Why do anthropologists believe that hunting and gathering people first turned to agriculture.?

Question

I am having a problem with this question from my College Environmental Bio class. I can't find this answer anywhere. I have been trying to find this answer for an hour now and can't find it. If any of yall know anything about this please let me know. Thanks

Answer 1

It's easy to understand why people domesticated animals, but agriculture is a lot of work and the answer to your question at this point is anybody's guess.  It's generally conceded that women invented agriculture. People probably noticed that squash seeds thrown away in a pile grew into new squash plants next spring, and experimented with other seeds.  Squashes were domesticated early and the reason is probably because they're easy to grow: given enough water and sunlight the vines will take over everything. But raising grains is much more work. First you have to prepare the soil, which is work enough in itself - if you want to have enough wheat to feed 20 people throughout an entire winter, you need 5 acres or more devoted to nothing but wheat. Once it sprouts, crows love it. ( There's an old planting song that goes "One for the taxman, one for the crow, one to die and one to grow.") A lot of weeding must be done. Rain has to come at critical times, or you have to irrigate, another big project. Harvest time is a real grind of continuous hard labor to get in all the ripe grain before it gets rained on. After that it has to be winnowed, stored, and then finally ground to be useful as flour. This is a lot of work - try it!

What makes it more confusing is that people who live largely on a grain and vegetable diet have a lower calorie diet than do people who get most of their calories from meat. Maybe shamans told them to do it.

Answer 2

Several factors may cause the rise of agriculture:

1) Extinction of the megafauna (less yield from hunting)

2) Development of neolithic tools including pottery which allows for massive amounts of plant food to be gathered.

3) Appearance of seasons due to glacial retreat after the end of the last Ice Age.

4) Increasing population pressure. There are only so many good hunting sites, while farmland could be developed anywhere there is water

5) Domestication of animals. While people in the Near East region developed domestication after agriculture, people in the Far East (i.e. Asia) developed domestication first, which may have led to a sedentary lifestyle, which in turn led to the development of agriculture.

Answer 3

They believe it becuase taht is what the evolutionary paradigm says must have happened.

There is very little evidence to support this point of view.

The evidence shows that man has been highly intelligent from the earliest time that we have evidence. The ancient civilisations - whether they be from Egypt, Asia, S America, all had agriculture as well as writing, building etc.

For the true history of man you need to turn to the Bible. Adam and Eve were created intelligent. Their children are recorded in Genesis 4:2 :  Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil.

Much later, after the flood, all people were gathered at Babel. When God dispersed them they scattered throughout the world - giving rise to the ancient civilisations that anthropologists investigate.

Unfortunately the prevailing 'scientific' view (not just in anthropology), is that the Biblical account is ruled out  -  by the very definition of 'science'. Not a very scientific approach to rule out one possible explanation a priori. Nevertheless that is what many people do - not for scientific reasons but for philosophical/religious ones.

There are many articles here which may also help.

http://creationontheweb.com/content/view...

Answer 4

Because at the end of the last Ice Age, wild game had become scarce, and Hunter/Gatherers had to supplement their diets with intentionally grown food, which also involved remaining at the same location for more than one season, in order to harvest what they had planted!

Answer 5

That's easy, it's easy. Sorry, but think about it. The amount of energy expended trying to hunt (with relatively minor weapons) and locating foods is great compared to the energy expended planting a plot of earth, tending it occasionally and letting the rain provide all of the needed water. And it is fairly predictable and dependable as a supplement to hunting, occasionally crops fail, but the majority of the time the do not, especially the wild varieties of plants that would have been the first things grown for food. There is a formula for calculating cost of energy used/energy gained. Also, agriculture allowed small populations to settle more permanently and grow into civilizations as they didn't have to follow animals or weather for available foods.

Answer 6

First and  foremost reason is the increase in polities and populations.

Answer 7

The hunter gatherers knew about how plants grew and how to increase the yield. They knew when certain plants became ripe and made sure to be there to collect them. In the Northwest the camas plant had edible roots. People made sure to always leave the largest plants so they would reseed.

Very likely agriculture came about due to population pressure. People couldn't just move to a new area or split off when the band became too large. They still had their territory but now had to increase the food production through agriculture.

There came with agriculture a number of problems. Living in one spot meant that sanitation was an issue. Stocks of wood could run out. Eating stone ground grains meant that teeth wore down to the gums. Women suffered repetitive motion problems from grinding.

Answer 8

Population pressure.

Hunter gatherers expend less energy gaining food, and they have a lot of leisure time. The quality of their diet is also a lot better, the first farmers were a small and sickly lot. About four inches shorter than hunter gatherers, with bad teeth and a lot of health problems like arthritis, and smaller brains.

But, agriculture can raise a LOT more people on the same piece of land. You only need a climate change to force too many people onto the same piece of land for agriculture to become necessary, or there will be starvation and war.

Once you've started farming, your tribe can number six or more times more than the next tribe over that don't farm. Even if they are bigger individually, you'll still be able to overrun them and take their land for your new field of  barley. And because you don't move, you can build fortifications to defend yourself against raids from others. And then, because you are no longer nomadic, you can collect status items and wealth, as you don't have a weight limit on your possessions anymore.

The reason farming caught on has a lot more to do with war than food production.

Answer 9

The answer isn't that easy. You cant generalize and say that all populations turned to agriculture for the same reasons. But, generally it is assumed that population size and density is an important factor in the rise of agriculture production. Hunting and gathering is not less productive than agriculture. Actually, it has been shown that H/G expend less time and energy hunting and gathering than agriculturalists. They thus have more time to lay around telling stories around the fire :-)

However, the higher the population density, the more the people tend to over use the resources that can be had in the natural environment. Thus, people may have turned towards purposeful planting to supplement hunting and gathering. Eventually, this gave rise to maize agriculture (in north america) which likely spread from mesoamerica.

Thus you must take note of migrations of people, culture, diffusion of technology, independent invention etc as all possibilities for the origin of agriculture.

Also, you cannot say it was males or females who started agriculture. Arguments have been made for both. But I agree, likely it was females. Ethnohistorical accounts have show that females are generally the work horses of most small indigenous cultures, and usually do most of the work related to agricultural or horticultural production. Agricultural may have arisen from hunter gatherers observations that similar plants tend to grow in the same places every season. It is a simple extrapolation to see that seeds may the the reason for this. Therefor accumulation of seeds and purposeful planting may have followed.

By the way, I am working on my MA in anthropology, so my answer is correct for the most part.

Oh and the previous answer stated something about energy equations. Thats Leslie White, neoevolutionist theory from the 1960's. Not really relevant today.