"A People's History of the World" Part 1 Ch. 1-5

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History Reflections: Part 1 "A People's History of the World" by Chris Harman 11-30-11 Chapter 1: The Neolithic Revolution Chapter one covers the variety of ways that human beings came to make their livelihoods. It explains how mankind made the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to the lifestyle of a cultivator, of a farmer. Not only did they learn to adapt to their ever-changing climates and make agriculture possible, but they learned to make use of the animals that lived in their surrounding areas. It is during this Neolithic Revolution that humans made their first big step forward: the domestication of flora and fauna. But how did humans even get to this kind of lifestyle? What about this period in time made all these transitions possible? The answer is that their climate changed. Although climate changes happened all over the world, one of the most prominent examples of this change is shown in the Fertile Crescent. Humans here were forced to give up their hunter-gatherer ways because “there was a decline in the availability of naturally occurring wild grains and a fall in the size of the antelope and deer herds” (Harman 10). So when they were faced with this sudden lack of wildlife to hunt and vegetation to gather, they had to think of an alternative. That alternative was agriculture. Based on their prior knowledge of plants that they had acquired through the ages of gathering, some groups of people put that knowledge to work and planted the seeds of wild plants. This supplied them with a stable food supply. Over time, their methods of agriculture increasingly improved. Methods ranged from horticulture to a more modern form of agriculture that surfaced much later on. This new lifestyle allowed humans to stay in one place, and as a result, “people became more firmly rooted to their village settlements than ever before” (Harman 11). Suddenly,
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