The Agricultural Revolution
In just _____________ years, humans went from hunting and gathering to create such improbabilities as the airplane, the Internet, and the 99 cent double cheeseburger. 15,000 years ago, humans were _____________ and hunters. Foraging meant gathering fruits, nuts, and also wild grains and grasses. Hunting allowed for a protein-rich diet, so long as you could find something with meat to kill.
While we tend to think that the lives of foragers (hunter/gatherers) were pretty bad, fossil evidence suggests that they actually had it pretty good. Their bones and teeth are healthier than those of _____________; they actually work a lot fewer hours than the rest of us; and spend more time on _________, music, and _____________.
It’s important to note that cultivation of crops seems to have arisen independently over the course of millennia; using crops that naturally grew nearby—_______ in Southeast Asia, _____________ in Mexico, _____________ in the Andes, _____________ in the Fertile Crescent, _____________ in West Africa —people around the world began to abandon their foraging for agriculture.
Let’s first take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of agriculture:
Advantage: __________ _______ _________. You might have droughts or floods but if you’re growing the crops and breeding them to be healthier and heartier, you get a bit more say in whether you starve.
Disadvantage: In order to keep feeding people as population grows, you have to radically change the ___________ ____ _____ ___________________.
Advantage: You can create a food surplus, especially if you grow grain, which makes _____________possible. Agriculture can support people not directly involved in the production of food, like, say, _____________ who can devote their lives to creating better farming equipment (or _____________).
Disadvantage: Some would argue the whole complexity of large and complex agricultural communities that can