Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of shrinking fossil fuel resources, and 4) expanding use of
food crops for biofuel production.” Agricultural production
changes rapidly as farmers worldwide react to price fl uctua-
tions in fossil fuels, seeds, fertilizers, crops, and land.
To set the stage for understanding the contemporary
agriculture picture, in the next section of the chapter, we
discuss how people lived before the origins of agriculture
and the circumstances that gave rise to the domestication
of plants and animals many millennia ago.
Archaeological digs of ancient settlement sites suggest that
people would capture a fi re caused accidentally and would
work to keep the fi re burning continuously. Later, people
learned that fi re could be generated by rapid hand rotation
of a wooden stick in a small hole surrounded by dry tinder.
Fire became the focal point of settlements, and the camp-
fi re took on symbolic and functional importance. It was a
means of making foods digestible, and it was used to drive
animals into traps or over cliffs.
In addition to hunting game on land, humans har-
vested shellfi sh, trapped fi sh by cutting small patches of
standing water off from the open sea, and invented tools
to catch fi sh, including harpoons, hooks, and baskets.
Using tools and fi re, human communities altered their
environments, which helped to establish more reliable food
supplies. Along with hunting and gathering, early humans
were adept at keeping track of the migration cycles of fi sh
and other animals. American Indians along the Pacifi c Coast
and on Arctic shores, the Ainu of Japan and coastal East
Asia, and communities in coastal western Europe caught
salmon as they swam up rivers and negotiated rapids and
falls. Archaeologists have found huge accumulations of fi sh
bones at prehistoric sites near salmon runs.
Hunter-gatherers migrated to take advantage of cycli-
cal movements of animals and to avoid exhausting the supply
of edible plants in any one area. After the summer salmon
runs, people hunted deer during the fall and again in the
spring, taking advantage of seasonal movements to trap deer
where they crossed rivers or in narrow valleys. During the
winter, people lived off dried meat and other stored foods.
Hunting, Gathering, and Fishing
Before the advent of agriculture, hunting, gathering, and
fi shing were the most common means of subsistence
throughout the world. Of course, what people hunted or
gathered depended on where they lived. North America
provides a good example of the diversity of regional special-
izations among hunter-gatherers. The oak forests of parts
of North America provided an abundant harvest of nuts,
sometimes enough to last more than a full year; American
Indian communities living in and around these forests
therefore collected and stored this food source. Other
American Indians living near the Pacifi c Ocean became
adept at salmon fi shing. The bison herds of the Great Plains
provided sustenance, and so bison served as a focal point for
many plains cultures. In the colder climates of North
America, people followed the migrations of the caribou
herds. In the north, in the coastal zone stretching from
present-day Alaska to Russia, the Aleut developed special-
ized techniques for fi shing and for sea mammal hunting.
The size of hunting and gathering clans varied
according to climate and resource availability. Hunting
and gathering communities in areas of abundance could
support larger populations. People living on the margins
of forests could gather food in the forest when hunting
yielded poor results and then return to hunting when cir-
cumstances improved.
The First Agricultural Revolution
Out of areas of plenty came agriculture, the deliberate tend-
ing of crops and livestock to produce food, feed, fi ber, and
fuel. Geographer Carl Sauer believed the experiments nec-
essary to establish agriculture and settle in one place would
occur in lands of plenty. Only in such places could people
afford to experiment with raising plants or take the time to
capture animals and breed them for domestication. Sauer
studied the geography of the First Agricultural Revolution,
focusing on the location of agriculture hearths and what
kinds of agricultural innovations took place in those hearths.
Where did plant domestication begin? Sauer, who
spent a lifetime studying cultural origins and diffusion,
suggested that Southeast and South Asia may have been
the scene, more than 14,000 years ago, of the fi rst domesti-
cation of tropical plants. There, he believed, the combina-
tion of human settlements, forest margins, and fresh water
streams may have given rise to the earliest planned cultiva-
tion of root crops —crops that are reproduced by cultivat-
ing either the roots or cuttings from the plants (such as
tubers, including manioc or cassava, yams, and sweet pota-
toes in the tropics). A similar but later development may
have taken place in northwestern South America.
Terrain and Tools
Before developing agriculture, hunter-gatherers worked
on perfecting tools, controlling fi res, and adapting environ-
ments to their needs. The fi rst tools used in hunting were
simple clubs—tree limbs that were thin at one end and
thick and heavy at the other. The use of bone and stone and
the development of spears made hunting far more effective.
The fashioning of stone into hand axes and, later, handle
axes was a crucial innovation that enabled hunters to skin
their prey and cut the meat; it also made it possible to cut
down trees and build better shelters and tools.
The controlled use of fi re was another important early
achievement of human communities. The fi rst opportuni-
ties to control fi re were offered by natural conditions (light-
ning, spontaneous combustion of surface-heated coal).
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