ABSTRACT
It’s hard for us to imagine, buying our food from supermarkets, that for more than 99 percent of our existence as humans we were hunters and gatherers, tied to the seasons of plant foods, the movements of game, and the ebb and fl ow of aquatic resources. Agriculture, the deliberate cultivation of cereal grasses and edible root plants, is a phenomenon of the past 12,000 years of human existence. Agriculture and animal domestication (“food production”) were a major turning point in human history, the foundation for all early civilizations and, ultimately, for our own modern industrial world. Before describing the development and spread of farming, we must examine some of the major theories that explain this development and review some of its consequences. Also, we must describe the intensifi cation of hunter-gatherer societies that came immediately after the Ice Age ( Figure 5.1 ).
