History notes on Big Era 3
 10,000 to 1,000 years ago BCE
 Farming and emergence of complex societies
 One perspective
o Slow and fragmented
 Another perspective
o Fast, happened in only 8,000 years
 Farming is interrelated technical process of producing foods
 Social and cultural changes
 Agriculture means a whole new way of living
o Agriculture
o Agrarian societies
o Complex interplay of plants
o Animals
o Topography
o Climate
o Weather with human tools
o Techniques
o Social habits
o And cultural understandings
 Some people switched, others lived half and half
 Fundamental was domestician
 Alter the genetic make up of plants and animals to become more useful to
humans
 Neolithic era, new stone age because of complex tools
o Varied and useful tools began to appear
o Tandem with farming
 Meant that groups could become larger and more dense than before
 6 to 120 million people in big era 3
 Faster rate of growth than previous eras
 Required humans to think more and organize themselves
 Paleolithic people had food supplies, shelter, and short work hours
 Did not take up because they thought it would have made life more secure
and satisfying
 Certain places, incrementally of centuries of millennia
 No clear vision of where we where going
 Agrarian societies connected to the ice age thaw
 Rainfall increased a lot
 Covered the shelves and land bridges
 Broke the world into groups
o Afroeuraisa and islands
o Americas
o Australia and Papua new guinea
 4,000 BCE pacific islands became their own little group
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Big thaw permitted warmer rain
Forests and meadowlands popped up
So many animals lived that people stayed in one place and hunted all year
People began to gather grains
Travel spread new plants
Information comes from texts (the bible, in some cases)
Different people research agriculture and the like
Domestician domus house
Breed for food, fiber, muscle power
Cows ancestors were strong and unruly, other animals the same
Quality and usefulness important in picking thing to use
Protected grain from weeds, drought, and birds
Began selecting seeds based on desirability
Control and manipulate the reproduction of plants to make them better and
more useful
Called systematic domestician
Fertile Crescent ancestors of wheat barley and the like
Management of animal breeding, too
Reduce organisms that they did not want and vice versa
Co-dependent with animals and plants
Rely predictably
Incubator of agriculture
Intensification made humans intervene in natural more than ever
Enhanced species biological success in species that they breed
Upward spiral
Began to require radical innovational
Fertile Crescent, incubator for agriculture
Societies far larger and dense
Called complex societies
Organized power systems
Local environment hurt because of the things taken from them
Extremely vulnerable
Humans began to have large negative affects on the environment
Deforestation and erosion threatened food sources
Close to animals – disease, epidemics
Sometimes these led to collapse of a part of the whole of a society
Stimulated economic conditions to stop disaster
New social rule where needed
10,000 people on a farm in Catal Huyuk in Turkey
Social relations had still the same base
No full time job other than farming
No formal powers, but intelligent leaders
4,000 big changes in social customs
Even bigger communities
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Cities began to rise in 2,250 BCE
12 K 16 cities pop:30,000 +
Specialized jobs arose
Not all job food
Hierarchy
Men over women, patriarchy
Center government system was established, rulers control on others
Trade, lines of trade
Innovations being made in technology – multiplied
Monumental buildings
Walls around cities, tombs, etc.
System of writing or complex record keeping
Spiritual belief systems, public law, artistic expression grew
Astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, and civil engineering’s foundations laid
Not all places with all things
Great Arid Zone special life on herding domesticated animals
Pastoral nomadism
Adapt in larger numbers in places no farming
Not friendship but kinship, how close in blood
Patterns of cycles of encounter, war and peace, etc.
Social and political change because of the herders
Not big as agrarian civilizations
Not found in Americas or in Australia
Capacity for language and writing
Collective learning made stockpile of knowledge
Ideas began to travel within communities, no matter the distance
Cultures changed, just like they do today
Flow of information increase
Religious knowledge, female deities
Writing, Egypt or Mesopotamia, spread widely
Horse drawn chariot, all over AfroEurAsia
Can learn from buildings
o Art
o Objects
o Written texts
o Tools
o Other material remains
Always changing
Not culturally self contained
Developed and changed with their connections and everything
Connections near and far
Trade
Migration
War
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Cultural exchange
The standard of living is what we need to have to stay alive. It includes all of
the things on the human needs chart. It is also how people lived and the
conditions that they lived in, like how clean they where and how much they ate.
The quality of living is how good life is. How good the food was that they ate. It is
the things that are not part of surviving, but things that make life better and
more enjoyable.
Pros and Cons of Farming
Pros
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Cons
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Do not have to hunt
Richer diet
Easier to make money off of
Easier to produce great quantities of food
Do not have as much trouble stockpiling for the winter
Do not go hungry if you cannot find to something to eat
Can work as team
Do not have to have specialized knowledge, or less specialized knowledge
Paves way for technological advances
Accumulate possessions
Family sizes could increase
Take little brain power
Increases muscle size
Easier to store
Technology changes come more often and make the work easier
More work
Longs hours
Little sleep
More equipment costs
Not as much leisure time
Stayed with their germs
Way easier to caught a disease or be in the middle of an epidemic
Women became tied to the home
Cold snaps can destroy crop
Pros and Cons of Hunting and Gathering
Pros
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Lots of leisure time
Third as much work
Did not rely on weather, or insects
Could stockpile large animals easily for winter
Wide array of plants and animals to chose from
More mobility
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Cons
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Left their germs behind
Able to follow traditions
Increases muscle size
Had to stockpile for winter
Had to store meat correctly, or else it went bad and all your work went to
waste
Not as easy to sell large quantities
Not as many spices and the like, not enough time to grow
Relies on skill and cunning
When animals begin to die because of sickness or some other natural
disaster, you are in trouble
As population increases, it becomes much harder to get food
As your hunting areas become developed, animals die and go away
More competition
Easier for competition to have a large effect on family and tribe