February 18, 2018 Sunday
Bedtime Story
When Apes Took to Agriculture/Domestication
Yuval Harari of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
on the other hand, considers the agricultural revolution history’s biggest
fraud.
You may wonder why, and very rightfully so.
Well, let us how the “recent” history of us
human apes and our close cousins went.
For nearly 2.5 million years or maybe three
we human apes, after diverging from human like apes of the types
Australopithecus, Homo habilis and other unnamed ones, were feeding ourselves
simply by gathering plants and hunting animals.
By the humans, I mean to include many
varieties of human species that were existing by then such as Homo erectus,
Homo ergaster and the Neanderthals.
From East Africa they had spread all over
the planet, including as far as Australia, Asia Pacific and the Americas
entering it via Alaska from Siberia and migrating all the way down to South
America.
Yet they continued to live by gathering and
hunting which provided them a great variety from the perspective of complete
biological nutrition.
Yet, some 10,000 years ago, for some
unknown they changed their life style that they had been practicing for as long
as humans had been present on the earth and took to cultivating a very few
variety of grains and domesticating very few class of animals.
This gradual revolution took over a century
or more starting around 9500 BC and got firmly established as least in the
Fertile Crescent by 8000 BC or so.
The area where the cultivation first took
root is the modern Middle East or to be more specific land area that included
modern Eastern Turkey, western Iran and the Levant.
The Levant itself is a loose term which
shifting definitions but very broadly it refers to “Mediterranean lands east of
Italy”.
The first to be domesticated were the wheat
and the goats which probably happened by 9000 BC and by 3500 all the
domestication of crops and animals that we see around us today was over.
Which means that even today, most of our
calories come from the very limited plants and animals that our ancestors
domesticated between 9000 BC and 3500 BC.
I love this phrase from the book Sapiens:
“No noteworthy plant or animal has been
domesticated in the last 2,000 years.
If our minds are those of hunter-gatherers,
our cuisine is that of ancient farmers.”
This is all very interesting but not very
shocking.
The best is still to come.
So far, the historians have always
proclaimed and sent a general message that agriculture was a great big leap
forward for the humanity as a whole.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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