Posted on 03/29/2012 4:46:05 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The moment when the hunter-gatherers laid down their spears and began farming around 11,000 years ago is often interpreted as one of the most rapid and significant transitions in human history -- the 'Neolithic Revolution'.
By producing and storing food, Homo sapiens both mastered the natural world and took the first significant steps towards thousands of years of runaway technological development. The advent of specialist craftsmen, an increase in fertility and the construction of permanent architecture are just some of the profound changes that followed.
Of course, the transition to agriculture was far from rapid. The period around 14,500 years ago has been regarded as the point at which the first indications appear of cultural change associated with agriculture: the exploitation of wild grains and the construction of stone buildings. Farming is believed to have begun in what is known as the Fertile Crescent in the Levant region, which stretches from northern Egypt through Israel and Jordan to the shores of the Persian Gulf, and then occurred independently in other regions of the world at different times from 11,000 years ago.
Recent evidence, however, has suggested that the first stirrings of the revolution began even earlier, perhaps as far back as 19,000 years ago. Stimulating this reinterpretation of human prehistory are discoveries by the Epipalaeolithic Foragers in Azraq Project (EFAP), a group of archaeologists and bioarchaeologists working in the Jordanian desert comprising University of Cambridge's Dr. Jay Stock, Dr. Lisa Maher (University of California, Berkeley) and Dr. Tobias Richter (University of Copenhagen).
Over the past four years, their research has uncovered dramatic evidence of changes in the behaviour of hunter-gatherers that casts new light on agriculture's origins...
(Excerpt) Read more at physorg.com ...
|
|
GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
Two things -- one, I think I should be thanking someone for sending the link in FReepmail, and two, was there a recent topic about this? |
|
|
Interesting. I suppose farming was a prerequisite to writing.
Human teeth have been decreasing in size over the past 10,000 years. That is probably a result of farming, as well.
Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
We call the above people Liberals or "Progressives"
.....and of course it led to regulation and zoning laws. That’s evolution.
In short, they didn't need agriculture to move into the Neolithic.
Glad the guys working in the field are beginning to think that approach over and apply it elsewhere.
Let me take this opportunity to point out that professional archaeologists may have been making a mistake in failing to recognize tree domestication as having preceded herding and other forms of agriculture. For example, the Sa'ami are believed to have been domesticating birch trees ~ this gave them a faster growing, healthier birch, with lots of trunk to create planks from. The planks gave them ski's, snowshoes, baskets/claypots, and seagoing boats! (I mentioned that the other night). There are other examples.
Thanks for the ping. And all of these advances would not have occurred if not for Global Warming.
Just imagine what the consumption of easy-to-gobble fast food will do to them.
In 100 years we'll be eating Soylent Pink Slime out of feeding cartridges.
Hee hee. Apparently, it was our switch to an easy to eat cooked diet that allowed for our teeth to begin shrinking in the first place. Eventually, we'll just have gums!
Welcome to the future. That's called orange chicken, and it's best when the pink syrup is about the consistency of 50w motor oil.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.