week:7-unit-7 Food Collection

In today’s globalizing world, communities and societies are being incorporated, at an accelerating rate, into larger systems. The firstrst major acceleration in the growth of human social systems can be traced back to around 12,000–10,000 years ago, when humans started intervening in the reproductive cycles of plants and animals. Food production refers to human control over the reproduction of plants and animals, and it contrasts with the foraging economies that preceded it and that still persist in some parts of the world today. To make their living, foragers hunt, gather, and collect what nature has to offer. Foragers may harvest, but they don’t plant. They may hunt animals, but (except for the dog) they don’t domesticate them. Only food producers systematically select and breed for desirable traits in plants and animals. With the advent of food production, which includes plant cultivation and animal domestication, people, rather than nature, become selective agents. Human selection replaces natural selection as food collectors become food producers. The origin and spread of food production (plant cultivation and animal domestication) accelerated human population growth and led to the formation of larger and more powerful social and political systems. The pace of cultural transformation increased enormously. This chapter provides a framework for understanding a variety of human adaptive strategies and economic systems.

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