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Essays on origins of agriculture
The effect of agriculture on the world
The history of agriculture
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Ten thousand years ago humans made the decision to completely change their lifestyle. They began penning animals, pulling weeds, and purposely planting certain plants with nutritional value. In other words, humans began farming. The question is: Was it for the better? I believe it was better for many reasons, including food production, more advanced tools and weapons, and the immense population increase, although people who believe that foraging was better did prove some valid points.
Farming or agriculture was a major improvement over foraging. One noticeable difference in this time period was humans began using more complex tools to do more advanced techniques of farming. They also began domesticating plants and animals, this was one of the leading factors of the beginning of agriculture. This was a huge turning point for humans everywhere. People could now live together in communities, villages, cities, etc. This was very different than the traditional way of a nomadic lifestyle. Farming also allowed the population to grow extremely, birth rates sky rocketed. Food, because of farming, could now be produced with less time and effort. Civilization with farming can provide a more assured source of constant food. With communities and people together, people are grouped together they can learn collectively and also have more protection against other predators. Perhaps the most significant reason farming is a major improvement over foraging is that specialization could occur. Specialization is when an individual or a group focuses on one craft that will better help their communities. One example of this is being a shoemaker. Having a wide variety of skills is crucial to a community.(hunter…shelters 6),(Reilly 17)
Some people di...
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...y project.com
I used this article because it gave me a general idea of how the foragers lived. It also provided me with information on the nomadic lifestyle.
Text 9-“ Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover magazine (May 1987) 64–66. This source provided me with a lot of information and a good argument for why foraging could be considered better.
Text 11-Richard Lee, “What Hunters Do for a Living,” in Man the Hunter, eds. R.B. Lee and I. DeVore (Chicago: Aldine, 1968).
This cite gave me a lot of data pertaining to the schedule that hunter gatherers gi by. Also, it told about the amount of leisure time that they get.
Text 13- Kevin Reilly, The West and the World: A History of Civilization (New York: Harper Collins, 1989)
This source was beneficial to my paper because it gave me several very good points on why farming is better.
Living in the Paleolithic age must have extremely difficult. I just read the book Maroo of the Winter Caves , by Ann Turnbell. This book tells about Maroo and her family, This book tells a lot about how life was like back then. It's mainly about Maroo and her family having to travel from the winter caves, back to the autumn hunting grounds.While they try to travel back, they get into many obstacles that they have to over come, Mainly trying to overcome time and nature. Our life is extremely different today, then Maroo's life thousands of years ago, Some of these differences are the shelter we inhabit, the clothing we wear,
Nourishment was also an essential part of their everyday life and just like in the Stone Age era, the natives were classified as hunter-gatherers. The hunting was mainly done by the men and the women would be in charge of the cooking and the collection of edible plants. However; these activities were not set in stone and sometimes men would do the cooking while women made the
Hunting and gathering is probably a preferable lifestyle compared to a farmer, but it seems a bit over the top to blame absolutely every problem in our society on agriculture. It’s a common argument, but Jared Diamond's theory does seem to be quite an over-simplification. For example, he argues that inequality between sexes could be caused by agricultural because women were made beasts of burden and given greater pressure to work on the fields. However, the root cause of that isn’t agriculture, it’s sexism and stereotyping, because without an outdated sexist mindset no one would treat women differently in the agricultural department, and it is an oversimplification to ignore this. Furthermore, because of farming and globalization people now are given even more opportunity for a diverse diet. Although early farmers had access to only one or a few crops versus hunter-gatherers who had an entire forest of varied food, people nowadays have many more options than both hunter-gatherers and early farmers combined. A grocery store has ten times as many diverse and varying food items as a forest does, providing food from all corners of the world not just a single location or country, allowing people to create a perfectly balanced diet if they so choose. In conclusion, I agree with Jared Diamond's thesis on certain grounds, but I mostly disagree that the introduction of agriculture was the “worst mistake in human
Perry, Marvin, et al. Western Civilization: Ideas, Politics and Society. 4th ed. Vol. I. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992.
c. 8000 B.C.E. was the beginnings of agriculture also known as the Neolithic or Agricultural Revolution. Agricultural Revolution transformed human life across the planet. This event demonstrates KC 1.2: I.A because this led to cultivation of plants and domestication of animals that caused creating abundant amount of food supplies. It illustrates the interaction between human and environment, development of technology, settling patterns, and how natural resources gave some lands advantages over others. Agriculture developed independently at different times in different regions. Historians believe that the Agricultural Revolution might have originated from Middle East (ME), although they are not fully sure.
hunted with bows and arrows and as the years went on and how they trade with other tribes and
Farming also became a steady source of food for the early civilization. With established dwellings, communities were able to create crude irrigation systems to support their crops in the very dry dessert like climate. Domestication of animals also became a possibility as well with the more permanent living situation the early civilization h...
“[Agricultural societies] can organize more elaborate political structures because of their ability to send messages and keep records. They can tax more efficiently and make contracts and treaties...also generate a more explicit intellectual climate because of their ability to record data and build on past, written wisdom.” (Stearns, 17) A hunter-gatherer society is much more primitive and must have vast territory to hunt on. Basically, you can't build an advanced civilization without farming.
Firstly, the Neolithic Revolution is a great place to start in History because that is when the first major shift of among people’s way of life throughout the whole world occurs. It occurred approximately 10,000 years ago. Many hunter-gatherers turned into farmers because they saw it was a good opportunity to have a larger quantity of food readily available. This change in living caused a massive landslide of other changes to occur with it, such as growth in populations, cities were built and a rise of cities occurred, quantity of food over quality of food, sometimes crops were destroyed by nature, and disease spread because of larger populations living together. Although some negative effects from early farming occurred, the good effects eventually got better and overshadowed the negative. The main advantage to this change, is that people learned and continue to learn how to better develop farming, city building, and health techniques over time, even to this day in the year 2014!
In their daily activities they primarily attended to their live stock and crops and anything else their farm needed. They used the same old tools they had for centuries; the tools their ancestors developed. The whole family work literally all day as hard as they could. Even the children put in their part. The boys helped their farther with the crops and the girls helped their mother tend to the livestock and/or make food.
Diamond states that the reason hunter-gatherer groups became agriculturists was simply because it was easier to create more food for your individual group if it was grown, this statement does have validity. Everyone would be responsible for themselves and would be expected to help out. There wouldn’t be the constant grumbling that there are so many people being lazy and living off of handouts like there are in the modern world today.
The blessing and curse of the Agricultural Revolution is advocated with its augmentation and dissemination. Taking the stipulative definition of “blessing” and “curse” from the original premise, one can only superimpose the layman’s terms of “negative” and “positive”. Upon examination of the two classifications within the Neolithic Period and ancient Mesopotamian civilization one can confirm the premise. Therefore, the agriculture revolution was a blessing and a curse for humanity. Human society began to emerge in the Neolithic Period or the New Stone Age. This new age began around 9,000 B.C.E. by the development of agriculture in the region surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and what is commonly referred to as “The Fertile Crescent” located in West Asia.1 The very development of agriculture had benefited humans by no longer having to move about in search of wild game and plants. Unencumbered by nomadic life humans found little need to limit family size and possessions and settled in a single location for many years. One negative aspect of this settling is that the population increased so much so that wild food sources were no longer sufficient to support large groups. Forced to survive by any means necessary they discovered using seeds of the most productive plants and clearing weeds enhanced their yield.2 This also lead humans to develop a wider array of tools far superior to the tools previously used in the Paleolithic Period or Old Stone Age. The spread of the Agricultural Revolution in the Neolithic Period also cultivated positive aspects by creating connections with other cultures and societies. Through these connections they exchanged knowledge, goods, and ideas on herding and farming.3 Another major positive aspec...
Cipolla calls it the first great economic revolution (Cipolla 18). The development of agriculture leads to the development of communities, city-states, civilizations, and other settlements. The social structure that formed around agriculture brought about the possibility of specialization within a society, since not everyone had to hunt and gather all the time. Instead of living in an ecologically sustainable manner like the hunter/gatherers, people started living in an economic manner (Southwick 128). Specialization enabled the development of social institutions such as religion and government, and agriculture necessitated the development of irrigation.
As agriculture has become more intensive, farmers have become capable of producing higher yields using less labour and less land. Growth of the agriculture has not, however, been an unmixed blessing. It, like every other thing, has its pros and cons. Topsoil depletion, groundwater contamination, the decline of family farms, continued neglect of the living and working conditions for farm labourers, increasing costs of production, and the disintegration of economic and social conditions in rural communities. These are the cons of the new improved agriculture.
...as greatly advanced in the past 200 years thanks to mechanical tools replacing manual labor. It is the most important industry and will forever remain the base of our economy. Humans have constantly been trying to make it easier and quicker to produce crops, from wooden ploughs to pesticides. Agriculture is easily one of the most important and obvious signs of humanity and its adaptation and evolvement over thousands of years.