Threshold 7

Humans
Part 1: The Rise of Agriculture

Rendel B. Batchar, LPT, MAEd

Faculty, College of Education
Bataan Peninsula State University
Dinalupihan, Bataan
From course packet 06, we learned...

• What physical adaptations have made

us different from our primate cousins.
• What role human language plays in
collective learning.
• How collective learning allows us to pass
knowledge from one generation to the
next.
• How the first humans lived.
What's inside?

• The Rise of Agriculture

• The First Cities and States Appear
• Ways of Knowing: Agriculture
and Civilization
• What should we eat?
Our early ancestors lived by foraging... Do we see problems with their lifestyle?
How did agriculture transform our history as a race?
 massive population growth
Agriculture (creating cities and trade)

eventually people began specializing in other

resulted things (e.g. govt, armies, arts)

to... Birth of civilizations

The Rise of Agriculture
 Neolithic Revolution
• Aka Agricultural Revolution
• Transition from small, nomadic
bands of hunter-gatherers to
larger agricultural settlements
and early civilization
• Started around 10,000 BC in the
Fertile Crescent
• Shortly after, Stone Age humans
in other parts of the world also
began to practice agriculture
Neolithic Age
• Sometimes called "New Stone Age"
• Neolithic humans used stone tools like their earlier
Stone Age Ancestors
• Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe coined the
term “Neolithic Revolution” in 1935 to describe the
radical and important period of change in which
humans began cultivating plants, breeding animals for
food and forming permanent settlements.
• The advent of agriculture separated Neolithic people
from their Paleolithic ancestors.
 • Based on current archeological evidence,

The World anatomically modern humans have

existed roughly 200,000-300,000 years.

Before • However, before roughly 15,000-20,000

years ago, we have no evidence that our
Agriculture ancestors had agriculture.
• Instead, we believe they strictly hunted
or foraged for food.
• Over foraging, starvation, energy to
keep going and reproduce
• Lesser population
• Historians estimate the world population
was around six to ten million 10,000
years ago.
The Birth of Agriculture

• About 10,000 to 15,000 years ago,

humans began to mold nature to
their needs and agriculture emerged
in multiple places around the
planet.
• emerged independently and spread
from places as varied as
Mesopotamia, China, South America
and sub-Saharan Africa
• The Neolithic period’s name stems
from the fact that stone artifacts
were more smooth and refined than
those of the Paleolithic period, or
Old Stone Age. Many of these tools
facilitated early agriculture
Pastoralism: A Branch • began around the same time as cultivation of plants
• Pastoralism is the domestication and herding of
of Agriculture animals such as goats, sheep, and cattle
• While many pastoralists were nomadic, their
lifestyle differed fundamentally from that of hunter-
foragers in that they did not rely exclusively on
naturally occurring resources (milk, wool, trade)
• A mix of cooperation and conflict resulted from the
relationship between pastoralists and farmers.
• Pastoralists’ military-related artifacts suggest that
they may have come into conflict with farming
societies; however, in other cases, pastoralists
traded goods with farmers in a cooperative
relationship.
Agricultural
Inventions
• Plant Domestication
• Cereals such as emmer wheat, einkorn wheat
and barley
• Around the same time that farmers were
beginning to sow wheat in the Fertile
Crescent, people in Asia started to grow rice
and millet
• In Mexico, squash cultivation began about
10,000 years ago, while maize-like crops
emerged around 9,000 years ago.
• Livestock
• Domestic pigs were bred from wild boars
• goats came from the Persian ibex
• infectious diseases: smallpox, influenza, and
the measles
Domesticated Animals
• The first farm animals also included sheep and cattle (Mesopotamia)
• Water buffalo and yak were domesticated shortly after in China, India and Tibet
• Draft animals including oxen, donkeys and camels appeared much later—around 4,000 B.C.—as humans developed
trade routes for transporting goods.
Impact of Agriculture on
Collective Learning
• The impact of agriculture has been profound on humanity,
most clearly in terms of population.
• Agriculture also has had environmental impacts.
• agriculturalists cleared forests using the slash and burn
technique; they would remove a ring of bark from the
trees, drying out the trees and allowing them to burn more
quickly. The ash from the trees acted as a fertilizer for the
soil.
• Pastoralism also brought challenges to the environment
and people – overgrazing
• Higher likelihood of diseases
Agriculture and the advent of
the first city-states

Many population centers evolved into the first

wave of city-states that emerged within a few
thousand years of the agricultural revolution.

Eventually those states began to have complex

bureaucracies to tax and administer their people,
a significant catalyst for the birth of writing,
which was transformational for civilization.
The First Cities and States Appear
 • A “state” is a city, or several cities, and the
surrounding villages and farms.
• A state could include hundreds of thousands
of people, even millions. Those people fell
into different levels depending on their
States and social rank or how much wealth and power
they had.
Civilizations • A few people called “elites” were on top.
• Out of states arose empires. An empire was
led by a single ruler who controlled large
territories of cities and farmland. These large
states are often called “civilizations.”
Agrarian Civilizations
All civilizations share certain characteristics.

They have dense populations and are controlled by elites.

This does not mean they are better than other kinds of societies.
However, they are more complex.
Since these early civilizations always depended on the farming
around them, we call them “agrarian civilizations.”
 • Storage of surplus food
• Development of a priestly class; a state religion based on
Civilizations gods/goddesses
• Central rule (such as a king, pharaoh, or emperor)
commonly • Specialized jobs
included the • Social rank based on wealth, ancestry, and job
• Increased trade
following... • Systems of writing or recording information; increased
collective learning
• Armies and increased warfare
• Monumental public architecture (temples, pyramids)
• More inequality between men and women; male-
dominated traditions
Ways of Knowing: Agriculture and Civilization
Recordkeeping and History

• History is typically defined as the study of the past. To study of the past
historians need to focus on questions and evidence. They must come up
with questions about the past and gather evidence to answer these
questions.
• In some ways studying history is a lot like trying to solve mysteries. Once
something happens, it’s gone. Only “residue,” various kinds of evidence,
is left behind for the detective or historian to ponder. The mystery can
only be solved or historical event explained if the detective/historian
asks the right questions and finds the necessary evidence to answer it.
Science vs History

• Science is different from history in some important ways. Scientists asks

questions and design experiments or plan observations to test their
hypotheses. Repeating experiments and observations gives them
confidence about their conclusions. Historians ask questions, but they
must rely on the analysis of artifacts and written evidence to answer
them. They can’t perform and repeat experiments.

• There are many types of historians, and their questions differ depending
on the field of history they work in. For example, the questions that an
environmental historian asks are going to be different from the
questions of an economic historian.
Many species have ways of tracking the past

• Plants and animals can track the past. Trees, for example, create tree rings, but creating a
ring each year is not the same as remembering abstract ideas or origin stories.
• Humans can use language and writing to record ideas and make them accessible without
an individual person having to memorize them.
• For a long time, humans could only transmit their ideas orally. This required people to
memorize the ideas or records, and then pass them on to someone else.
• Writing allowed humans to remember and record much more information than any one
human could pass on orally. Once the information was recorded in a permanent way, a
person was not required to remember it to keep it in the collective learning of the human
community.
• Historians depend on written records. Historians use them to help answer the questions
they have about what happened in the past.
The Origin of World
Religions

• Most of the large-scale, world religions

developed around the same time—
between 1200 BCE and 700 CE.
• As a result of increasing commercial
and cultural interaction between
people across large areas, religions
were shared.
 there is usually a there is a key text or set
founding man who of texts that defines
receives the word of man’s relationship with
God God

Common there are

people come together
features of recommended ways of
living and worshipping
regularly to have God’s
word interpreted for
world religions them by an authority

there is a path to self-

transformation and
eternal salvation in one
way or another
 • Religion provided structure and
meaning for large groups of
people in ways that small, tight-
knit village communities used to
do.
Structure and • Religion provided stability in
Meaning cities and appealed to many
different people from all social
classes and occupations.
What should we eat?
Humans and
Nutrition

• The human body uses food both as a

source of energy and as a source of
materials for building and maintaining
body tissues.
• The amount of energy that is available in
food is expressed in Calories.
• One Calorie (Cal) is equal to 1,000
calories, or one kilocalorie.
Major Nutrients
in Human Food
Malnutrition
• Malnutrition is a condition that occurs
when people do not consume enough
Calories or do not eat a sufficient variety of
foods to fulfill all of the body’s needs.
• Humans need to get eight essential amino
acids from proteins.
• In some parts of the world, the only
sources of food may be corn or rice. Each of
these foods contains protein but lacks one
of the essential amino acids. A type of
malnutrition called amino acid deficiency
can result from such a limited diet.
 • A person’s diet is the type and amount of food that
he or she eats.
• A healthy diet is one that maintains a balance of the
right amounts of nutrients, minerals, and vitamins.
• In most parts of the world, people eat large
Sources of amounts of food that is high in carbohydrates, such
as rice, potatoes, and bread.
Nutrition • The foods produced in the greatest amounts
worldwide are grains, plants of the grass family
whose seeds are rich in carbohydrates.
• Besides eating grains, most people eat fruits,
vegetables, and smaller amounts of meats, nuts,
and other foods that are rich in fats and proteins.
The Ecology of
Food
• As the human population grows,
farmland replaces forests and
grasslands.
• Feeding everyone while maintaining
natural ecosystems becomes more
difficult.
• Different kinds of agriculture have
different environmental impacts and
different levels of efficiency.
 • Artificial selection, also called "selective
breeding”, is where humans select for
desirable traits in agricultural products or
animals, rather than leaving the species to
Artificial evolve and change gradually without human
interference, like in natural selection.
Selection • Artificial selection has long been used in
and GMOs agriculture to produce animals and crops
with desirable traits.
• Artificial selection appeals to humans since it
is faster than natural selection and allows
humans to mold organisms to their needs.
Artificial Selection:
Important
Terminologies
• Purebred is a type of organism
that comes from a lineage of the
same breed of organism and that
has never mated with another
breed.
• A cross-breed organism is one that
was the offspring of two different
types of purebreds.
• mixed-breeds are a combination of
multiple breeds, where their
parents were not purebreds. There
are too many possible
combinations to count.
GMOs: An
Example of
Artificial
Selection