History of Agriculture
Before Agriculture
Before agriculture, people lived by hunting
wild animals and gathering edible plants. When the herds were
plentiful and the plants flourishing, life was good. But, when
the herds migrated elsewhere, people had to follow them and often
discover a whole new set of plants to supplement their diet.
Hunters eventually realized that their
prey was much easier to kill if it were walled up in a box canyon.
Better yet, they could capture the prey and keep it in a cave
for future use. Archaeological finds show that early humans imprisoned
giant ground sloth's in this way. Entrapment, however, was a
temporary measure. Not thinking of the future, hungry humans
gorged themselves, then, when the sloths had all been eaten,
they sought out more sloths. maintaining a herd by breeding and
nurturing wasn't yet practiced.
This "feast or famine" lifestyle
had its definite drawbacks including starvation. Fortunately,
several geniuses throughout the world eventually discovered how
to preserve meat by drying it, smoking it over a fire, or cooking
it. some others realized that it they took the seeds of the plants
they had been eating and scattered them about, they grew into
new plants.
Eventually, people decided that life would
be a lot easier if they always had the animals with them and
if edible plants or their produce were always available. Settling
down seemed like a good idea.
The Origins of Agriculture
Recent archaeological finds place the beginning
of agriculture before 7000 B.C. and animal domestication (mostly
dogs used as hunting aids) thousands of years before that. There
is some evidence that the people of Shanidar, in Kurdistan, were
domesticating sheep and planting wheat as long ago as 9800 B.C.
Intensive food gathering, in which the
local inhabitants of a region set up permanent residences and
made extensive use of already present plants, seems to have started
in the Near East around 9000 - 7000 B.C.
Barring the use of time machines, there
is no way to know for sure how planting really got started. But
archaeologists have lots of theories. One theory suggests that
some seeds were spilled in a memorable manner during a migration.
When the tribe next passed the same place, they might have correlated
the spill of seeds with the sudden abundance of the plant. They
could then have realized that they could store seeds and plant
them, and be assured of having a food supply. later they began
selecting and planting the seeds from plants with the highest
yield. In this way, plants were domesticated, changed and controlled
to benefit man rather than just exist in the wild.
At about the same time as the agricultural
advances described above, people started to domesticate the wild
ox and gather sheep into herds. Remains of a hunting dog, dated
back to 8500 B.C., have been found in North America.
Towns and Cities Develop From
Farming
The abundance of the harvest from domesticated
plants allowed major increases in population. Having all of one's
plants and animals in one place allowed the agriculturist to
move from random caves and makeshift huts into permanent or semi
permanent villages with homes made from stones, wood, or wattle.
An early example is the Biblical city of Jericho. It started
as such a village around 9000 B.C., and has been a settlement
of one sort or another ever since.
One of the earliest recorded towns is Catal
Huyuk established on the Konya Plain in Turkey. It is a vast,
fertile expanse ideal for primitive agriculture. The earliest
buildings date from 6500 B.C. and are similar to those found
in the oldest Jericho settlements. You entered the mud brick
buildings from the top. Catal Huyuk is notable for the number
of shrines used for a variety of purposes, including burial and
possible propitiation of deities of the hunt and the harvest.
This implies an early religious organization and a way of life
that left enough time for some members of the society to concentrate
on religious duties. There was also time for crafts. some of
the earliest known pottery was found in Catal Huyuk. There is
also evidence of copper smithing and rope making, and some ovens
were big enough to imply that some residents were full time bakers.
By 5000 B.C., the Euphrates Valley was
full of villages and townships. The townships provided central
services of storage, religious observance and administration
that the villages could not handle. These townships developed
into the Sumerian civilization.
At about the same time, similar villages
were beginning in the Nile Valley and the river valleys of china
and India.
Early Farming Techniques
The initial approach to farming was to remove
some of the seeds from food plants before eating them, then scatter
the seeds back into the same area they came from.
Later, the planters realized that other
(non -food) plants were competing with their plants for the field,
so they took to weeding the fields to make sure the only their
plants were growing there. Everything else was left to nature.
Eventually it became obvious that this
constant replanting resulted in stunted crops and low yields.
The first response was simply to find a new field. After all,
the land was vast and people were few. After awhile, though,
the obvious fields were used up. Then potential farmers looked
to the forests.
Slash and Burn
Most agricultural societies discovered the
slash and burn technique. First, all the foliage in a section
of a forest was cut down, creating a field. The remains were
left on the ground. Then the field was set on fire, and the
ash from the cut foliage enriched the soil. After many uses
even this enriched soil became barren, and farmers were forced
to find new fields.
As the population of the world grew and
more fields were slashed and burned, the walk to a newly burned
field became longer and longer and other cultures could claim
these unattended fields. The tribe would then have to move to
new sections of forest. In some areas, such as Madagascar, slash
and burn agriculture is still practiced and the land is becoming
less and less fertile.
Fallow Fields
A fallow field is one that is not planted
for a period in hopes that it will regain its fertility. It
is believed that the practice of leaving fields fallow originated
because some cultures were forced to return to their old fields,
and found that the infertile fields they left behind had become
more productive.
This led to the establishment of a rotation
system where each growing season certain fields would be left
alone or tilled but not planted, extending the useful production
life of a set number of fields. sometimes the fallow fields
were used for pasturage for animals, which had the incidental
benefit of fertilizing the soil.
It was later found that certain plants,
thought useless except perhaps for animal fodder, were beneficial
to a field's productivity, and seeds for these plants were planted
in fallow fields.
Irrigation
As populations grew and competed for the best
growing lands some cultures were forced to try to farm normally
arid areas. Some of these cultures died trying; others discovered
the principles of irrigation. There were some early massive
engineering projects to dam water for later use, including the
digging of canals to distribute water to normally dry fields.
The first known examples of this irrigation process were built
by farmers who colonized the Euphrates River Valley around 4000
B.C.
In most cases, irrigation involves trapping
and storing water that appears for a short period, such as the
spring flooding of the Euphrates and Nile, or the winter rainstorms
of the American desert, so that it can be used later in normally
dry periods. In almost all cases, early irrigation made the
desert flower for a couple of centuries, then the water dried
up in some climatic change or the fields grew barren because
the irrigation had washed away all the good soil and the culture
died. Both the Pueblo dwellers of the American desert and the
inhabitants of Petra in the Middle East flourished and then died
with their irrigation systems.
Other areas, such as the very fertile Nile
Valley and the Tigris-Euphrates Fertile Crescent, were big enough
and had a sufficiently dependable source of water so that they
remained productive until the present day, though even these
areas have undergone a decline in fertility and might be barren
if not for modern agricultural techniques.
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