Food Production Flashcards
Most of the worlds major food plants and animals were domesticated well before _______
2000 BC
Which kind of society exhibits the beginnings of social differentiation?
Horticultural societies
Approximately 80% of all societies that practice horticulture or simple agriculture are in the _________
tropics
Of all food collectors, ______ probably had the most sophisticated weapons, including _____, _______, and _______
Inuit
Harpoons
Compound bows
Ivory fish hooks
When did people begin to depend less on big-game hunting and more on relatively stationary food resources? What is this called?
- 14000 years ago
- Broad-spectrum food collecting
When did the shift toward broad-spectrum hunting and gathering happen in the New World? What led to this?
- Around 10 000 years ago
- Climate change bit aspect
- Lots of extinction → had to shift toward a broader range of game species
- Melting glacial ice led to more woodlands and grasslands = more plants to exploit
- Highland mesoamerica (mountainous regions of central and southern Mexico) → altitude important factor in hunting and collecting regime
Why did broad-spectrum collecting develop?
- Climate change → rise in sea level increasing availability of fish and shellfish and decline in big game
- Human activity → overkilling of animals
Population growth
Why would the average height have declined during the Mesolithic in the Old World?
Poorer diet
Natural selection for greater height relaxed because leverage for throwing projectiles was not so favoured after the decline of big-game hunting
How does sedentism relate to broad-spectrum collecting?
The nearness or the high reliability and yield of broad-spectrum resources can account for sedentism - not the broad spectrum itself
Explain the difference between foragers, food production, horticulturalists, and agriculturalists.
Foragers:
- Food collectors → use all forms of subsistence technology in which food-getting is dependent on naturally occurring resources
Food production:
- Began around 10 000 years ago
- Populations began to cultivate and later domesticate plants and animals
Horticulture:
- Plant cultivation is carried out with relatively simple tools and methods; nature replaces nutrients in the soil in the absence of permanently cultivated fields
Agriculturalists:
- Intensive agriculture is characterised by the permanent cultivation of fields and the use of complex agricultural techniques
What are the two different kinds of horticulture?
Shifting cultivation:
- More common
- The land is worked for short period and then left idle for some years
- Use slash-and-burn techniques to clear the wild plants and brush in the old field and return nutrients to the soil
- Natural vegetation is cut down and burned off → the cleared ground is used for a shirt time and then left regenerate
Long-growing tree crops
What kind of tools and techniques would horticulturalists use?
Simple tools and methods
Usually hands tools like digging stick or hoe
No ploughs or equipment pulled by animals or tractors
No fertilisation or irrigation
What are some techniques that intensive agriculturalists use?
Cultivate fields permanently
May use fertilizers
Irrigation from streams and rivers
Crop rotation
Explain the relationship between broad-spectrum collecting, sedentism, and population growth in terms of pre-agricultural developments.
Before plants and animals were domesticated in many part of the world there seems to have been a shift to less dependence on big-game hunting and greater dependence on broad-spectrum collecting
The broad spectrum of resources frequently included aquatic resources, such as fish and shellfish, and a variety of wild plants, deer, and other game
Climatic changes may have been partly responsible for the shift to broad-spectrum collecting
Broad-spectrum collecting is associated with more permanent communities in some parts of the world - like the Near East, Europe, Africa, and Peru
In areas like Mesoamerica, the domestication of plants and animals may have preceded permanent settlements
Why do sedentary !Kung women have more babies than nomadic !Kung women?
Reduce spacing between births (sedentary = 3 years) (nomadic = 4 years):
Nomadic women didn’t want to have to carry two kids at once → for sedentary women they didn’t’ always have to carry their children
Sedentary lifestyle seeing advantages to having larger families - more contribution to labour
The longer a mother nurses her baby the longer it is before she starts ovulating again - sedentary mothers can give babies other soft foods like cereals and milk - this shorten the interval between birth and the resumption of ovulation
Sedentary women had more fatty tissue which also resumes ovulating sooner
Discuss the domestication of plants and animals in the Near East, Old world, and elsewhere in the world.
Near East: earliest domestication about 8000 BC
Other independent centres of domestication elsewhere in the Old World: China, SE Asia, New Guinea, and Africa - around or after 6000 BC
New World:
- Highlands of Mesoamerica: 7000 BC
- Central Andes around Peru: 7000 BC
- Eastern Woodlands of North America : 2000 BC
Humans selected certain plants and animals - deliberately or accidentally - because they had characteristics more advantageous for our use: plants with a tougher rachis hold seeds longer and are more desirable for planting; smaller sheep, goats, and cattle are easier to manage than larger ones common in wild herds
What is the significance of the Natufians of the Near East?
Evidence of hollowed out basin-shaped depressions in the rock at the front of their rock shelters - possibly for storage pits
Tools suggest Natufians harvested wild grain intensively (sickles)
Earliest mesolithic people known to have stored surplus crops → stored beneath the floors of their stone-walled houses in storage pits
Evidence suggests increasing social complexity → sites five times larger than those of their predecessors and much more sedentary
Burial patterns suggest more social differences between people
Tooth enamel shows nutritional deficiency
How do archaeologists compare wild vs. domesticated plants and animals?
plants : look for differences in the fragility of rachis (stems), the size of seeds, and the presence of naturally growing ancestors in the region
Animals : look for differences in physical characteristics (ex. Horn shape), the size of animals, and the demography (age-sex composition) of herds
What group made stone axes?
Maglemosians of Northern Europe
Changing environment led to more forested environment
Made stone axes and adzes to chop down trees and use them for houses, canoes, paddles, etc.
Evaluate theories for why food production developed.
Push models: hunter-gatherers were forced into farming by some kind of stressor like an environmental change or population pressure
Pull models: hunter-gatherers were drawn to the benefits of the new farming lifestyle
Most commonly thought that at least initially, some conditions must have pushed people to switch from collecting to producing food, as opposed to it being a voluntary choice
Causes:
- Global population growth → as people moved to fill most of the world’ best habitable regions, people were forced to us a broader spectrum of wild resources and to produce more than what nature could offer by domesticating plants and animals
- Environmental cause → 10000 years ago summers became hotter and winters colder → some people began to favour sedentism in places with vast stands of wild grain; with an abundance of food nearby, populations grew, forcing people to plant crops and raise animals to feed themselves
Mesoamerica → people turned to domestication to produce more of the most desired and useful plants found in nature
- They would sow a variety of plants, then do their seasonal rounds of hunting and gathering, and then go back later to harvest what they had sown
What and when were the first domesticated animals?
Dogs → 10 000 BC in the NEar East (or asia?)
Goats and sheep → 7000 BC
Cattle and pigs → 6000 BC
When and where was the earliest domestication of maize?
5900 BC in Tehuacan Mexico
Domesticated from teosinte
What was an advantageous planting strategy that those in Mesoamerica, Mexico were credited with?
Planting maize, beans, and squash together in the same field
Maize takes nitrogen from the soil and beans put nitrogen back into the soil
What part of the New World was the only one where domesticated animals were a significant part of their economy?
The central Andes
Used for meat, transportation, and wool
Llamas and alpacas domesticated 5000 BC
Guinea pigs also domesticated
Why might the spread of domesticated plants have been more rapid in the Old World than in the New World?
The Old World spread was more along an east-west axis, while the New World spread was more north-south
North-south would have required more time to adapt to variation in day lengths, climates, and diseases
How did plant domestication in Asia differ from in the Near East?
First plants to be domesticated were probably not cereal grains - may not have even been used for food
Bamboo → used to make cutting tools and for other building purposes
Gourds probably used as containers or bowls
Rice → Yangzi Valley in China (6500 years ago)
New Guinea → banana and taro (7000 years ago)
