Meeting the Family by Donovan Webster

Author:Donovan Webster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Geographic Society
Published: 2010-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

The Stone Age, it has been noted in other places, did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended when Homo sapiens made a huge Neolithic-age leap forward in thinking and technology. And much of that leap was facilitated by one change in human practice. Slowly, but with increasing volume and efficiency, modern humans switched from hunting and gathering to a committed life of farming.

Beginning about 11,000 years ago, Neolithic humans were stumbling into the earliest stages of a new, more agrarian way of life. Still, the route remained slow going, with heavy work and the threat of starvation always nearby. Nobody would be jetting off to vacation at Cabo San Lucas or Ko Samui any time soon. But over the next thousands of years, the archaeological record shows that humans learned how to grow cereals and breed animals in incrementally increasing numbers.

It’s important to stress that, just as modern farming is fraught with challenges, early efforts had their ups and downs. Still, even in its early precariousness, agriculture was, to many people, far preferable and more energy-efficient than the life of hunting and gathering. Thus began a positive feedback loop that, in terms of its magnitude, compares with nothing else in the cultural history of Homo sapiens.

Farming changed the history of humankind: With the human cultivation of crops, the crops cultivated the humans as well.

“The establishment of farming suddenly meant humans had time for other things,” says Rae Lesser Blumberg, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, who has studied ancient and modern farming and its effects on society for five decades and in more than 40 countries. “And it didn’t take long, only a few thousand years, for what was once a subsistence culture to become a solidified one that had a centralized village or city, with stratification and division of labor inside that society. With some exceptions and notable ‘buts’ along the way, farming set up what human society has become. Not all cultures progressed at the same speed; many progressed at very different speeds. But in the story of what modern humankind is, farming is a huge component. Again, with some exceptions, the idea of farming might well be the differentiating component between ancient and modern humans.”

As mentioned, by 11,000 years ago Monte Verde in Chile was established, its society thriving as people dined on grilled animals and potatoes from the local harvest. Not long after that, in the lowland areas of the Middle East’s Levant, communities were sprouting up, many of them permanent enough that the land soon became barnacled with small mud-brick or stone buildings.

At localities like Tel es-Sultan in Jericho, today located within the West Bank Palestinian Territories, or at Çatal Hüyük in central Turkey—places well watered thanks to sometimes snowy mountainsides and springs nearby—ancient towns took root. Tel es-Sultan, said to be among the oldest continuous settlements on Earth, is so ancient that excavations show its earliest structures were devoid of clay containers, rendering it a rare “pre-pottery” Neolithic site.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.