Why did early man build his dwelling near the fields?
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
Sometime about 10,000 years ago, the earliest farmers put down their roots—literally and figuratively. Agriculture opened the door to (theoretically) stable food supplies, and it let hunter-gatherers build permanent dwellings that eventually morphed into complex societies in many parts of the world. But how that transition played out is a contentiously debated topic. Now, a new study shows that our path to domesticity zig-zagged between periods of sedentary life and a roaming hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The evidence? The presence—and absence—of the common house mouse.
“It’s remarkable, using a lowly house mouse to monitor a major milestone in human history,” says Melinda Zeder, curator of Old World archaeology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., who wasn’t involved with the study. “It’s really a masterful way of monitoring sedentism.”
To explore the transition to agriculture, scientists have looked to the Natufians, an ancient hunter-gatherer society that flourished from about 12,500 to 9500 B.C.E. in a part of the Middle East called the Levant, which includes pieces of modern-day Cyprus, Syria, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine. The Natufians were among the first people known to domesticate animals—dogs and hogs—and may have been the first to transition to farming. As they moved from seasonally collecting acorns and hunting gazelle to farming wheat and barley, many researchers think they went through an intermediary phase: a semisedentary period in which they built stone dwellings but still hunted for sustenance and moved on when resources became scarce. But evidence of exactly when and how humans became sedentary has been hard to come