Making Living - Textbook Flashcards
What is adaption?
the way humans adjust to their environments to fulfill their needs
What are patterns of subsistence?
food-procuring strategies. Sometimes called the subsistence run.
What are five patterns of subsistence?
- foraging (hunting and gathering)
- pastoralism
- horticulture
- intensive agriculture
- mechanized agriculture (industrialism)
What is horticulture?
Normally small-scale cultivation of crops using hand tools such as digging sticks or hoes.
What are relations of production?
coping mechanisms that societies have evolved.
- these relations and the social adaptions they require of people, such as agreement or consent, are essential adaptions if society is cofunction properly.
What is the balance adaption must establish?
A moving balance between the needs of a population and the potential of its environment.
What refers to the function response of organic or populations to their environment.
adaption
What is anthropogenesis?
The process whereby ecosystems are influenced or altered by humans. Examples include human impact on the environment through pollution, farming, or construction.
What is an ecosystem?
A system, or a functioning whole, composed of both the physical environment and the organisms living within it.
What can too much or too little sickle cells offer?
Having some wicked cells offered a protection against malaria, but having too many resulted in disease and death.
What is an example of bicultural evolution?
the case of the sickle cell
What is the study of ecological anthropology?
focuses on how cultures interact with their environment
How many people, today, support themselves through hunting, fishing, and gathering wild plant foods
perhaps a quarter of million people – less than 0.00005 percent of the world’s population of over 7 billion.
When did the domestication of plants and animals begin?
10 000 years ago
Of all the people who have lived, what percent were foragers?
90%
___years ago the world was sparsely populated and foragers could pick and choose their environments.
ten thousand
Where are foragers found today?
Today, foragers are found only in the world’s marginal areas – the Arctic tundra, deserts, and inaccessible forests.
For how many years has a need existed for at least some specialist “commercial” hunter-gathers to supply the wild forest commodities that have helped east-west trade since ancient times.
2000 years
What characterizes the mobility and technology of foragers?
- do not farm or practice animal husbandry
- frequent movement
- some keep to fairly fixed annual routes and cover only a restricted territory while others have to cover a wider territory
- annual cycle of congregation in one season and dispersion in another
- regular dispersal and aggregation
- nets, bow and arrow
How are foraging camps organized?
- small size
- fewer than 100 people
What is carrying capacity?
The number of people the available resources can support at a given technological level
What is density of social relation?
Roughly the number and intensity of interactions among the members of a camp or other residential unit
What is an important mechanism for regulating social density, as well as for ensuring that the size and composition of local groups are suited to local variations in resources?
redistribution of people
How must foragers make long term adjustments to resources?
Most foraging populations seem to stabilize at numbers well below the carrying capacity of their land. In fact, most foragers could support from three to five times as many people as they typically do.
How do foraging people control population size?
Constant stimulate of the mothers’ nipples suppresses the hormones that promote ovulation. Infants are nursed several times an hour for as many as four or five years.
How is labour divided in foraging societies?
- The hunting and butchering of large games and the processing of hard or tough raw materials: masculine occupation
- Gathering and processing a variety of vegetal foods, domestic chores: women’s work. The nature of women’s work in foraging societies is such the women can do it while taking care of children. They also can do it in company with other women, which helps alleviate the monotony of the work.
What percent of food do modern foragers obtain from plant foods and from the fish and shellfish that women also sometimes provide?
60 to 70 percent
Food sharing is a defining characteristic among which subsistence pattern?
foraging
What is the centre of daily activity and the place where food sharing takes place in foraging societies?
the camp
Why are foragers egalitarian?
- highly mobile
- lacking animal and mechanical transporting
- material goods of foragers must be limited to the barest essentials
- the fact that no one owns significantly more than others helps limit status differences. age and gender are usually the only sources of significant status differences.
What is wealth a sign of in foraging societies?
deviance
What balances rescue distribution with social equality in foraging society?
The forager pattern of generalized exchange, or sharing without any expectation of a direct return.
How many years ago did the transition from food forager to food producer? What is this referred to act?
9000-11000 years ago in several parts of the world. Has been termed the Neolithic Revolution.
What is the neolithic age?
New Stone age. In the Middle East, this period is dated between 8300 and 4500 BC. The Neolithic Age signalled the introduction of domesticated plants and animals, ceramics, and polished tone tools – all related to a change in the subsistence strategy from foraging to horticulture and agriculture. the name, derived from Greek, translates as “new stone age” (neo = “new,” lithos = “stone”).
How is food-producing different than food-foraging?
- requires more work
- monotonous
- larger, more complex communities in which diseases easily mutate and spread
- generally associated with intensive competition for resources