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Chapter Summary
After approximately 10,000 years ago when the earth’s climate changed significantly, humans began to develop new ways of adapting to their changing environments. In some areas of the world, this took the form of a transition to plant and animal domestication as forms of niche constructions. Agriculture also involved an element of conscious human choice, whereby humans chose to domesticate wild plants that were both easy to harvest and nourishing. In the process, they created new tools and other forms of material culture to assist with new processes like harvesting.
Anthropologists have identified four major ways in which humans relate to plant species: wild plant-food procurement, wild plant-food production, cultivation and agriculture. In each successive form, the amount of energy people apply to get food from plants increases, but the energy they get back from plants increases even more.
Animal domestication developed as people attempted to control the animals that they were hunting in order to intervene in breeding patterns. Archaeological evidence for animal domestication may be indicated in one of four ways: when an animal species is found outside its natural range, when animal remains show morphological changes that distinguish them from wild populations, when the numbers of some species at a site increase abruptly relative to other species, and when remains show certain age and gender characteristics. The earliest animal domesticated, about 16,000 years ago, was the dog.
Scholars have suggested different factors responsible for plant and animal domestication; none alone is entirely satisfactory. Today, most archaeologists prefer multiple-strand theories that focus on the particular sets of factors that were responsible for domestication in different places. One good example of a multiple-strand approach to domestication is shown by recent studies of the Natufian cultural tradition in southwestern Asia, which developed about 12,500 years ago. Post-Pleistocene human niches involving sedentism and domestication had both positive and negative consequences for human beings who came to depend on them. By the time farmers became fully aware of agriculture’s drawbacks, their societies had probably become so dependent on agriculture that abandoning it for some other subsistence strategy would have been impossible.
Neolithic farming villages possessed egalitarian social relations, like the foraging societies that had preceded them. However, beginning about 5000 years ago in southwestern Asia and shortly after in Egypt, the Indus Valley (India), China, Mesoamerica and the Andes, humans independently developed social stratification. Social stratification occurred when surplus food production made it possible for some members of society to stop producing food altogether and to specialize in various occupations. A wide gulf developed between most members of a society and members of a new social class of rulers who controlled most of the wealth.
Learning Objectives
In this chapter, the student should learn to do the following:
- discuss the different theories that have evolved to explain the origins of animal and plant domestication;
- outline how and if plant cultivation is a form of niche construction;
- explain the consequences of the domestication of plants and animals;
- discuss the relationship between sedentism and the development of agriculture;
- discuss social complexity and what kinds of evidence archaeologists look at when assessing the complexity of a particular society;
- outline how archaeologists explain the rise of complex societies.