Why Was Agriculture So Important?발음듣기
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Why Was Agriculture So Important?
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태국어 번역 1명 참여
출처 : 칸아카데미
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Imagine you woke up one morning and there were no grocery stores, no restaurants, no supermarkets.발음듣기
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Well, the truth is, in today's world, with seven billion humans to feed, foraging couldn't come near to providing enough food.발음듣기
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Farming, like what you see around me in this rice paddy near Cheongju in South Korea, is absolutely essential to the survival of the modern world.발음듣기
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Remember, foragers travel around their environments selecting the plants, the animals and the other raw materials they need and using them without processing them too much.발음듣기
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They select a small range of species, they tend to them very, very carefully as in this paddy field, and they keep them in protected environments.발음듣기
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They protect them, they feed them, they help them reproduce, and in return, they get nutritious honeydew.발음듣기
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When species get dependent like this in the natural world, over time they tend to change very, very rapidly indeed.발음듣기
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For example, the ants, after a time, get so dependent on the aphids that if all the aphids died, the ants would starve to death.발음듣기
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Biologists refer to such relations between species, such relations of close dependency, as symbiosis.발음듣기
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This was because humans selected the most nutritious wheat grains, or rice grains, or corn grains, or the most docile and fattest animals.발음듣기
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And the result was that within a few generations, new domesticated species began to appear and they were created not by natural selection, but by artificial selection.발음듣기
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You can see the difference very, very clearly if you compare a modern corn cob, which is fat and nutritious and tasty, with its ancestor, teosinte, which is a rather pathetic-looking, weedy plant.발음듣기
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Or if you compare a modern sheep, domesticated sheep, which tends to be fat and docile and frankly not too smart, with its ancestor, a mountain goat, a very intelligent, athletic creature.발음듣기
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Humans change too, but they tended not to change genetically so much as technologically, socially and culturally.발음듣기
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They learned to clear trees, to build paddy fields like this, to divert rivers, to protect their crops and animals from pests such as rats or wolves.발음듣기
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And the result of all of this was that humans found that they could produce more of what they wanted from a given area, from a small area, than they had before and that meant that humans could now live in sedentary villages rather than being nomadic.발음듣기
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But to get a real sense of what's going on with farming, we need to think about it from a big history perspective.발음듣기
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Remember, all the energy that supports the biosphere, or most of it, comes from sunlight through photosynthesis.발음듣기
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So what farmers were really doing was diverting more of that energy into species that they could use and away from other species.발음듣기
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At the moment, it looks as if farming really began about 11,000 years ago in the highlands east of the Mediterranean that we know as the Fertile Crescent.발음듣기
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It may also have grown... appeared at about the same time in the Nile Valley, slightly further south.발음듣기
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Then from about 8,000 years ago, we have evidence of rice growing in China and at about the same time, we have evidence of the growing of taro and yams in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, though it took several thousand years for agriculture to really flourish here.발음듣기
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Then, from about 5,000 to 4,000 years ago, agriculture pops up in several different parts of the world.발음듣기
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And farming also appears in the Americas right across the Atlantic, in Mesoamerica, where they're growing maize and squash, and also in the Andes, where potatoes were a very important crop.발음듣기
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From these core regions, agriculture then spreads to neighboring regions, but there's a real puzzle here because none of the core regions seem to have been connected.발음듣기
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So why, after almost 200,000 years of living as foragers, did humans in so many parts of the world that had no connection between each other begin to behave in such similar ways in such a brief period of time?발음듣기
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During the Paleolithic era, if populations grew too much, you could generally solve the problem by migrating into a new region.발음듣기
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But after the settlement of the Americas from about 15,000 years ago, there were no large areas left to migrate into.발음듣기
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So from now on, if populations began to grow, you had to try to get more resources from a given area.발음듣기
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And during the Ice Ages, for the most part, climates were so cold and so unpredictable that farming was more or less impossible.발음듣기
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Glaciers began to retreat, sea levels began to rise, and in area after area, you began to get warmer and wetter climates.발음듣기
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There was a brief period between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago when climates were cold again, but then from about 12,000 years ago, climates became warmer and wetter, and we entered the interglacial period that we're still living in today.발음듣기
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Now, as a result of global climate change, humans and animals and plants everywhere in the world had to start changing their behaviors.발음듣기
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In some areas such as the Fertile Crescent east of the Mediterranean, as climates changed, resources became more abundant.발음듣기
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And in these regions, these particularly favored regions, some foragers began to settle down because they found they could live in one place for most of the year without traveling around.발음듣기
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In the Fertile Crescent, archeologists refer to the people who settled in these villages as Natufians, and they've excavated many of their villages.발음듣기
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But as they settled down, their behaviors changed and, in particular, populations began to grow.발음듣기
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We're not sure why, but one reason may be that if you're a villager, you don't have to carry children around so there's less pressure to reduce the number of children.발음듣기
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Within a few generations, they found they didn't have enough resources to feed everyone in what had once seemed an area of abundance.발음듣기
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The problem was they'd probably forgotten many of the old techniques of foraging, and, besides, neighbors probably occupied those lands now.발음듣기
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Now, something like what happened to the Natufians seems to have happened in many other areas.발음듣기
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In the case of the Natufians, we have lots of evidence about this expansion of villages and population growth.발음듣기
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But something like this happened in many areas and everywhere, the same two factors seemed to have been involved.발음듣기
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First, global climate change, which made agriculture possible, and secondly, overpopulation, which made it necessary.발음듣기
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As we've seen, these are pivotal events that allow the creation of new, more complex things with new emergent properties.발음듣기
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Agriculture unlocked forces much more powerful than that and they would transform human history.발음듣기
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