MMW 11 Chapter Notes - Chapter Neolithic Essay 1: Digging Stick, Crop Yield, Shanidar Cave
2 Oct 2016
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Sourcebook neolithic essay 1 (the agricultural revolution ) notes: Foragers (hunting, fishing, gathering: humans have mostly been foragers, foraging cannot sustain a large, non-moving population. Foraging groups were easily defeated by groups using agriculture/ pastoralism (raising livestock: foragers were driven into marginal environments -> lots of environmental stress, band societies. Referred to as a band : divided labor by gender. Men did most of hunting and fishing, women and children the gathering. Hunting done with stone tools -> tools easy to dig up -> know more about hunting than gathering. Did not make one gender superior to other: leadership. Leadership title fell to person who was best at getting the job done at the time: conventions concerning marriage led to widespread kinship networks among foraging groups, sharing was unwanted but critical to groups survival. Made it difficult to be assimilated to agricultural societies since these societies did not really share: no groups developed systems of writing.
