ABSTRACT
Almost the entire evolutionary history of genus Homo has taken place within a hunting-and-gathering context. It was only 15,000 years ago that societies of modern humans in different areas of the world began to shift to an agricultural way of life. The transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural societies is one of the most profound and significant events in prehistory. The origins of agriculture can be viewed as a broad phenomenon that can be broken into three components. The relationship between humans, on the one hand, and plants and animals, on the other, in which the humans play an integral role in the protection and reproduction of plants and animals. A nineteenth-century American anthropologist who viewed the transition to agriculture as marking the boundary between the period of “savagery” and the period of “barbarism.” Both Morgan and Childe viewed the development of agriculture as a shift in the relationship between humanity and the natural world.
