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Origin of agriculture and civilization
Social impact of agricultural revolution
Growth of population on farming
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1. The Agricultural Revolution marked a decisive turning point in human history. What evidence might you offer to support this claim, and how might you argue against it?
While the majority of humankind continues to use agricultural to satisfy their nutritional needs, a few societies, like the Hadza, continue to use gathering and hunting methods. Some gathering and hunting societies knew about the Agricultural Revolution, but refused to partake in it, such as the peoples of Australia. However, since the Agricultural Revolution, human population growth has skyrocketed. Scholars estimate that population levels rose by 833%. With such a big population, these early societies had no choice but to continue agriculture, or else the population could not be sustained. In regards to demography, the Agricultural Revolution marked a turning point.
2. How did early agricultural societies differ from those of the Paleolithic era? How does the example of settled gathering and hunting peoples such as the Chumash complicate this comparison?
As a rule, gathering and hunting societies are nomadic. They follow animals to hunt and find areas with plants to gather in order to satisfy nutritional needs. However, some
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Because of the surplus, the population was able to sustain more people. As the population began to grow, agricultural food production became irreversible; there were too many people to sustain by hunting and gathering. Also, the Agricultural Revolution occurred directly after the last Ice Age. This killed of many species of plants and animals that hunters and gatherers relied upon for food. With this mass extinction, Paleolithic societies needed a new solution to adequate their nutritional needs. As the climate became warmer, it became optimal for agriculture, and it was only a matter of time before people would embrace
Agriculture has been around for hundreds of years. With its negative effects on humanity, agriculture has greatly affected the environment. Many archeologists believe that adoption of Agriculture was not an improvement but a disaster for humans in many ways. Jared Diamond, the author of the article called “The worst mistake in the history of the human race” argues that hunter-gatherers were better off than the farmers. In a way agriculture is believed to cause many problems for humans such as sexual inequality, deep class division, changed their diet which later led to poor health and diseases.
Agriculturalists normally stay in one place and have more supplies like the plow and also animals. Since agriculturalists stay in one place, they can have animals like horses, cows, sheep, etc. They would also have more land and maybe a field for growing crops. Hunter gatherers migrate to warmer places and they wouldn’t be able to have animals because they move around and they couldn’t feed or take care of them like the agriculturalist could. Hunter gatherers also don’t have real houses like the agriculturalists do. Since hunter gatherers move around, they would make portable ones that they could move or a make shift house out of the nature.
Watkins, Jeffery. Regents Prep: Global History: Change & Turning Points:, "Neolithic Revolution." Last modified 2003. Accessed March 23, 2012. http://regentsprep.org/Regents/global/themes/change/neo.cfm
Most people would argue that the transition from hunting and gathering of food to agricultural food production was the best innovation in human history. We are taught to believe that this innovation gave rise to civilization, allowed for more leisure time in which people could then focus on arts and allowed for a higher yielding, more consistent and reliable food source. Despite some of the innovations that sprang from agriculture, upon a closer look, we can see that with the advent of agriculture came class division, gender inequality, less leisure time, overpopulation, diseases, deficient diets and starvation. The transition from hunting and gathering to agricultural food production may have been the worst mistake in human history.
Hunter and gathers were very small groups of people that moved all the time to get what they need to eat. They ate something different everyday. Hunter and gathers had time to do what they wanted because they ate when they were hungry they weren't always in the fields. With Hunter and gatherers they were small they had no wealth and population, cites. Hunter and gathers were low in population because if there were a lot of people that would be hard to find animals to eat. Plus it would be too many mouths
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...
Plato once quoted, “Necessity is the mother of invention”. During the Prehistoric era, early humans needed to survive in the environment around them, thus creating close-knit nomadic hunter-gathers. With the rise of the Agricultural Revolution, early humans adapted new ways of finding food creating food surpluses that started a population boom. From farming villages to major cities, it created civilizations that once rose and fell. These civilizations created a large impact that affects today.
...the small mobile groups could begin to reside in one area. Agriculture was a turning point in early human life because humans began to alter their surroundings for survival (Ponting). The relationship between early humans and their environment is extremely complex. On one hand, the human race survived and prospered despite the climatic difficulties. On the other hand, the blossoming of early humans directly caused the extinction or near-extinction of many species as well as possibly affecting the atmosphere and climate.
To understand how great an impact the development of agriculture had on the early evolution of the New World, we must first examine foraging societies to gauge what kinds of social developments were already in progress prior to the shift in mode of production. With the exception of “complex foragers”, who were fortunate enough to live in environments that could to sustain large populations without the need for regimented food production, hunter-gatherer bands simply did not have time for anything other than searching for their next few meals (Diamond). Without a surplus of food, they live much more similarly to the rest of the animal kingdom, focusing most of their efforts on sustenance, rather than things such as progression of technology and construction of monuments. Ins...
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.
Agriculture has changed dramatically, especially since the end of World War II. Food and fibre productivity rose due to new technologies, mechanization, increased chemical use, specialization and government policies that favoured maximizing production. These changes allowed fewer farmers with reduced labour demands to produce the majority of the food and fibre.
Agriculture is quite possibly the most important advancement and discovery that humanity has made. It produces the one thing that we need the most: food. It has been around since 9500 BC, and can be the oldest sign of mankind’s acumen and the development and evolving of our minds and creations. Agriculture has been mastered throughout hundreds of years and is one of our most important resources on Earth, along with water and fossil fuels. Although the older farming methods from ancient times seem somewhat mediocre and barbaric, they were very ingenious and advanced for that time period. Over thousands of years, we have improved the way agriculture is used, how land is cultivated, the various techniques of farming and irrigation, and the tools and mechanics used. Numerous things that we see as aboriginal today, such as using a hand plow, were extremely contemporary in ancient times, and played key roles in the development of man and society, since quick labor was not abundant before this time. We are now extremely advanced in agriculture and irrigation and the tools used to farm and grow and harvest crops. We have learned from our past and ancestors how to grow and evolve in our methods and have advanced forward greatly.
Establishing an adequate supply of food is historically one of the fundamental challenges facing mankind. The modern food infrastructure employed by contemporary society is rooted in the creation and innovation of food production. Its effective utilization decreases the level of societal labor contribution required and discourages food shortage trepidation amongst individuals. It is hard to fathom given the current status of our society massive agricultural-industrial complex that the hunter-gatherer organization of society dominated for more than 99 percent of our existence (Fagan 2007: 126). The hunter-gatherer population was characterized by their primary subsistence method, which involved the direct procurement of edible plants and animals from the wild. The primary methods employed were foraging and hunting, which were conducted without any significant recourse to the domestication of either food source (Fagan 2007: 129). Food production is presumed to have emerged approximately 12,000 years ago as a system of “deliberate cultivation of cereal grasses, edible root plants, and animal domestication” (Fagan 2007: 126). The pronounced change from hunting and gathering to agriculture and domestication can be simplistically designated the Agricultural or Neolithic Revolution (Pringle 1998). The catalytic developments of the Neolithic Revolution mark a major turning point in the history of humankind. The resulting animal and plant domestication established the foundation on which modern civilization was built.
Domestication of plants and animals lead the people of horticultural societies to lead more sedentary lifestyles as food resources were not always moving as they were in hunting and gathering society. The permanence of settlement gave people more time to procreate and invite outsiders into societies. As a result, horticultural population grew denser and led to larger settlements as people joined the society. The division of labor also changed with the transition into horticulture as men’s primary role in hunting and gathering was tracking large game animals that gradually grew scarce. Men still went on hunts, but not as many with the constant supply of food resources provided by the women. Women worked in all other aspects of society such as caring for the children and domesticating the animals. The division of labor heavily weighed on the women of society in simple horticulture, as men’s sole primary duty was to hunt the animals leaving women with all other tasks in horticulture. Kinship was also important in horticultural societies as they provided a means to create a social system. The emergence of trade in horticultural societies began with trade among kin groups in an exchange of resources that the other required. The most affluent, in possession of resource surplus,
HUNTING AND GATHERING SOCIETIES are the simplest types of societies in which people rely on readily available vegetation and hunted game for subsistence. Only a few people can be supported in any given area in such subsistence societies. Hence they usually have no more than 40 members or so, must be nomadic, and have little or no division of labor. All societies began as hunting and gathering societies. These societies were still common until a few hundred years ago. Today only a few remain, including pygmies in central Africa and aborigines in Australia. Most of the rest have had their territory overrun by other forms of society. Hunter-gatherer societies also tend to have non-hierarchical social structures. There is rarely surplus food, and since they are nomadic little ability to store any surplus. Thus full-time leaders, bureaucrats, or artisans are rarely supported by hunter-gathering societies. Hunting and gathering society consumes a great deal of time, energy, and thought, collecting and hunting for food. Most of these societies today generally live in marginal areas where resources are scarce, so life for the hunter and gatherer seems more oriented toward mere survival. Life expectancy is also very low compared to the post industrial society. Technology is minimal in the hunting and gathering society, which again relates back to the need for expending time and energy finding food. Technology in medicine is also primitive for hunters and gatherers. Equality is great and social stratification is low, opposed to the post-industrial society.