Chapter 7
Patterns of Subsistence
What Is Adaptation?
• Adaptation refers to beneficial
adjustments of organisms to their
environment.
• This process leads to changes in the
organisms and impacts their environment.
• The human species adapts biologically
and culturally.
People Adapt
• All people adapt to three things
– Abiotic – physical environment
– Biotic – all living things
– Human environment – home, neighborhood
How Do Humans Adapt
Culturally?
• Through cultural adaptation, humans
develop ways of doing things that are
compatible with the resources they have
available to them and within the limitations
of the various habitats in which they live.
• Adaptations may be remarkably stable for
long periods of time, even thousands of
years.
What Sorts of Cultural Adaptations Have
Humans Achieved Through the Ages?
• Food foraging is the oldest and most universal type of
human adaptation and typically involves geographic
mobility.
• Adaptations involving domestication of plants and
animals, began to develop in some parts of the world
about 10,000 years ago.
• Horticulture led to more permanent settlements while
pastoralism required mobility to seek out pasture and
water.
• Cities began to develop as early as 5,000 years ago in
some world regions.
Cultural Adaptation
• The process organisms undergo to
achieve a beneficial adjustment to an
available environment and the result of
that process.
• The characteristics of organisms that fit
them to the particular environmental
conditions in which they are found.
Adaptation
• Interaction between
– changes an organism makes in its
environment
– changes the environment
makes in the organism.
Ecosystem
• A system, or a functioning whole,
composed of both the physical
environment and the organisms living
within it.
Adaptation in Cultural
Evolution
• Human groups adapt to their
environments by means of their cultures.
• Cultural Evolution is the the process of
cultures changing over time.
• Not all changes turn out to be positive, nor
do they improve conditions for every
member of a society.
• Complex, urban societies are not more
“highly evolved” than those of food
foragers.
Comanche Bison Hunt
• A Comanche bison hunt
as painted by artist
George Catlin.
• Plains Indians such as
the Comanche and
Lakota developed
similar cultures, as they
had to adapt to similar
environmental
conditions.
Convergent Evolution
• In cultural evolution, the development of
similar adaptations to similar
environmental conditions by peoples
whose ancestral cultures were quite
different.
Parallel Evolution
• In cultural evolution, the development of
similar adaptations to similar
environmental conditions by peoples
whose ancestral cultures were similar.
Culture Area
• This map shows the
culture areas defined
for North and Central
America.
• Within each, there is n
similarity of native
cultures, as opposed to
the differences that
distinguish the cultures
of one area from those
of all others.
Culture Core and Ritual
• Culture cores are the
features of a culture
that play a part the
society’s way of making
a living.
• In Bali, gatherings for
rituals at water temples
allowed farmers to
arrange schedules for
flooding their rice
paddies.
Procedures for Cultural
Ecology
1. Analyze the interrelationship of a
culture’s technology and its
environment.
2. Analyze the patterns of behavior
associated with a culture’s technology.
3. Determine the relation between those
behavior patterns and the rest of the
cultural system.
Production
• The act of making a resource into a
product.
• Two areas of production:
– Factors – physical aspects of production
– Organization of production
• Division of labor
• Patterns of cooperation
• Rights to resources
Definitions
• Carrying capacity - The number of people
that the available resources can support
at a given level of food-getting techniques.
• Density of social relations - The number
and intensity of interactions among the
members of a camp.
Four Types of
Subsistence
•
•
•
•
Hunting and gathering (food foraging)
Horticulturalists
Pastoralists
Agriculturalists
Food Foraging
• Also known as hunting and gatehring
• Egalitarian
• Environmental management
– Passive
– Active
Food Foraging Life:
Characteristics
•
•
•
•
Division of labor – marked by sex and age
Mobility - Move about a great deal.
Seasonal congregation and dispertion
Band political level - Small size of local
groups.
• Reciprocal sharing - populations have few
possessions and share what they have.
• Rights to resources - Populations stabilize
at numbers well below the carrying
capacity of their land.
Food Foragers and Population
• Frequent nursing of
children over four or five
years acts to suppress
ovulation among food
foragers such as
Bushmen.
• As a consequence,
women give birth to
relatively few offspring
at widely spaced
intervals.
Neolithic
• The New Stone Age; prehistoric period
beginning about 10,000 years ago in
which peoples possessed stone-based
technologies and depended on
domesticated plants and/or animals.
Neolithic Transition
• Sometimes referred to as Neolithic
revolution.
• The profound culture change beginning
about 10,000 years ago and associated
with the early domestication of plants and
animals, and settlement in permanent
villages.
Transition to Food
Production
• Began about 11,000 to 9,000 y.a.
• Probably the result of increased
management of wild food resources.
• Resulted in the development of
permanent settlements as people
practiced horticulture using simple hand
tools.
Domesticates in the
Archaeological Record
Horticulture
• Cultivation of crops carried out with simple
hand tools such as digging sticks or hoes.
• slash-and-burn cultivation
– Also known as swidden farming.
– An extensive form of horticulture in which the
natural vegetation is cut, the slash is
subsequently burned, and crops are then
planted among the ashes.
Slash-and-Burn Cultivation
• Reburning an old, overgrown
slash-and-burn plot in the
Amazon forest in Venezuela
in preparation for new
planting.
• Although it looks destructive,
if properly carried out, slashand-burn cultivation is an
ecologically sound way of
growing crops in the tropics.
Pastoralism
• Subsistence that relies on raising herds of
domesticated animals, such as cattle,
sheep, and goats.
• Pastoralists are usually nomadic.
Pastoral Nomads
• In the Zagros
Mountains region of
Iran, pastoral nomads
follow seasonal
pastures, migrating with
their flocks over rugged
terrain that includes
perilously steep snowy
passes and fast ice-cold
rivers.
Agriculture
• The cultivation of food plants in soil
prepared and maintained for crop
production.
• Involves using technologies other than
hand tools, such as irrigation, fertilizers,
and the wooden or metal plow pulled by
harnessed draft animals.
Characteristics of
Agricultural Societies
• One of the most significant correlates of plant cultivation
was the development of fixed settlements, in which
farming families reside together near their cultivated
fields.
• At first, social relations were egalitarian and hardly
different from those that prevailed among food foragers.
• As settlements grew and large numbers of people had
to share important resources such as land and water,
society became more elaborately rganized.
Locations of Major Early
Civilizations
• Civilizations of Central and South America developed
independently of those in Africa and Eurasia.
• Chinese civilization may have developed independently of those
in Mesopotamia, the Egyptian Valley, and the Indus Valley.
Peasant
• A rural cultivator whose surpluses are
transferred to a dominant group of rulers
that uses the surpluses both to underwrite
its own standard of living and to distribute
the remainder to groups in society that do
not farm but must be fed for their specific
goods and services in turn.
Development of Cities
• Cities developed as intensified agricultural
techniques created a surplus.
• Individuals were free to specialize full-time
in other activities.
Mechanized
Agriculture
•
•
•
•
Population boom
Machines do a lot of the work
Specialization
Produce a lot of things we do not need