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Summary History of Food Production
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Extensive summary of the course 'History of Food Production'. It also includes answers to the study questions.
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1. Why did foragers become farmers?The where and when of the ‘Neolithic revolution’ is well known, but the how and why not.
Plant domestication is the deliberate manipulation of wild plants by humans in order to give them a
more desired characteristics for human consumption, for example increased digestibility.
Animal domestication is the same, no new varieties are created, but some properties are changed for
example that cow doesn’t run away or won’t attack. The domestication of animals, is partly
conscious and partly unconscious. Animals did domesticate themselves, such as dogs.
Agriculture is a system in which you use domesticated plants or animals to produce food.
Foragers used plant domestications, but were not farmers. They had no agriculture, because they did
not grow and harvest their own food.
Paradox: the early farmer societies were worse of than their foragers that hunted and gathered.
Foragers are usually taller, stronger, with a more balanced diets with more protein. So, if farming
would make you more prone to disease and your life is shorter and you have a less balanced diet,
than why would you switch to farming? An explanation could be that foragers were trapped in the
farming and the offspring could not switch back to foragers.
Humans originate from apes 7 million years ago. Several species of homos have evolved. The homo
sapiens emerged late. The sapiens had a big brain capacity and were be able to share information.
The sapiens were dependent on hunting and gathering. It took a long time before the homo sapiens
came into the Neolithic revolution/farming/agricultural revolution.
Most of homo sapiens came from Africa. They spread around the world. The UK was one of the last
parts where the Homo Sapiens settled. Homo Sapiens ‘kicked’ out the other Homo’s. This could be
because the Homo Sapiens had certain diseases and/or because Sapiens had a lot of good runners. In
addition, they have communicative abilities. This gave the Homo Sapiens a large competitive
advantage over the others.
The first agricultural revolution started in the Fertile Crescent (Middle-East). The eight ‘founder
crops’ of the Fertile Crescent were einkorn wheat, emmer/durum wheat, barley, lentils, pea,
chickpea, bitter vetch and flax. These crops contained calories and proteins which are needed for
replication. So, the wild ancestors of wheat, barley, sheep and goats were present in the ‘Fertile
Crescent’. The ‘Urban revolution’ also occurred in this region. There was city growth, and people
could do also other activities than food practices.
Gordon Childe (1892-1957) developed the ‘Oasis Hypothesis’: Climate change (droughts) at the end
of the Pleistocene forced clustering of foragers into ‘oases’ (river valleys) off the fertile crescent
where they started farming to secure food supplies: beginning of the Holocene. The droughts would
diminish the food available food hunters and gatherers. They had to move to areas with water, such
as rivers. As they were compressed in a small area and as this area was ideal for farming, they started
farming. However, he was not right. People became farmers when there was a rapid increase in
temperature and wetter conditions (after the drought). More area become suitable for farming.
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,Nikolai I. Vavilov (1887-1943): Areas with the largest genetic diversity of cultivated crop plants today
are the most likely centres of original domestication. He was the first thinking differently than Childe.
In the world there were different zones were different crops were harvested. The change in climate
did not only causes the farming in the Fertile Crescent, but also in other parts of the world.
We think now that there are different “hearths” of domestication. The motivations driving farming is
different for each area. Childe’s ‘oasis hypothesis’ is revisited. We think now that the Holocene
brought warmer and wetter climates, improving plant and animal resources. Vavilov’s map of origins
of agriculture is adjusted with more refined dating of human, animal and plant remains.
The parts were farming started were not connected. European farmers emerged late and were the
‘copy cats’ of the other farming systems. They benefited from events that happened elsewhere and
got their domestication from Asia.
Africa had their own events of domestication, but later on it was hard for them to be very
productive. The Europeans did become very productive.
The farming systems emerging in America was based on potato, maize, tomato and squash. They
were non existent in the Old-world as the systems were not connected.
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,New theories (post 1970) why people became farmers:
- Push model: availability of wild foods declines
o Climate change lead to resource based expansions. There was population growth,
regulated by emigration (push out people were they got constraints for food) into
marginal areas. Foragers introduce plants and animals from the rich areas to
sustain a living leading to agriculture.
▪ So, people only started agriculture because otherwise they would die. This
explains why the river valleys were later with farming than up-hills
▪ However, it does not explain why the population grew faster than the
animals and plants they fed on
- Pull model: availability of domesticated crops rises
o Climate change modified human-animal-plant relations due to selection effects.
Selective hunting increased reliance on specific resources and technologies of
harvest (sickle) and storage (baskets, roasting) and specialization pulls foragers
into trade leading to agriculture.
▪ There was more availability, so people could specialize and trade. This
caused the development of new technologies, and food could be stored.
When people started to trade, the agriculture started (agriculture is a
process of specialization)
- Social model: changing consumer preferences <> social status
o Ambitious individual foragers look for ways to maintain prestige. Farming secured
exotic/high-status foods and may have released an early ‘consumption revolution’.
This lead to expanding production and trade in handicrafts, buying people into a
lifestyle they didn’t want to give up
▪ People wanted to identify with a certain status. With farming, there could be
different statuses, because you could e.g. become a warrior. However, it
does not explain why the climate chance was so distinctive in the change
from forager to farmer.
The forager-framer paradox:
- Farmers became smaller
- Farmers spend more time on food
- Farmers allowed people to live together in cities, which enabled contagious diseases. The
life-expectancy in the city was shorter than in the country side. In the large cities, more
people would die than people that were born. So, to sustain the population level of the
cities, there should be influx of people from the outside.
The reason why foragers ever contemplate farming is still heavily debated. The idea of farming as the
optimal survival strategy (production and storage = security) has been abandoned, especially after
publication of ‘Man the Hunter’ (Richard Lee 1968. It had ever been a conscious choice of the
foragers to become farming, they were pushed and pulled into it. Sedentary agriculture ‘evolved’
stepwise and over time and ‘farmers’ held on to it.
Foragers became trapped into agriculture:
- Foragers could never have foreseen the emergence of “cities”, “civilizations” and “socio-
political hierarchies” (tax systems, slavery etc.).
- Sedentary agriculture changed demographic systems: more frequent sexual intercourse,
shorter birth-intervals, baby-care, decline of ‘infanticide’ causing increased population
growth. Beyond a certain population size, there is no way back.
- Changes in ‘defence systems”: the defence system turned from mobility to sedentary. Larger
group sizes became an advantage. Hunter-gatherers were displaced.
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, Conclusions:
- To explain the start of human food production it is crucial to first ask: when and where?
o Food production developed in different parts that were not connected. Climate
change was the driver.
o It took place in the end of the last ice-age (ca. 10.000 BC) in the start of Holocene.
- Sedentary agriculture first emerged in areas with high bio-diversity (mountainous regions
and river valleys).
- Farming may have been a superior strategy in the earliest times in some areas, and
subsequently, tilted the balance in its favour because of population growth (a system-trap).
- Diamond pays most attention to the ‘where’ question, less to the ‘when’ question, and does
not go deeply into the causality issue. He stresses that the Neolithic revolution was an
“autocatalytic” process.
- So, Diamond was in favour of push model, while the lecturer is in favour of the pull model.
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