisites to planting cereals as a crop.
A fourth factor was a two-way link between the growing human population and the rise of food production.

All over the world, archaeologists are finding evidence of rising populations associated with food production. The debated problem is: did food production allow the population to rise or did the rise in human population force people to convert to food production? It is expected that the growth moved in both direction. Food production lead to increased population because it produces more edible calories than hunting and gathering. However, human populations were already beginning to rise in the Pleistocene anyway because of improvements to human technology. The adoption of food production carried itself in a cycle driven by positive feedback. A slight rise in population required more food and rewarded those who took small steps towards producing their own. Once people became sedentary and produced enough food, they could have more children, which caused the population to rise, which required still more

food.
A last factor was the geographic boundaries between food producers and hunter-gatherers. The larger populations of farmers allowed them to displace the hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers who adopted food production overpowered those who didn’t.