Topic 8: Early Food Production

Learning Objectives

• What types of stone tolls characterized the Mesolithic and Neolithic ages?

• What is the Broad-Spectrum Revolution? Why is it important?

• What is food production?

• What are the benefits and costs of food production?

The Stone Age

• A broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used to make implements.

• Lasted 3.4 million years.

Paleolithic (Old Stone Age)—Foraging as the means of subsistence

• Lower Paleolithic (Acheulean toolmaking tradition associated with H. erectus ),

• Middle Paleolithic (Mousterian tradition associated with Neanderthal and archaic H. Sapiens)

• Upper Paleolithic (blade tools associated with AMHs)

Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age)

Neolithic (New Stone Age)

Paleolithic

(The Broad-Spectrum Revolution occurred in the late upper Paleolithic period

Mesolithic

• The Broad-Spectrum Revolution

• microlithic tools

Neolithic

• Food production

• Ground and polished stone tools

• Pottery

The Broad-Spectrum Revolution

(Kent Flannery 1969)

Foraging activities at the end of Ice Age (between 15,000 to 12,000 B.P.), during which a wider range of plant and animal life was gathered and hunted.

B.P.—before present

What Caused the Revolution?

Environmental change and population grow

• Example: humans’ attempts to adapt to the postglacial environment in Europe.

o Change of hunting strategies

o Gathering remained as the mainstay of human economies

o Food preservation

o Development of carpentry

Why Is the Broad-Spectrum Revolution Important?

• The accumulation of knowledge of plants and animals and their reproductive characteristics.

• This revolution gradually led to food production in a mere 10,000 years (hominins had subsisted by foraging for several million years!)

Stone Tools Made in the Mesolithic Period

The characteristic tool type: microlithic (Greek for “small stone”), small and delicately shaped stone tools

Food Production:

human control over the reproduction of plants and animals—purposeful domestication.

• People became food producers when more than 50% of their diet depends on domesticated food

What caused food production?

• Ecological/environmental change

• Population growth

• Social and political need

Plant Cultivation and Selection

Among 200,000 known plant species, a mere dozen were domesticated.

Characteristics of domesticated plants as a result of purposeful human selection:

• The size of the edible part of plants became larger with domestication. Higher yield.

• The loss of the natural seed dispersal mechanism (bean pods, the grain axis)

• The brittle husks of domesticated grains

Why weren’t most large animal species domesticated?

14 out of 148 large animal species had been domesticated.

--Animal temperaments

--Animal social structure

--The issue of territory

Animal Domestication and Selection

• Sheep and goats: the first animals to be domesticated.

• Selecting animals for certain desirable features (e.g., woolly sheep)

• Animals tend to get smaller with domestication