Emergence of agriculture and writing
New challenges for humanity
Humans must have faced the new conditions that existed in the places they arrived: other climates, new predators, even more primitive humans.
They improved their tools: they added handles. To improve your efficiency; they invented the rope, hooks, whistles, and baskets.
In cold areas, they needed animal skins to cover themselves. To hunt they invented the spear, the bow; and, to separate the meat from the skin, better flint burins, chisels and knives.
Creativity began 40,000 years ago: art. The first things that appeared were lines, circles and symbols carved in stones, later, small sculptured bone objects, and 30,000 years ago, the cave painting on the walls of the caves: hands, human and animal silhouettes.
- Agricultural revolution
Most of the people in the world changed their lifestyle around 10,000 years ago by adopting some form of agriculture.
Why and how did they do it?
Due to a decrease in glaciation, the planet's climate improved, which in turn allowed certain naturally growing grasses to spread across the steppes.It also influenced some groups to observe that plants have a cycle: they are born, grow and bear fruit.It was probably the women who noticed that the grains were germinating and began to sow them.
Along with agriculture came the domestication of animals.
- Agricultural main centers:
*The crescent-shaped strip of land located in the eastern Mediterranean (called the Fertile Crescent, which includes the present-day countries of Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey), 10,000 years ago.
*Northwest China, 7,000 years ago. Mesoamerica (term applied to central and southern Mexico and adjacent areas of Central America), 5,000 years ago
*Andean America (today Ecuador and Peru), 4,000 years ago
- Changes brought by agricultural revolution
The main and immediate change that agriculture brought to the sedentary. The groups had to take care of their plantations, harvest them and store the products that they did not consume immediately (surpluses); therefore, they could no longer travel to different places.
The second big change was in housing: branch sheds and caves were not enough, as in nomadic life. They had to build the first houses, with whatever was available in the area: stone, mixed wood,etc. The gathering of several houses, often behind a fence to protect themselves from predators and enemies, led to the formation of hamlets and villages.
The populations mastered the cultivation techniques: fertilizer, irrigation, seed selection and conservation of the surpluses, as well as the breeds of domesticated animals and the quality of the tools used. This increased the harvested product, which was the third big change
The availability of more consumable calories brought the increase in population, the fourth big change. Biologists have estimated that the total world human population, 10,000 years ago, was between 5 and 10 million. After 8,000 years, this figure had become 300 million.
- Invention of writing
The development of cities and agriculture led to the growth of commerce. In one of these cities, and for hundreds of years, Sumerian merchants kept records of what they sold and bought on clay tokens in the shape of animals, jars, and other items they traded.To keep track of sales they covered the chips with mud that they scraped off with the end of a cane. Towards the year
3300 BC, they realized that they did not need figures and began to scratch with simplified signs on whatever surface represented the articles - that was the beginning of writing. As the canes left marks in the shape of a triangle or wedge, this type of writing is known as "cuneiform". When they wanted to keep track of the sales, they made it in clay and baked it.