Chapter One Review: Agriculture

                For the most part, chapter one stressed the importance of Agriculture, and its impacts into the development of the world in which we live in today.  Traditionally speaking, most world history courses in the past would have omitted the Paleolithic Era (or “Old Stone” when translated) from being taught among the general students.  This is not to say that this time period was not as vital as the later events of recent human history; rather, when compared to governmental developments within the different regions of the world, progress during the “Stone Age” phase of life was slow, and there is a severe lack of recorded documented data that historians use to confirm the way life used to be like.  The later stages of life had the abundance of written texts; without the text, historians and archeologists rely on relics, preserved remains, and the locations in which the items were found, in order to piece together what may have happened in this land before time.  From this collected data, we can confirm four important details within the Paleolithic Age:  the human species emerged and evolved into Homo Sapiens from the human like creature, humans used basic and really old stone tools to perform tasks, they had formed into bands of 20-40 people of “gatherers and hunters”, and they initially migrated out of Africa into other continents (list of simplified key points created in class by Ms. Patricia Andrews).

Our instructor pointed out a subtle and clever observation of the way the author (Robert W. Strayer) described the culture as being “gatherers and hunters”, rather than the traditional “hunters and gatherers”.  Strayer purposely did this to demonstrate a very important fact—the majority of food was 70% gathered materials (berries, nuts, previously killed creatures, etc.) while the other 30% of the food was through hunting.  This is also aimed to eliminate the gender-typing associated with this method of life; it had been presumed that a “gathering” role took on a more feminine characteristic, while “hunting” was seen more as a masculine trait.  In reality, evidence suggests that these primitive people were egalitarian by nature (meaning they were equal in all aspects of life), and both men and women would be classified equally as gatherers.

The dawn of the Neolithic Era (or Agricultural Revolution) was what transitioned the Stone Age into further evolutional development.  By directly manipulating plants and domesticating certain animals, people were now able to produce their own food rather than digging around for what would be available.  Consequently, by affecting the previous balance of the world, the abundance of food allowed populations to rise, and while people began to lose the skills of traditional gathering and hunting, the domesticated animals and plants also became dependent on humans for survival.  Strayer also conveyed the push for agriculture was the value of intensification after the Ice Age; by discovering the efficiency of creating more food and resources, and minimizing the surface area of land in which they previously gathered and hunted, the people could prosper by expending less energy to live when compared to their former lifestyle.  After the survival of the Ice Age, Strayer suggests the evidence of growing populations occurred during the global warming to prepare and prevent a future global event.  With this “food crisis”, people were motivated to explore new ways of producing food and technologies which combat these earthly forces.  This also greatly hindered the people from maintaining their former skills of survival in order to produce for the future masses.

I personally found it interesting how crippling they grew to be as a direct result to this new way of life.   I know that people today do the same thing with calculators, meal preparation, or any other means of having someone (or something) do the most basic and difficult work for them if they can avoid it; yet without acquiring those necessary set skills, people struggle to do the work themselves.  For me, I’m personally embarrassed with my inability to create my own food—not in the traditional sense of finding a cow to create my own steak (which I also don’t know how to do), but even traditional home cooked meals are an impossible challenge for me to create because I always had somebody willing to do it for me.  I am grateful that I can make my own bowl of cereal (barely), but I know that I would have an extremely difficult time in the Paleolithic Era if I were to make a desirable meal for my band of brothers and sisters.  If I also proved myself useless within the pack, I would most certainly be exiled.

I also found it interesting that with the birth of agriculture, and the development of societies, that not only did the later generations lose their primitive skills of survival, but they also lost a bit of their morals and ethics as well.  Earlier in the chapter, archeologists were able to find artifacts and sculptures that indicated the praise of women (or women like deities), for their role in bearing and producing life.  When farming became prominent in the agricultural realm, in some societies the males took on the work load to produce the harvest and life giving sustenance.  In other societies, with the fewer numbers of adult female remains compared to male, there is a notion of preference toward male offspring, and quite possibly the elimination of female babies.  It makes me think of the foundation of human nature, are we inherently good?  Are we inherently evil?  I believe in the balance of needing some bad with the good, and some good with the bad.  Not everything can be distilled into black and white concepts, and morality and integrity can all be relative to the person performing the acts.  That being said, I know the methods of creating a selective society in favor of infant genocide is pretty extreme, but for their survival and improper assessments to invest in their future, I can understand their actions.  

All of the societies involved with producing agriculture in fears of another worldly disaster reminds me of the Y2k scare.  For those of you too young to remember it, there was a wide spread panic of the fall of computerized technology due to the programming of dates within the internal memory was (in theory) only set for the 1900's.  People truly thought at the time that after New Year's Eve, the counters in all computerized systems would reset back to 1900 instead of 2000.  With duplicate time entries, it could have messed up records, cause ATM's to crash, and other systems that humans became dependent on.  In fearful responses for the end of the world, some people began stocking up on food to prepare for the anarchy, others joined cults involving mass suicides to avoid the hardships of technological collapse.  Fearful surviving methods enables crazy behaviors for people, and for most part the actions taken to controll one's fate is made by selfish motivation.  With the rising civilizations embracing a brand new way for living, I can rationalize that people today would most likely do the same thing if their methods would secure their future.  I don't exactly agree with the methods people take to secure their chances of survival, but I understand that it has been an instinct embedded within us through the many generations of mankind.