HISTORY 100
WORLD HISTORY
Lesson 3:  AGRICULTURE AND HUSBANDRY

LEARNING OBJECTIVES
● You should be able to define and explain the following terms: husbandry, agricultural revolution, selective breeding, hybridization, fertilization, crop rotation, slash and burn agriculture, megaliths, barbarism in its old technical sense, diffusion and independent development, “golden age”.
● You should understand the relationship between a sedentary way of life and material progress.
● You should have begun to consider some of the basic questions raised by some aspects of The Agricultural Revolution:
○ Why did humans adopt agriculture when it meant a more laborious life for them, one with less variety and more drudgery, less social communication and more lonely labor, and a poorer diet coupled with a loss of leisure?
○ Did agriculture spread through diffusion or independent development? What arguments could be adduced to support one or the other?
○ Why did The Agricultural Revolution tend to center in river valleys?
○ How can one explain the immense amount of labor that neolithic societies invested in such things as the megaliths of western Europe?
○ Are there any reasons why religion and magic might have been more important for the people of early neolithic communities that they had been for their palaeolithic ancestors?
○ Can you think of any Golden Ages that might been echo of the more or less plentiful and carefree days of palaeolithic times?

Sometime around 10,000 BC, some hunting and gathering clans in the Middle East began to abandon hunting because they had learned to control animals to the point where they could keep them close, work to keep their numbers as great as possible, and kill some when they needed meat’. They also learned how to prepare the soil so that they could take the seeds of the plants that they had been gathering, plant them, water them, keep them free from weeds, and harvest them when they were mature’. Agriculture of this sort was a difficult and laborious process, because — not having the means to keep most plants edible during the fall and winter seasons — they had to rely on the seeds of certain grasses — wheat, rye, barley, millet, and spelt — because these seeds could be dried and preserved for a considerable time.
The process of developing agriculture took a long time’. The seeds of these grasses were quite small, and it has taken thousands of years of selective breeding and hybridization to bring them to the size that they now are’. Also, the growing of these cereals exhausts the fertility of the soil, and the early agriculturalists knew little or nothing of fertilization, or crop rotation’. Some people practiced what is called slash and burn cultivation, in which the trees on a piece of lands are slashed and, when they are dead and dry, are burned to open up a field for cultivation’. When the yield from that land begins to diminish, another tract is slashed and burned, and the people move to the new field’. This wandering existence made it impossible, however, for these peoples to develop the level of organization and sophistication of which a sedentary people is capable’. Consequently, the earliest evidence of established neolithic communities are found in river valleys where Spring floods replenish the soil’s fertility with a layer of fresh silt.
Even so, it took neolithic farmers much more land to feed themselves than is necessary today’. This meant that their animals were in competition for the land available, and so their agriculture limited the number of animals they could keep’. This meant that the amount of protein in their diet was less than that of the hunters and gatherers, and that they had to work harder and longer to secure a sufficient amount of food to eat’. It also meant that various communities competed for the same land, and warfare became a regular fact of human life.
There was progress of a sort, however’. Agriculture could support more people, and the world’s population of humans grew to fifty million or more’. Agriculture also made larger communities possible, and, about 3500 BC, the neolithic peoples of western Europe were able to built structures out of immense stones called megaliths’. This may simply have meant that the mass of the population has become subject to the commands of a warrior or priestly class, however’. Whatever the case, the Agricultural Revolution spread slowly throughout the world, and some peoples never did accept it but remained, apparently by choice, hunters and gatherers.
The Agricultural Revolution raises a number of important questions.
● Agriculture took more time and more energy than hunting and gathering, and yielded a less satisfying diet, a loss of equality between sexes and among individuals, and made war a permanent feature of human life’. Why would any people have chosen such an exchange?
● Some scholars believe that agriculture originated in the Middle East and gradually spread throughout the world in a process of diffusion, while others point to the different staple plants that were developed in various parts of the world and suggest that agriculture appeared through independent development in several places around the globe’. What significance does this dispute have for our understanding of human beings and human society?
● It may well be that a memory of their more pleasant existence as hunters and gatherers led people to develop the idea of a golden age that is so common in the folklore and religions of the world’. What examples of such Golden Age legends and myths can you think of, and how well do you think the reflect the transition from Palaeolithic savagery to Neolithic barbarism?

ASSIGNMENTS
REQUIRED
Washington State University has mounted an excellent series of educational modules, and you should concentrate on The Agricultural Revolution for a good general overview of the subject’. One of the problems with the web, however, is that it is changing so fast that it is sometimes difficult to keep up with what is currently available’. For this reason, I will usually try to give you an alternate site for the one assigned’. At the time that this section is being put up, The Neolithic Revolution is available and is an excellent alternative site’. One of the more impressive characteristics of the neolithic peoples of western Europe was their practice of erecting tombs and monuments composed of gigantic stones, often covered with hundreds of thousands of tons of dirt’. The Stone Pages offers a good introduction to these constructions’. I would particularly recommend Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth in Ireland, and, of course, the famous Stonehenge in England.

This text was produced and installed by Lynn H. Nelson
23 January 1998
Lawrence KS