Domestication of Plants and Animals Essay

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The domestication of plants and animals lead to great change in the development and structuring of communities, as the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was slowly replaced by permanent settlements of farmers and villages. We can see that the communities varied greatly dependent on their local ecology, the resources available, and the time period within which their community was based. The road to agricultural way of life in the MIddle East is characterized by Four distinct stages. It was during the Kebaran period, and Geometric Kebaran in which hunter-gatherers began to utilize the plant and animal resources of the region. Architecture became a prominent feature of the Natufian period, as communities began to transition to village life from …show more content…
It was these Mesolithic hunter-gatherers with their complex societies who are many times accused of adopting domestication through their own sophistication, were able to gradually yet effectively alter the direction of their communal lives. The result of this is that there is a clash in ideas representing the existence of domestication in Europe. An example of this is the interaction between Linear Band Keramik cultures, and Mesolithic groups, as LBK's utilized middle eastern plants and animals, yet lived in villages consisting of large community structures and traded with other Mesolithic groups, sometimes bringing on violence. In Mesoamerica, the domestication of plants has had little effect on these hunter-gatherer societies except for adding additional sustainability to the community. The Teosinte, a wild grass found in the Mexican highlands is the ancestor to Maize, otherwise known as corn. The Maize and squash agricultural revolution began to spread north towards the current United States. During the Late ARchaic period, almost 3000 years ago, intensive maize agriculture began in the American Southwest. These agriculture societies lived in large Villages, and built large terraces and canals to feed their crops, however the theory of optimal foraging can better explain the variation in the distribution of domestication as ecological factors also affected its spread. To sum it all up, the complex process
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