Thursday, October 27, 2011

The Origins of Agriculture

Paleoanthropolical theory has suggested multiple reasons that early humans gave up their lives as hunter-gatherers and turned to agriculture. The earliest and most accepted theory is that agriculture was a natural progression or cultural progress. Others have suggested enviromental change and others an increase of population. However, their are problems with all these theories.
First, let's start with the "natural progression" of culture bringing us agriculture. Why? It is estimated that gathering and hunting brings the same amount of food yeild PER MAN-HOUR as agriculture does. Obviously seed crops give people a significant increase in food yield per acre, but that would not have been known.
Enviromental change is a very weak theory, as differnent cultures turned to agriculture at different times in history.
I also don't believe that an increase in population would have caused early humans to turn to agriculture, as it more likely that a turn to agriculture lead to an increase in population.
So, what is the most likely reason people turned to agriculture? Fishing. Seed crops take time to grow, and it just does not makes sense that early man would have suddenly stopped their nomadic lifestyle and sat around watching plants grow as game dimmenshied. Fishing gave early man a steady and reliable food source that could have led to the first permanent settlements. These stable and permanent settlements would have allowed increases in population, and also given the earliest farmers time to plant, grow, and harvest the first earliest crops. Spear fishing was probably the first form of fishing and could have been done with many of the same spears that were used in hunting, and gathering shallow water creatures such as crabs, mussels, clams, fogs, turtles, and snakes could have added variaty and stability to the fishing villages. From these early settlements, the domestication of animals and seed crops would have had a solid foundation to grow from.

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