Basic Agriculture

Before Agriculture:

In agriculture, people lived by hunting wild animals and gathering edible plants. When the herds were plentiful and blooming plants, life was good. But when the crew moved somewhere else, people have to follow them and often discover a whole new set of plants to supplement their diet.

Hunters finally realized that their prey was much easier to kill if it was bricked up in a box canyon. Even better, they could catch prey and hold it in a cave for future use. Archaeological finds show that early humans imprisoned giant ground sloth is in this way. Entrapment, however, was a temporary measure. Not thinking about the future, hungry people mash itself, so when Sloth had all been eaten, they sought more laziness. Restraint of a herd of breeding and care was not yet practiced.

This "feast or famine" lifestyle had its obvious disadvantages, including hunger.

Fortunately, several geniuses world finally discovered how to preserve meat by drying it, smoking it over a fire, or cooking it. Some others realized that what they took seeds from the plants they had eaten and dispersed them, they grew into new plants.

 

Ultimately, people have decided that life would be much easier if they always had animals with them, and if the edible plants or their products are always available. Settle down seemed like a good idea.

The Origins of Agriculture:

Recent archaeological findings at the beginning of agriculture before 7000 BC and livestock (most dogs used as hunting aids) thousands of years before that. There is some evidence that people Shanidar, in Kurdistan, were domesticating sheep and wheat plants as far back as 9800 BC

Intensive food gathering, where local inhabitants in a region that is created permanent housing and made extensive use of existing facilities, appears to have begun in the Middle East around 9000 - 7000 BC

Barring the use of time machines, there is no way to know for sure how planting really got started. But archaeologists have plenty of theories. One theory suggests that some seeds are wasted in a memorable way during a migration. When the tribe next passed the same place, they can be correlated emission of seed with the sudden wealth of the plant. They could then have realized that they could keep the seeds and plant them, and be sure to have a food supply. Later they began to select and plant the seeds from plants with the highest yields. In this way the plants were domesticated, modified and controlled to benefit the people and not only found in nature.

At about the same time as agricultural progress described above, people began to tame the wild oxen and sheep gather in flocks. The remains of a hunting dog that goes back to 8500 BC, have been found in North America.

Cities develop from agriculture:

Abundance of the harvest from domesticated plants permitted large increases in population. With all of the same plants and animals in one place, the agronomist move from random caves and makeshift huts with permanent or semi-permanent villages with houses made of stone, wood, or wattle. An early example is the biblical city of Jericho. It started as such a village around 9000 BC, and has a resolution of one or the other.

One of the earliest recorded cities Catal Huyuk established in Konya Plain, Turkey. It is a big, lush expanse of water ideal for primitive agriculture. The earliest buildings date from 6500 B.C. and resemble those found in the oldest settlements in Jericho. You came into the mud brick buildings from the top. Catal Huyuk is remarkable for the number of shrines, used for many purposes, including burial and potential victims of the gods of the hunt and harvest. This implies an early religious organization, and a way of life, which left enough time for some members of society to concentrate on religious duties. There was also time for crafts. Some of the earliest known pottery was found in Catal Huyuk. There is also evidence of copper smithing and rope making, and some kilns were large enough to indicate that some residents had full-time bakers.

By 5000 BC, the Euphrates Valley was full of villages and communes. Municipalities provide important services for storage, religious practices and the administration that the villages could not handle. These townships evolved to the Sumerian civilization. 

At about the same time, were the same villages, starting in the Nile valley and river valleys in China and India.

Early cultivation techniques:

The initial approach to agriculture was to eliminate some of the seeds from food plants before eating them and then spread the seeds back in the same area they came from. 

Later, plantation owners realized that the other (non-food) plants were in competition with their plant to the area, so they went to weed the fields to ensure that only those plants that grow there. Everything else was left to nature.

Eventually it became clear that this constant replanting resulted in stunted crops and low yields. The first reaction was just to find a new field. After all, the country was long and people were few. After a while, although the peripheral areas that were used up. So potential farmers looked to the forests.

Slash and Burn:

Most farming communities discovered the slash and burn technique. Firstly, all the leaves in a section of a forest was cut, creating a field. The debris was left on earth. So the field was set on fire, and ashes from the cut sheet-enriched soil. After many uses even this enriched soil was barren, and farmers were forced to find new areas.

As world population grew and more areas were cut and burned, the walk to a newly burnt area became longer and longer and other cultures that can claim these areas unsupervised. The tribe would then have to move to new parts of the forest. In some areas of Madagascar, such as slash and burn agriculture is still practiced and the soil becomes less and less fertile.

Fallow Fields:

A fallow field is not planted in a period in the hope that it will regain its fertility. It is believed that the practice of leaving fields fallow arose because some cultures were forced to return to their old areas, and found that the dry areas, they left behind was more productive.

This led to the creation of a rotational system, where each season, some areas will be alone or tilled but not planted, extending the useful production life of a number of areas. Sometimes fallow fields were used for grazing animals, which had the unintended benefit fertilize the soil.

It was later found that certain plants thought unusable, except perhaps to feed, was in favor of a field of productivity and seeds for these plants were planted in fallow fields.

Watering:

As the population grew and competed for the best growing lands some cultures were forced to try to grow normally dry areas. Some of these cultures died in the experiment, while others discovered the principles of irrigation. There were some of the first massive engineering projects to dam water for later use, including the digging of canals to distribute water to normally dry areas. The first known examples of this irrigation process was built by farmers who colonized the Euphrates River valley around 4000 BC 

In most cases, irrigation, fisheries and conservation of water contained in a short period, such as spring flooding of the Euphrates and the Nile, or winter storms in the American desert, so it can be used later in the normally dry periods. In almost all cases, early irrigation desert flower in a couple of centuries, so the water dried up in some climate change or the fields grew barren because irrigation had washed all the good land and culture died. Both Pueblo dwellers in the American desert, and the inhabitants of Petra in the Middle East flourished and then died with their irrigation systems.

Other areas, such as highly fertile Nile Valley and the Tigris, Euphrates Fertile Crescent, was large enough and had a sufficiently reliable source of water, so they were productive until today, but even these areas has been a decline in fertility and can only, if not for modern farming methods.