Talk:Human Legacy Course/The Beginnings of Agriculture

• Question #1: What characteristics define the Neolithic Era? o Several advances in toolmaking defined the Neolithic Era, people learned to polish and grind stones to shape tools with sharper edges. These new methods enabled people to make more specialized tools, such as chisels, drills, and saws. However, the most significant advances of the Neolithic Era had to do with food, not tools. • Question #2: How did tools in the Neolithic Era differ from those in the Palaeolithic Era? o Palaeolithic people had chipped stones to produce sharp edges or points, in the New Stone Age people learned to polish and grind stones to shape tools with sharper edges. These new methods enabled people to make more specialized tools, such as chisels, drills, and saws. However, the most significant advances of the Neolithic Era had to do with food, not tools. • Question #3: What is involved in plant and animal domestication? o Experimentation as well as gradual development. Manual selection of the best crops and breeds. • Question #4: How did the development of agriculture benefit prehistoric people’s lives? o This allowed for the settlement of a fixed abode and allowed people to no longer be pastoral herders but rather to settle and develop into villages and even small towns. • Question #5: How did geography contribute to the development and spread of agriculture? o People tended to domesticate crops that were endemic to their local areas • Question #6: Who is Ötzi the Iceman, and why is he significant? o Ötzi was found in the Alps in the late 20th Century CE, and allowed us an insight into the Neolithic society including diet, clothing and body modification as he had multiple tattoos which could have been religious or medicinal in nature, or simply decorative, though this is a fringe theory. • Question #7: How did life for early hunter-gatherers differ from that for people in early agricultural societies? o Hunter gatherers were not able to be static in their abode but needed to move with their herds or with the natural migration of their prey. Agriculture allowed people to settle in permanent communities and to develop society. • Question #8: What have scientists learned about Neolithic farming societies by studying Çatal Hüyük? o They have discovered that at this site, the settled community went from a gatherer society to an agricultural one and that this may have happened in as little as a single generation.