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    Brief History of The World. How Domestication O..

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    Indrajit Kar
    The document discusses how the domestication of plants and animals impacted world history. Regions like Eurasia developed more due to having domesticatable crops and farm animals, while places like sub-Saharan Africa lacked these and had smaller civilizations as a result. Eurasia had key domesticated crops and animals like cows, horses, and wheat that allowed larger populations and empires to form.

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    Brief History of The World. How Domestication O..

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    Indrajit Kar
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    The document discusses how the domestication of plants and animals impacted world history. Regions like Eurasia developed more due to having domesticatable crops and farm animals, while places like sub-Saharan Africa lacked these and had smaller civilizations as a result. Eurasia had key domesticated crops and animals like cows, horses, and wheat that allowed larger populations and empires to form.

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    The document discusses how the domestication of plants and animals impacted world history. Regions like Eurasia developed more due to having domesticatable crops and farm animals, while places like sub-Saharan Africa lacked these and had smaller civilizations as a result. Eurasia had key domesticated crops and animals like cows, horses, and wheat that allowed larger populations and empires to form.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    18 views2 pages

    Brief History of The World. How Domestication O..

    Uploaded by

    Indrajit Kar
    The document discusses how the domestication of plants and animals impacted world history. Regions like Eurasia developed more due to having domesticatable crops and farm animals, while places like sub-Saharan Africa lacked these and had smaller civilizations as a result. Eurasia had key domesticated crops and animals like cows, horses, and wheat that allowed larger populations and empires to form.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 2

    2/8/2018 Brief History of the World. How Domestication o...

    - History of the World - Quora

    HISTORY OF THE WORLD

    Brief History of the World. How Domestication of


    Plants and Animals Impacted World History.
    Balaji Viswanathan

    Why are some regions so developed and others didn't as much? Why do we talk about
    Eurasia so much in history? Why was its civilizations much more durable than the others?
    A part of it is owed to nature. For most of our history we were really impacted by nature
    and its geography. Jared Diamond in his book the "Guns, Germs and Steel" covers this in a
    lot of detail.

    Domesticated Plants
    Human civilization originated mainly because of agriculture through the domestication
    of wild plants. By controlling those plants, we had a rapid increased food production and
    at the same time rapid increase in population densities [hunter-gatherer humans required
    square miles of forest land for each person, while agriculture dependent humans required
    less than a thousandth of that]

    Subsaharan Africa & Australian geography didn't allow the domestication of major crops.
    Thus, until a few centuries ago agriculture was not viable at large scale and civilizations
    were hampered by it. In contrast, the Inca, Maya and various civilizations of Asia were
    adding an enormous number of new crops to mix. This resulted in some parts of the world
    getting large civilizations and some parts didn't.

    1. You can also see it in the distribution of farm lands.

    Domesticable Animals
    Domesticated animals were also key to human civilization. They provided easy access to
    food and transportation for most of human history. However, almost all of the key
    domesticated animals are native to Eurasia. There is none at all in Subsaharan Africa or
    Polynesia. Americas had one useful domesticated animal - Llama and that is mostly it.
    Absence of animals means even when the American civilizations discovered wheel they
    mainly used it for toys and not transportation as they had nothing to pull the wagon with.

    On the other hand Eurasia had Cow & Goat [major source of milk and meat], Horse [major
    source of transportation and warfare], Pig, Sheep [clothing], Donkey & Camel
    [transportation] and you can see why Eurasians built such an advantage. None of these
    were in Africa and the native African animals such as the Zebra and African Elephant are
    not domesticatable.

    https://worldhistory.quora.com/Brief-History-of-the-World-How-Domestication-of-Plants-and-Animals-Impacted-World-History 1/2
    2/8/2018 Brief History of the World. How Domestication o... - History of the World - Quora

    However, few centuries ago some of the native African cultures got the major
    domesticated animals from Eurasia and that revolutionized things there. Horses were
    imported by the Mali empire of West Africa and their constant trade connection with
    Arabs helped them create one of the greatest empires in Africa. Similarly the Bantu tribes
    of central Africa would borrow cattle from the horn of Africa and use that to expand all
    over subsaharan Africa. Horses also provided a huge advantage to Europeans over the
    natives. Some of the natives would then use the horses to move back to hunter-gatherer
    societies. The horse would define the native American culture of USA.

    1. Page on udel.edu

    2. The Horse in West African History

    3. List of domesticated animals


    9,802 views · 72 upvotes · Posted May 28, 2015

    https://worldhistory.quora.com/Brief-History-of-the-World-How-Domestication-of-Plants-and-Animals-Impacted-World-History 2/2

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