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Friday, March 03, 2006

Skills for hunting and farming

Evolution of agriculture brought itself with the formation of cities, as human groups grew and stayed together at one place. This facilitated population explosion even more and cities expanded. One thing I also want to point it out here is the difference between the skills required in agriculture and hunting. A new human child learning his/her lessons in hunting can manage just with either looking or using sign language. New hunters learnt by either looking other hunters or by their own experience. Hunting requires great physical strength and spontaneity, good reflexes and keen eyes, good legs and shoulders are must. All this is possible through only rigorous training or practice. So, hunters learnt their leassons running behind other better hunters and facing different problems in their own ways. Information flow required was simple and small.
Farming also requires physical strength but not as of hunting level. Farmers can manage even with some problem in running, slow reflexes and not so keen eyes. Working at a farm still requires great stamina to toil under the sun, strength for ploughing, harvesting, carrying the produce to other places. Early farm still required human effort for tilling, seeding, irrigation and harvesting. These efforts were as cumbersome as involved in hunting. So, initially, there was not much of incentive for a human to spend his/her energy in farming instead of hunting. Informations flow related to farming was also important as it is now. Due to long seasons and harvesting cycle period, it was difficult to learn the skills required for better farming just by watching or using sign language. Selection of more fertile land and better ways of ploughing or watering are crucial but the time gap between the human input and food output is too long. This effectively hampered the learning process of early humans. Prediction of weather was as it is now very crucial to get any harvest from the farm in the regions where irrigation is solely dependent on rains. These prediction can olny come by many years of experience, even with all the sophisticated devices lately, humans still can't predict the weather with complete surity. Transfer of these skills required some other medium of information flow, rather then just sign language.
Two things which were crucial in agriculture revolution were domestication of animals and use of complex verbal language. Domesticated animals were used to toil in farms, instead of humans. This put agriculture in more favorable possible than hunting in terms of human physical effort. Language made possible that skills learnt by one human generation was passed on to next and also skills or new method deviced by a human were passed on the complete group in short time.
Agriculture in turn gave rise to large scale permanent settlement of human groups which are called cities now. Cities, in turn due to increased interaction between sexes and more luxury time led to population explosion. Increased population again led to scarcity of food and proliferation of agriculture as a food source. Also, large farmers groups dominated over smaller hunter groups, thus sending the weaker in oblivion. This is amazing as one part of a system fed the other part and the system just proliferated on its own.

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