Agriculture Paper - Good Thing or Worst Mistake Ever?

Jordan Huxtable

Anth 102

9/27/12

Agriculture paper

Agriculture:

Good Thing or Worst Mistake Ever?

Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi, and other life forms for food, fiber, biofuel and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture also known as farming or husbandry was a key development in the rise of the human civilization. Most people think of agriculture as just a way of growing food, well they are wrong, it is a way of growing food but also has to do with cultural changes adaptions and changes by human races. Agriculture created new opportunities and for the human race and became a way of survival. Agriculture is not the biggest mistake ever; it was a good thing and helped evolve our human race into what it is now.

Hunting and gathering animals, different kinds of plants, or berries for a long time was our way of getting wood and surviving. This worked pretty well, and the hunters did a good job of adapting to their surroundings such as weather conditions or different types of environmental conditions. "In the tropics they gather mainly plants resources for food, medicine, etc. It is not unusual for them to use several hundred plant species. In the Arctic and sub-Arctic, they may force to rely more on hunting to survive. They move seasonally to optimize different sources of food as they become available." This shows how people in a couple different climates have to survive and what they do for food and medicine. The last sentence states that they move seasonally to make sure different foods and resources become available to them and do not run out, the problem is that sometimes the resources did run out or there weren't enough animals to be hunted.

"To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence," (Diamond page 91). Here diamond is saying that everything the human race has believed in has changed or evolved into something else, and he does not believe that the adoption of agriculture is going to change for the best, but in fact change for the worse and destroy our existence. Another quote from Diamonds book that I found interesting was, "Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over on person per ten square miles, while