Write a detailed account on the origin of agriculture and civilisation.
Answers
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.
The peoples who first cultivated cereal grains had long observed them
growing in the wild and gleaned their seeds as they gathered other plants for
their leaves and roots.