The Achievement and Early Consequences of Food-Production: A Consideration of the Archeological and Natural-Historical Evidence

Abstract

After an approximate half million years of relatively simple food-gathering and food-collecting existence, mankind finally achieved—with the domestication of plants and animals—a settled food-producing level of existence. Traces of the beginnings of this change-over may go back eight or ten thousand years, perhaps both in certain Old World and certain New World situations. The appearance of incipient plant cultivation (or "vegeculture") would seem to have been a development within a level of intensified and increasingly efficient food-collection —a phenomenon of end-glacial and early post-glacial times. Truly efficient food-production was under way in western Asia by about seven thousand years ago, and perhaps by four thousand years ago in nuclear America. The hall-mark of effective food-production (in western Asia, at least) was the settled, architecturally expressed, village-farming community. Inconceivable save on the basis of the village-farming community way of life, the urban expression of the city state (again in western Asia,...