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It is a great challenge to understand how and why humans adopted this technological change. We mostly rely on fossil evidence, but there is also some evidence of it in the modern world as some present-day groups of people are moving away from hunting and gathering food and are choosing agriculture instead. It is important to mention that farming was more helpful to early humans because farmers built more permanent and more durable houses.
They also had stronger tools, and they had an unlimited supply of food as well. Their tools were made of steel which made them sturdier and more durable than before. Another thing is that their houses were made out of hardened clay which made them sturdier than the houses foragers had.
In addition to farming, those who were working in agriculture had a bigger supply of food because they had a farm and they would keep growing food which enabled them a more consistent food supply than foragers. Both foraging and farming were of great importance for society to grow, but it seems that farming was more essential and helpful as well.
One can see that farming was a big improvement in accordance to foraging because it enabled early humans to have a more consistent supply of food, sturdier homes, and stronger tools which helped them cultivate their crops for food. One must mention again that both foraging and farming were of great importance to the improvement of society, each in their way. There are a lot of differences between foraging and farming. Nevertheless, we will mention the main differences between the two.
First, we must mention that the hunting-gathering life was hard as there was never an assurance of the food supply. The foragers were usually fit and loved to eat a wide variety of food. The foragers were the ones to bring themselves food. One can say that they depended on themselves for food. The foragers were hunters, fishermen, and were picking food wherever they could find it. It is important to mention that the food foragers hunted or gathered may have had some diseases or have been poisoned which is a big disadvantage than te farming life.
The farmers are the ones who plant and harvest crops and know exactly the quality of their products. This is why foragers tend to lead shorter lives than other people. Another factor that contributes to a lower population density is the fact that it is more difficult for the young and the elderly to participate in food procure-ment. Children only gradually acquire the skills necessary to successfully find food and generally do not make significant contributions to the group until their teenage years.
Likewise, elders who can no longer produce enough food themselves expect to be cared for by others. One important hallmark of foraging societies is their egalitarian social structure. Stark differences in wealth, which characterize many societies, are rare in foraging communities.
One reason for this is that foragers have a different perspective on private property. Foragers also place a high cultural value on generosity. Those who resist sharing what they have with others might be ridiculed, or could even become social outcasts.
This practice is also an important survival strategy that helps groups get through times of food scarcity. Though foragers have high levels of social equality, not everyone is treated exactly the same.
Gen-der inequality exists in many communities and develops from the fact that work among foragers is often divided along gender lines. Some jobs, such as hunting large animals, belong to men whose success in hunting gives them high levels of respect and prestige. Nomadic lifestyles are the norm for most foragers, but there have been some societies that have broken this rule and developed large-scale sedentary societies.
This was possible in areas with abun-dant natural resources, most often fish. These societies all developed advanced fishing technologies that provided enough food surplus that some people could stop participating in food procurement activities. In that region, the salmon that spawn in the rivers are so abundant that they could support sedentary populations of a size that would normally be associated with intensive agriculture.
Hobbes, as well as many scholars that came after him, viewed Western societies as the pinnacle of social evolution and viewed less technologically advanced societies as deficient, antiquated, or primitive, a perspective that persisted well into the twentieth century.
Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognize that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times.
Foraging is a challenging lifestyle; some groups spend up to 70 hours per week collecting food. The amount of leisure time and relative comfort of the foraging lifestyle vary significantly based on differences in the availability of food and environmental conditions.
Contemporary studies of foraging also recognize that foragers have rarely lived in isolation. Throughout the world, foragers have lived near farming populations for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Conflicts and competition for resources with non-foraging societies have characterized the foraging experience and foragers, with their relatively small population size and limited technology, have often been on the losing end of these confrontations.
A sad worldwide pattern of exploitation and marginalization is the reason that many foragers today live in dwindling communities in marginal ecological zones. None of us live in a natural environment. Current research on the causes of global climate change have demonstrated that humans are having a profound effect on the Earth and its ecosystems, but it would be a mistake to conclude that human effects on the environment are a recent development.
Humans have been making environmental alterations for a long time and we have been engaged in a process of domesticating the planet for several thousand years. The Nukak were not known to the public at large until , when a group of 41 individuals came in contact with a school in the rural town of Calamar, in southeastern Colombia.
The Nukak are a highly mobile group of foragers who make an average of between 70 and 80 residential moves a year. The frequency of their moves changes seasonally: infrequent short-distance moves in the wet season, and more frequent long-distance moves occurring in the dry season. Anthropologist Gustavo Politis, who spent years living with the Nukak, observed that the Nukak will never occupy the same camp twice, even if they are moving to an area where an old camp is still in good shape.
When they establish a camp, they remove all the light brush and some of the medium-sized trees, leaving a few medium-sized trees and all the large trees intact. This wild orchard offers nearly perfect conditions for the germination and growth of seeds because the large trees provide enough shade to prevent the invasion of vines and shrubs.
As the Nukak use the camp and consume fruit they have gathered, they discard the uneaten portions, including the seeds. Significantly, the kinds of fruit the Nukak tend to eat in their camps are the ones that have hard outer seed cases. Once discarded in a Nukak campsite, these seeds have a higher chance of germinating and growing in the abandoned camp than they do in other parts of the rainforest.
The result is that Nukak territory is peppered with wild orchards that have high concentrations of edible plants, and the forest reflects a pattern of human intervention long after the Nukak have departed.
The Nukak are an important case study in the Amazon for a number of reasons. They are a tes-tament to the ability of small foraging groups to domesticate landscapes in active ways that greatly increase the productivity of the environment. In addition, the Nukak demonstrate that no place in the Amazon can be considered pristine if a group such as the Nukak have ever lived there. The same can be said for the rest of the planet. Although the transition from foraging to agriculture is often described as the Agricultural Revolution, archaeological evidence suggests this change took a long time.
The earliest species humans chose to domesticate were often not staple crops such as wheat, corn, rice, or cows, but utilitarian species. For instance, bottle gourds were domesticated for use as water containers before the invention of pottery. Dogs were domesticated as early as 15, years ago in eastern Asia from their wild ancestor the wolf.
Although it is unlikely that dogs were an important source of food, they did play a role in subsistence by aiding humans who relied on hunting the Ice Age megafauna such as wooly mammoths.
Dogs played such a critical role in hunting that some archaeologists believe they may have contributed to the eventual extinction of the woolly mammoths. When it rains. You do the milking. Pastoralism is a subsistence system that relies on herds of domesticated livestock. The need to supply grazing fields and water for the livestock requires moving several times a year. For that reason, this subsistence system is sometimes referred to as nomadic pastoralism.
In Africa, for instance, a nomadic lifestyle is an adaptation to the frequent periods of drought that characterize the region and put stress on the grazing pastures. Pastoralists may also follow a nomadic lifestyle for other reasons such as avoiding competition and conflict with neighbors or avoiding government restrictions. Pastoralists can raise a range of different animals, although most often they raise herd animals such as cows, goats, sheep, and pigs.
In some parts of South America, alpaca and llama have been domesticated for centuries to act as beasts of burden, much like camels, horses, and donkeys are used in Asia and Africa. Pastoralists who raise alpacas, donkeys, or camels, animals not typically considered food, demonstrate an important point about the pastoralist subsistence system.
The goal of many pastoralists is not to produce animals to slaughter for meat, but instead to use other resources such as milk, which can be transformed into butter, yogurt, and cheese, or products like fur or wool, which can be sold. Even animal dung is useful as an alternate source of fuel and can be used as an architectural product to seal the roofs of houses.
In some pastoral societies, milk and milk products comprise between 60 and 65 percent of the total caloric intake. However, very few, if any, pastoralist groups survive by eating only animal products.
Trade with neighboring farming communities helps pastoralists obtain a more balanced diet and gives them access to grain and other items they do not produce on their own. A community of animal herders has different labor requirements compared to a foraging com-munity. Caring for large numbers of animals and processing their products requires a tremendous amount of work, chores that are nonexistent in foraging societies.
For pastoralists, daily chores re-lated to caring for livestock translate into a social world structured as much around the lives of ani-mals as around the lives of people. The Maasai, a society of east African pastoralists whose livelihood depends on cows, have been studied extensively by anthropologists. Among the Maasai, domestic life is focused almost entirely around tasks and challenges associated with managing the cattle herds. Like many pastoralist communities, the Maasai measure wealth and social status according to the number of animals a person owns.
However, raising cattle requires so much work that no one has the ability to do these jobs entirely on his or her own. For the Maasai, the solution is to work together in family units organized around polygynous marriages. A household with multiple wives and large numbers of children will have more labor power available for raising animals. The example of the Maasai demonstrates the extent to which a subsistence system can structure gender roles and the division of labor between the sexes.
In Maasai society, women do almost all of the work with the cows, from milking several times each day to clearing the muck the cows produce. Despite doing much of the daily work with cattle, Maasai women are not permitted to own cattle.
Men make all deci-sions about slaughtering, selling, and raising the cattle. This same pattern is repeated in many pastoralist societies, with women valued primarily for the daily labor they can provide and for their role as mothers.
While women lack the political and economic power enjoyed by Maasai men, they do exercise some forms of power within their own households and among other women. As discussed previously, foragers tend to have little private property. Obtaining food from the nat-ural environment and living a highly mobile lifestyle does not provide the right conditions for hoard-ing wealth, while the strong value on sharing present in foraging communities also limits wealth differences.
Ownership of the grazing land, water supply, and other resources required for livestock is a trick-ier matter. Generally, these natural resources are treated as communal property shared by everyone in the society.
Sharing resources can lead to conflict, however, both within pastoralist societies and between pastoralists and their neighbors. In an influential essay, Tragedy of the Commons , Garrett Hardin pointed out that people tend not to respect resources they do not own.
For instance, pastoralists who have a personal interest in raising as many cattle of their own as possible may not be particularly motivated to preserve grass or water resources in the long term.
Do pastoralists destroy the environments in which they live? Evidence from anthropological studies of pastoralist communities suggests that pastoralists do have rules that regulate use of land and other resources and that these restrictions are effective in conserving environmental resources. The Maasai, for instance, have a complex land-management system that involves rotating pastures seasonally and geographically to preserve both grass and water.
In addition, the large swaths of community land managed by the Maasai stabilize and support the vast Serengeti ecosystem. Ecologists estimate that if this land were privately owned and its usage restricted, the population of wildebeest would be reduced by one-third. Despite the sophistication of their land and animal management techniques, pastoralists today face many pressures.
The growth of the tourism industry in many countries has led to increased demand for private land ownership to support safari centers, wild game parks, and ecolodges. The steady growth of human populations and intensive agriculture has also led to the widespread en-croachment of cities and farms into traditional pastoralist territories. Persistent drought, famine, and even civil war threaten some pastoralist groups, particularly in central Africa.
Meanwhile, pastoralists continue to experience tense relationships with their agricultural neighbors as both groups compete for resources, disputes that are intensifying as global warming leads to more intense heat and drought in many world regions. Have you ever grown a garden in your backyard? How much time did you put into your garden?
How much of your diet did the garden yield? People whose gardens supply the majority of their food are known as horticulturalists. Horticulture differs in three ways from other kinds of farming. First, horticulturalists move their farm fields periodically to use locations with the best growing conditions. For this reason, horticulture is sometimes known as shifting cultivation.
Second, horticultural societ-ies use limited mechanical technologies to farm, relying on physical labor from people and animals, like oxen that may be used to pull a plow, instead of mechanical farm equipment.
Finally, horticul-ture differs from other kinds of farming in its scale and purpose. Most farmers in the United States sell their crops as a source of income, but in horticultural societies crops are consumed by those who grow them or are exchanged with others in the community rather than sold for profit.
Horticultural societies are common around the world; this subsistence system feeds hundreds of thousands of people, primarily in tropical areas of south and central America, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. A vast array of horticultural crops may be grown by horticulturalists, and farmers use their specialized knowledge to select crops that have high yield compared to the amount of labor that must be invested to grow them.
A good example is manioc, also known as cassava. Manioc can grow in a variety of tropical environments and has the distinct advantage of being able to remain in the ground for long periods without rotting.
Compared to corn or wheat, which must be harvested within a particular window of time to avoid spoiling, manioc is flexible and easier to grow as well as to store or distribute to others. Bananas, plantains, rice, and yams are additional examples of popular horticul-tural crops.
One thing all these plants have in common, though, is that they lack protein and other important nutrients. Horticultural societies must supplement their diets by raising animals such as pigs and chickens or by hunting and fishing. Growing crops in the same location for several seasons leads to depletion of the nutrients in the soil as well as a concentration of insects and other pests and plant diseases.
In agricultural systems like the one used in the United States, these problems are addressed through the use of fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, and other technologies that can increase crop yields even in bad conditions. Horticulturalists respond to these problems by moving their farm fields to new lo-cations.
Often this means clearing a section of the forest to make room for a new garden, a task many horticulturalists accomplish by cutting down trees and setting controlled fires to burn away the undergrowth.
Once abandoned, farm fields immediately begin to return to a forested state; over time, the quality of the soil is renewed. Farmers often return after several years to reuse a former field, and this recycling of farmland reduces the amount of forest that is disturbed. While they may relocate their farm fields with regularity, horticulturalists tend not to move their residences, so they rotate through gardens located within walking distance of their homes. Horticulturalists practice multi-cropping, growing a variety of different plants in gardens that are biodiverse.
Growing several different crops reduces the risk of relying on one kind of food and allows for intercropping, mixing plants in ways that are advantageous. A well-known and ingenious example of intercropping is the practice of growing beans, corns, and squash together. Rather than completely clearing farmland, horticulturalists often maintain some trees and even weeds around the garden as a habitat for predators that prey on garden pests.
These practices, in addition to skillful rotation of the farmland itself, make horticultural gardens particularly resilient. Because daily life for horticulturalists revolves around care for crops, plants are not simply regarded as food but also become the basis for social relationships.
Just as a Maasai pastoralist gains respect by raising a large herd of animals, Trobriand Island farmers earn their reputations by having large numbers of yams. However, this is not as easy as it might seem. In Trobriand Island society every man maintains a yam garden, but he is not permitted to keep his entire crop.
Other yams must be given to the chief or saved to exchange on special occasions such as weddings, funerals, or festivals. With so many obligations, it is not surprising that the average man would have trouble building an impressive yam pile on his own.
Maintaining these positive relationships requires constant work, and men must reciprocate gifts of yams received from others or risk losing those relationships. Men who are stingy or mean spirited will not receive many yams, and their lack of social approval will be obvious to everyone who glances at their empty yam houses. The chief has the largest yam house of all, but also the most obligations. To maintain the goodwill of the people, he is expected to sponsor feasts with his yam wealth and to support members of the community who may need yams throughout the year.
So central are yams to Trobriand Island life that yams have traditionally been regarded not as mere plants, but as living beings with minds of their own. Farmers talk to their yams, using a special tone and soft voice so as not to alarm the vegetables. Yams are believed to have the ability to wander away from their fields at night unless magic is used to keep them in place. These practices show the close social and spiritual association between farmers and their crops.
Beans are often associated with gastrointestinal problems, namely flatulence. It turns out that this is related to the history of the domestication of the bean. Beans, along with maize and squash, were one of the most important crops domesticated by Native Americans in the New World.
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