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

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