Neolithic and Chalcolithic – Robert Jurmain reference book added in Neolithic section
Critical Thinking Questions
- What are the most important differences between the environmental and cultural approaches explaining why farming began? Your answer should include the basic assumptions, strengths, and weaknesses of each approach.
- What kinds of evidence from the archaeological record do researchers use as indicators or measures of the extent of plant or animal domestication?
- In what major ways did the development of agriculture differ between the Old World and the New World? Your answer should consider both plants and animals.
▶ Explain the important differences between domestication and agriculture.
▶ Compare and contrast environmental and cultural theories that explain the beginnings of farming and herding.
▶ Identify and explain the major kinds of archaeological evidence that researchers use as indicators of early plant and animal domestication.
▶ Explain the major ways in which the development of farming and herding differed in the Old and New Worlds.
By the end of the last Ice Age, humans were living in most of the world’s inhabitable places. They achieved a global distribution without becoming multiple species in the process, which isn’t the way things usually happen in nature. They were able to do this because they possessed extraordinary adaptive flexibility as biocultural organisms. Without such flexibility, humans might still be restricted to the tropical and subtropical regions of the Old World.
The archaeological record provides abundant evidence that the rate of change in human lifeways accelerated markedly during the past 10,000 years or so. Throughout this long period, human culture accounted for more and more of the changes in how and where our ancestors lived. By making cultural choices and devising new cultural solutions to age-old problems, human groups succeeded in mitigating some of the processes that operate in the natural world (for example, starvation due to seasonal food shortages) and either turned them to their advantage or at least lessened their worst effects. Humans also discovered that the cost of such cultural solutions included consequences for both the natural world and human biology. Two of the most profound and far reaching developments of later prehistory were the shift from hunting and gathering to food production and the emergence of the early civilizations. This chapter deals with plant and animal domestication and the associated spread of farming, both of them integral to the development of the first civilizations, which we will examine in . We’ll start by examining competing explanations for the origins of food production. This will give you a sense of the diverse perspectives from which researchers investigate how and why farming developed after the end of the last Ice Age. From there, we’ll discuss the archaeological evidence for the origins of food production in several regions around the world
Summary of Main Topics
▶ The early Holocene rise of plant and animal domestication and the invention of agriculture is called the “Neolithic revolution.” Agriculture soon became a major force in human biocultural evolution.
▶ Major theories to explain the development of agriculture fall into two broad groups:
● Environmental approaches: External or natural forces were the active ingredients in the development of agriculture. Human agency played little role.
● Cultural approaches: Human agency and culture was sufficient to push some societies to seek ways to increase locally available food resources. Environmental factors played little role.
▶ The origins of domestication and agriculture are complex problems for which there may be multiple valid explanations.
▶ Plant microfossils (phytoliths, starch grains, pollen) are important new data sources for the reconstruction of the development of plant domestication.
▶ The Old and New World examples show that in those areas where food production was adopted, farming transformed human subsistence, technology, society, habitation patterns, relationships with other species, and much more. In a few areas of the world, the emergence of large-scale, complex societies followed quickly on the heels of the Neolithic revolution. In Chapter 15, we’ll consider the development and course of early civilizations founded on Neolithic food-producing economies in the Old World and in the Americas. In “What’s Important,” you’ll find a useful summary of the most important archaeological sites discussed in this chapter.