The Development of Humanity Physical and Human Pressures

Human System vs Physical System Human System: tribe, family, government, city, village, religion, support group… Physical System: the water cycle, plate tectonics, weather, evolution, erosion…

The Earth wasn’t always like THIS

Once, it looked like THIS. “Snowball Earth”

And, eventually… like this: Late Cenozoic Ice Age

The Holocene Epoch The warm phase that ended the last Ice age… we’re still in it. 12,000 yrs now. There’s been lots of “little” warm phases to interrupt the ice ages (which are much longer than the thaws). (interglaciations) So what’s so important about this one??... us! … we humans.

Premodern World Paleolithic/Neolithic: 9000-7000bc you know it as the “Stone Age” Use of fire and stone tools were big discoveries. Creation of “minisystems”: a society with a single cultural base and a reciprocal social economy. (individuals specialize in particular tasks and share) These were subsistence-based economies. Very limited in geographic scale due to lack of extensive physical infrastructure. Some minisystems would prove successful and become Culture hearths… most fail and die out.

Agricultural Revolution #1 The first agricultural revolution was a transition from hunter-gatherer minisystems to agricultural-based minisystems which were more extensive and more stable. Slash-and-burn agriculture: using fire for farming

Location of Hearth Areas Carl Sauer: (cultural geographer): Agricultural breakthroughs could only take place in particular geographic settings: where natural food supplies were plentiful, diversified terrain, rich soils, plenty of water. Archeological evidence suggests that several agricultural Hearth areas experienced breakthroughs simultaneously but independently in a number of locations.

Fertile Crescent/Mesopotamia

Indus Valley

Question: What do places like the Fertile Crescent, Indus Valley, Ganges and Brahmaputra, the Huang He in China, and Mesoamerica have in common? What made these places early culture hearths?

Domestication: The Engine of the Agricultural Revolution. Domestication: transforming a living organism in such a way to better benefit from its use… simply taking care of a wild thing does not equal domestication. Plant domestication: human groups lived in widely diverse places, so therefore, the type of plants domesticated also varied. ex. root crops vs grass/seed crops

Animal Domestication: starting with the dog Animal Domestication: starting with the dog. Cattle, goats, sheep, and foul would follow soon after. How do we benefit from animal domestication?? How has modern industrial agricultural practices changed the pattern of domestication?

Postmodern World Social Stratification: the creation of permanent settlements (made possible by domestication of plants and animals) made it possible for some members of these new societies to do something OTHER than work for food. ex: toolmaking, marketing, administration, religion, teaching… However, some settlements had better stuff than other settlements which gave rise to CONFLICT

Rise of Government City-state: some of the first were in the Fertile Crescent: Babylon and Ur Countries, as you know them now, did not yet exist. Power was concentrated into the largest populated places in the region (Babylon). Smaller villages would comply to their rule or be conquered. Major conflict would erupt when two city-states went to war.

Kingdoms and Empires Over time, powerful rulers of powerful city-states may conquer their surrounding power-centers to create a kingdom. Over still more time, kingdoms could be combined by powerful rulers to create empires. Eventually, empires would seek to extend their power by taking colonies (Core, Periphery) known as colonization These were monarchies/dictatorships… systems of government, would not be experimented with until the early 1700s (not since the ancient Greeks)

Political and Economic Experimentation Democracy Capitalism Industrialization Urbanization