Question

WRITE A DETAILED account of the ORIGIN OF AGRICULTURE AND CIVILISATION

Answer 1

     There was nothing natural or inevitable about the development of

agriculture. Because cultivation of plants requires more labor than hunting

and gathering, we can assume that Stone Age humans gave up their former ways

of life reluctantly and slowly. In fact, peoples such as the Bushmen of

Southwest Africa still follow them today. But between about 8000 and 3500

B.C., increasing numbers of humans shifted to dependence on cultivated crops

and domesticated animals for their subsistence. By about 7000 B.C., their

tools and skills had advanced sufficiently for cultivating peoples to support

towns with over one thousand people, such as Jericho in the valley of the

Jordan River and Catal Huyuk in present-day Turkey. By 3500 B.C., agricultural

peoples in the Middle East could support sufficient numbers of non-cultivating

specialists to give rise to the first civilizations. As this pattern spread to

or developed independently in other centers across the globe, the character of

most human lives and the history of the species as a whole were fundamentally

transformed.