AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION

 

APWH THEME:  Impact of technology and demography on people and the environment

 

Essential Question:  What revolutions made the biggest impact of technology and demography on people and the environment?  Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions

 

AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION:  Causes and Effects

 

I.                  Origin of the Agricultural Revolution (also called the Neolithic Revolution)

a.      Evidence appears clearly about 10,000 years ago in Middle East (Turkey and Israel)

b.     Previously, humans gathered wild plants and hunted animals.  Earlier hominids scavenged animals killed by other predators.

 

II.               Theories about the origins of the Agricultural Revolution vary. 

                                                             i.      population increase

                                                           ii.      climate change

                                                        iii.      gradual experimentation by gatherers of wild plants

 

III.           Other forms of organizing human life continued

a.      pastoral/nomadic dependent on settled agricultural communities

b.     foraging societies most similar to gathering-hunting societies prior to Neolithic period

                                                             i.      gathered foods a few hours two days a week (mostly done by women with occasional help from children and men; 60 - 80 % by weight of food consumed)

                                                           ii.      caring for children under the age of three was a full-time activity (mostly done by women with help from fathers)

                                                        iii.       maintained tools, clothing and shelter; prepared food to eat = four hours a day (mostly done by women)

                                                         iv.      hunted large animals only every few weeks mostly set traps for small animals near the settlement/village; no more than about 30% of the diet (children and women set traps; men and older boys hunted larger animals)

 

IV.            Societies based on Agricultural Revolution Migrated

a.      foraging societies in AfroEurasia reduced or outnumbered

b.     pastoral/nomadic societies smaller in AfroEurasia

c.      foraging and limited settled societies continued in Americas because of the lack of domesticated animals

 

V.                Effects of the Agricultural Revolution

a.      population increase

                                                             i.      5 - 10 million before 10,000 B.C.E.

                                                           ii.      around 300 million in 1 C.E.

b.     labor divided into food-producing and non-producing jobs = hierarchies in economic and political organization

c.      social complexity increased = greater gender differences

d.     diseases increased = need for high birth rate

 

Excerpts:

Ishmael a novel by Daniel Quinn (1992), pp. 68-9

 

In order to accomplish anything, man had to settle down in one place where he could get to work, so to speak.  I mean that it was impossible for him to get beyond a certain point living out in the open as a hunter-gatherer, always moving from place to place in search of food.  To get beyond that point, he had to settle down, had to have a permanent basis from which he could begin to master his environment.

Okay.  Why not?  I mean, well, what was stopping him from doing that?  What was stopping him was the fact that if he settled down in one place for more than a few weeks he’d starve.  As a hunter-gatherer, he would simply clean the place out--there would be nothing left to hunt and gather.  In order to achieve settlement, man had to learn one fundamental manipulation.  He had to learn how to manipulate his environment so that this food exhaustion didn’t occur.  He had to manipulate it so that it produced more human food.  In other words, he had to become an agriculturalist.

This was the turning point.  The world had been made for man, but he was unable to take possession of it until this problem was cracked.  And he finally cracked it about ten thousand years ago, back there in the Fertile Crescent.  This was a very big moment--the biggest in human history up to this point.  Man was at last free of all those restraints that. . . . The limitations of the hunting-gathering life had kept man in check for three million years.  With agriculture, those limitations vanished, and his rise was meteoric.  Settlement gave rise to division of labor.  Division of labor gave rise to technology.  With the rise of technology came trade and commerce.  With trade and commerce came mathematics and literacy and science, and all the rest.  The whole thing was under way at last, and the rest, as they say, is history.

 

Nisa an anthropological study by Marjorie Shostak of a woman from the San/!Kung peoples of the Kalihari Desert in Southern Africa (1981)

 

p. 87  “We collected food, ground it in a mortar and ate it.  We also ate sweet nin berries and Isin beans.  (....)

Sometimes my mother would be the one to see the honey.  The two of us would be walking around gathering food and she’d find a beehive deep inside a termite mound or in a tree. (....)

 

p. 93  “I remember another time, when I was the first one to notice a dead wildebeest, one recently killed by lions, lying in the bush.  Mother and I had gone gathering and were walking along, she in one direction and I a short distance away.  That’s when I saw the wildebeest.  [Nisa, the child, went back to the village to tell everyone.]  “My father and my older brother and everyone in the village followed me.  When we arrived, they skinned the animal, cut the meat into strips and carried it on branches back to the village.”

 

p. 98  Once we went to live near a water hole, but there was no water in it.  That was another time we were all thirsty.  The only water came from kwa, a large water root.  My mother scraped the white pulp into mounds, squeezing the water for me to drink.

 

p. 99  There were caterpillars to eat, those little things that crawl along going, “Mmm...mmmm...mmmm...” And people dug roots and collected food and brought home more and more food.  There was plenty of meat and people kept bringing more back, hanging on sticks, and they hung it up in the trees where we were camped.

 

p. 12   The staple of  !Kung nutrition is the abundant mongongo (or mangetti) nut, which constitutes more than half of the vegetable diet.  It is prized for its inner kernel and for its sweet outer fruit.

 

Women in World History, Vol. I-- Readings from Prehistory to 1500, edited by Sarah Shaver Hughes and Brady Hughes.

 

On gender roles in prehistoric times, p. 11

 

Adrienne Zihlman:

Her examination of archaeological and anthropological evidence disputes the importance of ‘man the hunter’ as the key “innovation” that separated early humans from apes.  “This view of ‘man the hunter’ has been used to explain many features of modern Western civilization, from the nuclear family and sexual division of labor to power and politics.”

 

Instead she uses the following evidence to argue that gender roles were more equal in prehistoric times. (p. 13)

 

a.  teeth of early humans were those of omnivores so meat was only part of the diet

b.  majority of calories came from plants gathered for food

c.  cooperative social organization necessary for defense against large predators

d.  both male and female hominids could throw objects at predators and prey, especially if their children were threatened 

e.  stone tools (especially those for hunting) preserved better than tools made of perishable materials, so tools used by women are not available for study by archaeologists and anthropologists

 

p. 14

Early human men and women must have shared child rearing duties, otherwise the population would not have grown.  “With this support, mothers could have another offspring before the previous one was entirely independent.  Without this involvement of kin--a social solution to a physical problem--birth spacing would have to be extended to more than three or four years, leaving little time for reproduction in a species whose life span may have been little more than twenty years.”  She also argues that women must have selected socially agreeable men for their mates in order to ensure that their mates would share food and child raising duties with their kinship group.