Ch1 Part 2 First Farmers

Agriculture by far is the one human innovation that has propelled us to where we are today.  Without discovering the ability to cultivate foods and domesticate animals societies would not have been able to form, populations would not have been able to grow as they have and we would most likely still be living in small movable encampments.  This new innovation brought the end to the paleolithic era and was the dawn of the Neolithic age.  When clans began to increase in population and it became much more difficult to move whole communities.  I found some points made in this chapter very interesting and I really enjoyed Stayer's alternate views that he presents, such as the fact that women were in charge of the gathering so the innovation of agriculture must have certainly been invented by women.  Also, I find it fascinating that agriculture took such a long time for mankind to discover and yet areas all across the globe discovered this new method of cultivating food al around the same time.  The beginnings of agriculture first started with simply cutting back certain brush to allow favorable plants to grow in their place.  The most believable theory is that with the ice age ending and global warming causing a huge change in the earth's environment common food supplies for hunter-gathers began to dwindle and new sources of food had to be discovered to avoid a crisis.  They also presume that at this point populations had become larger and more sedentary at this time making agriculture a necessity.  Luck seems to be a key factor as Strayer discusses that few animals at the time and even now are capable of domestication as well as plants so only the civilizations lucky enough to have those resources present could flourish.  The first city to truly flourish also contained all the necessary components which was the fertile crescent in what is now called the middle east.   

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