AP World HistoryEra 1 & 2 Packet

Era 1: Ancient Period: to 600 BCE

Era 2: Classical Period: 600 BCE to 600 CE

Must Know Dates for Era 1 & 2

c. 8000 B.C.E. Beginnings of agriculturec. 3000 B.C.E. Beginnings of Bronze Age-early civ’sc. 1300 B.C.E. Iron Age6th C B.C.E. Life of Buddha, Confucius, Laozi 5th C B.C.E. Greek Golden Age – philosophers403-221 B.C.E. China’s Era of Warring States323 B.C.E. Alexander the Great dies221 B.C.E. Qin Dynasty unified China184 B.C.E. Fall of Mauryan Dynasty32 C.E. Beginnings of Christianity180 End of Pax Romana220 End of Han Dynasty312 Emperor Constantine converts to Christianity333 Roman capital moved to Constantinople4th C Beginning of Japanese invasion of (rest of) China/ Beg. of Trans-Saharan Trade Routes476 “Fall” of Rome527 Justinian rule of Byzantine Empire550 Fall of Gupta Dynasty/Empire

IntroID’sAlphabetic Systems Chariots Chavín

CivilizationDomesticationEgyptFertile CrescentHammurabi

MesopotamiaMohenjo-Daro and HarappaNeolithicOlmecPaleolithic

Pastoral NomadsShangSumer

GeographyLocate the following: Chavín Egypt Olmec Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa

Mesopotamia Shang Tigris River Euphrates RiverNile River Indus River Huang He River

Big Era ThreeFarming and the Emergence of Complex Societies10,000 - 1000 BCE

About 12,000 years ago some human communities began to

move in a new direction. For the first time, they began to

produce food in a systematic way rather than hunt or collect all

their food in the wild. The emergence of farming and the far-

reaching social and cultural changes that came with it sets Big

Era Three apart from the first two.

From one perspective, the advent of farming was a slow,

fragmented process. It happened independently in several

different parts of the world at different times. It occurred as a

result of people making thousands of minute decisions about

food production without anyone being conscious that humans

were “inventing agriculture.” And even though some people

started farming, others continued for thousands of years to live

entirely on wild resources or to combine crop growing with

hunting and gathering.

From another perspective we might argue that agriculture took

the world by storm. The Paleolithic era of hominids and human

tool-making went on for about 2,000,000 years. Farming

settlements, however, appeared on all the major landmasses

except Australia within a mere 8,000 years. Foraging societies

may have retreated gradually, but today, just 12,000 years after

the first signs of agriculture, they have all but disappeared.

We may define farming as a set of interrelated activities that

increase the production of those resources that humans can use,

such as cattle, grain, or flax, and reduce the production of things

humans cannot use, such as weeds or pests. In order to increase

the production of resources they can use, farmers systematically

manipulate their environment, removing those species they do

not want and creating conditions that allow the species they

favor to flourish. Thus, we plow and water the land so that our

crops can thrive, and we provide food and protection to the

animals we need. This is why the emergence of societies based

on agriculture, what we call agrarian societies, involved a

complex interplay of plants, animals, topography, climate, and

weather with human tools, techniques, social habits, and cultural

understandings.

The fundamental technological element of this interplay was

domestication, the ability to alter the genetic makeup of plants

and animals to make them more useful to humans. Scholars have

traditionally labeled the early millennia of agriculture the

Neolithic era, that is, “new stone age,” because humans

developed a more varied and sophisticated kit of stone tools in

connection with the emergence of farming.

Systematic food production contributed hugely to the amazing

biological success of Homo sapiens. In our discussion of Big Era

Two, we introduced the concept of extensification, the idea that

in Paleolithic times humans multiplied and flourished by

spreading thinly across the major landmasses of the world,

excepting Antarctica, and by adapting to a wide range of

environments, from equatorial forests to Arctic tundra. In Big

Era Three, however, a process of “intensification” got under

way. This meant that by producing resources from domesticated

plants and animals, humans could settle and thrive on a given

land area in much greater numbers and density than ever before.

The consequences of intensification were astonishing. In the

9,000 years of Big Era Three, world population rose from about

6 million to about 120 million, a change involving a much faster

rate of increase than in the previous eras. Such growth, in turn,

required unprecedented experiments in human organization and

ways of thinking.

Humans and the Environment

Scholars generally agree that foragers of the Paleolithic enjoyed,

at least much of the time, sufficient food supplies, adequate

shelter, and shorter daily working hours than most adults do

today. Humans did not, therefore, consciously take up crop

growing and animal raising because they thought they would

have a more secure and satisfying life. In other words, humans

seem to have been “pushed” into agriculture rather than “pulled”

into it.

When some communities in certain places made the transition to

farming, they did it incrementally over centuries or even

millennia, and they had no clear vision that they were dropping

one whole way of life for another. If we can speak of an

“agricultural revolution,” we would also have to say that humans

backed slowly into it even if, on the scale of 200,000 years, the

change was rapid.

The Great Thaw. The coming of agrarian societies was almost

certainly connected to the waning of the Pleistocene, or Ice Age,

that is, the period, beginning about 15,000 years ago, when

glaciers shrank and both sea levels and global temperatures rose.

In several parts of the Northern Hemisphere rainfall increased

significantly. This period of 5,000 to 7,000 years was the prelude

to the Holocene, the climatic epoch that spans most of the last

10,000 years. Rising seas drowned low-lying coastal shelves as

well as land bridges that had previously connected regions

separated by water today. Land bridges now under water

included spans between Siberia and Alaska, Australia and Papua

New Guinea, and Britain and continental Europe.

One consequence of this “great thaw” was the dividing of the

world into three distinct zones, whose human populations, as

well as other land-bound animals and plants, had very limited

contact with one another. These zones were 1) Afroeurasia and

adjacent islands, that is Africa, Asia, and Europe combined; 2)

the Americas; and 3) Australia. From about 4000 BCE, the

Pacific Ocean basin and its island populations began to emerge

as a fourth distinct zone. Though humans rarely had contact

between one zone and another (until 1500 CE or later), within

each of the zones they interacted more or less intensively,

depending on patterns of geography, climate, and changing

historical circumstances.

A second consequence of the great thaw was that across much of

the Northern Hemisphere warmer, rainier, ice-free conditions

permitted forests, meadowlands, and small animal populations to

flourish. The natural bounty was so great in some localities that

human bands began to settle in one place all or part of the year to

forage and hunt. That is, they became sedentary, settled in

hamlets or villages rather than moving from camp to camp. For

example, in the relatively well-watered part of Southwest Asia

we call the Fertile Crescent, groups began sometime between

10,000 and 13,000 years ago to found tiny settlements in order to

collect plentiful stands of wild grain and other edible plants and

animals.

The dawn of

domestication. In

time, these groups

took up the habit of

protecting their

wild grain fields

against weeds,

drought, and birds.

Eventually they started broadcasting edible plant seeds onto new

ground to increase the yield. Finally, they began selecting and

planting seeds from individual plants that seemed most desirable

for their size, taste, and nutrition. In other words, humans

learned how to control and manipulate the reproduction of plants

that were bigger, tastier, more nutritious, and easier to grow,

harvest, store, and cook than were wild food plants. Systematic

domestication was under way!

In the Fertile Crescent key domesticates included the ancestors

of wheat, barley, rye, and several other edible plants. Selecting

and breeding particular animals species—sheep, goats, cattle,

pigs—that were good to eat and easy to manage occurred in a

similar way. In effect, humans started grooming the natural

environment to reduce the organisms they did not want (weeds,

predatory wolves) and to increase the number of organisms they

did want (grains, legumes, wool-bearing sheep, hunting dogs).

Co-Dependency. Eventually, plant-growing and animal-raising

communities became “co-dependent” with their domesticates.

That is, humans came to rely on these genetically altered species

to survive. In turn, domesticated plants and animals were so

changed that they would thrive only if humans took care of them.

For example, the maize, or corn, that we see in fields today can

no longer reproduce without human help.Regions of Early Plant and Animal Domestication

The great advantage of co-dependency was that a community

could rely fairly predictably on a given area of land to produce

sufficient, even surplus yields of hardy, tasty food. Populations

of both humans and their domesticates tended to grow

accordingly. On the darker side, co-dependency was a kind of

trap: a farming community, which had to huddle together in a

crowded village and labor long hours in the fields, could not go

back to a foraging way of life even if it wanted to. And, as we

will see, a lot of new problems appeared as humans began to live

together in denser communities, from new types of diseases to

the buildup of village waste and rubbish.

Environmental intervention. The Fertile Crescent was an early

incubator of agriculture, but it was by no means the only one.

Between 12,000 and 3,000 BCE, similar processes involving a

great variety of domesticates occurred in several different parts

of the world. The intensification in population densities and

economic productivity that farming permitted also spurred

humans to intervene in the natural and physical environment as

never before. As farmers cleared more land, planted more crops,

and pastured more animals, they enhanced their species’

biological success. That is, there occurred a positive feedback

cycle of ever-increasing population and productivity that looked

something like this:

Beginning about 6,000 BCE, intensification in particular parts of

the world moved to a level that required radical innovations in

the way humans lived and worked.

Crowded cities. First in the Tigris-Euphrates and Nile River

valleys, then the Indus valley, and later in China’s Huang River

(Huang He) valley and a few other regions, societies

emerged that were far larger and denser than the

farming communities of the Neolithic period. We

refer to these big concentrations of people as

complex societies, or, more traditionally, as

civilizations.

Their most conspicuous characteristic was cities.

Early cities were centers of power, manufacturing, and creativity.

Building and preserving them, however, required drastic

alterations of the local environment to produce sufficient food,

building materials, and sources of energy. The price of this

intervention was high. Dense urban societies were extremely

vulnerable to changes in weather, climate, disease conditions,

wood supplies, and trade links to distant regions. After the

appearance of complex societies, humans stepped up their efforts

to manipulate and control their physical and natural environment.

This had great benefits but also produced a negative feedback

cycle.

Deforestation and consequent erosion threatened periodic food shortages and social conflict.

Habitation in densely packed villages and cities brought humans in closer contact with disease-carrying animals, resulting in greater vulnerability to epidemic infections.

In the cases of some complex societies, ecological problems stimulated social and economic innovations to improve conditions or stave off disaster. In some other cases, however, these problems led eventually to economic, demographic, or political collapse.

Humans and Other Humans

The intensification of population and production that came with

Big Era Three obliged humans to experiment with new forms of

social organization. The customs and rules that governed social

relationships in a foraging band of twenty-five or thirty people

were no longer adequate.

The permanent farming settlements that multiplied in

Afroeurasia in the early millennia of the era numbered as few as

several dozen people to as many as 10,000. These communities

had to work together in more complicated ways and on a larger

scale than was the case in foraging bands. Even so, social

relations may not have changed greatly from foraging days. Men

and women probably continued to treat each other fairly equally.

No one had a full-time job other than farming. Some individuals

no doubt became leaders because they were strong or intelligent.

No individual or group, however, had formal power to lord it

over the rest.

Early complex societies. Only after about 4000 BCE did truly

staggering changes occur in social customs and institutions. The

complex societies that arose in the Tigris-Euphrates, Nile, and

Indus valleys, and somewhat later in other regions, were

cauldrons of intensification. That is, people lived and worked

together in much larger, denser communities than had ever

The Neolithic settlement of Çatal Hüyük, established about 7000 BCE, may have had

close to 10,000 inhabitants. The site is in south central Turkey.

Reconstruction of Çatal Hüyük.World Images Kiosk, San Jose State

Universityhttp://worldimages.sjsu.edu

existed. These societies shared a number of fundamental

characteristics, which we generally associate with civilizations:

Cities arose, the early ones varying somewhat in their forms and functions. By 2250 BCE, there were about eight cities in the world that had 30,000 or more inhabitants. By 1200 BCE there were about sixteen cities that big.

Some people took up full-time specialized occupations and professions (artisans, merchants, soldiers, priests, and so on) rather than spending most of their time collecting, producing, or processing food.

A hierarchy of social classes appeared in which some men and women—the elite class—had more wealth, power, and privilege than did others. Also, men became dominant over women in political and social life, leading to patriarchy.

The state, that is, a centralized system of government and command, was invented. This meant that a minority group—kings, queens, high officials, priests, generals—exercised control over the labor and social behavior of everyone else.

Complex exchanges of food and other products took place within the complex society, and lines of trade connected the society to neighbors near and far.

Technological innovations multiplied, and each new useful invention tended to suggest several others.

Monumental building took place—city walls, temples, palaces, public plazas, and tombs of rulers.

A system of writing, or at least a complex method of record-keeping, came into use.

Spiritual belief systems, public laws, and artistic expressions all became richer and more complex.

Creative individuals collaborated with the ruling class to lay the foundations of astronomy, mathematics, and chemistry, as well as civil engineering and architecture.

A society did not have to exhibit every one of these

characteristics to qualify as a civilization. The checklist is less

important than the fact that all these social, cultural, economic,

and political elements interacted dynamically with one another.

The synergism among them made the society complex, that is,

made it recognizable as a civilization.

Animal-herding societies. From about the fourth millennium

BCE, Afroeurasia saw the development of a new type of society

and economy in parts of the Great Arid Zone. This is the belt of

dry and semi-arid land that extends across Afroeurasia from the

Sahara Desert in the west to Manchuria in northern China. Here,

communities began to organize themselves around a specialized

way of life based on herding domesticated animals, whether

sheep, cattle, horses, or camels. Known as pastoral nomadism,

this economic system permitted humans to adapt in larger

numbers than ever before to climates where intensive farming

was not possible. Pastoral nomads lived mainly on the products

of their livestock—meat, milk, blood, hides, hair, wool, and

bone. They often grazed and migrated over extensive areas, and

they planted crops either not at all or as a minor, supplemental

activity.

By the third millennium BCE, animal-breeding societies were

appearing in a number of regions, notably along the margins of

the Great Arid Zone. These communities found they could adapt

to dry conditions because sheep, cattle, and a few other

domesticates could thrive on wild grasses and shrubs. These

animals converted vegetable matter that humans could not digest

into meat, milk, and blood, which they could. That is, humans

became experts at transforming the natural flora of arid lands

into an animal diet high in protein and fat.

Pastoral communities usually followed regular migratory routes

from pasture to pasture as the seasons changed. When families

were on the move, they lived in hide tents or other movable

dwellings, and their belongings had to be limited to what they

could carry along. This does not mean that they wished to cut

themselves off from farming societies or cities. Rather,

pastoralists eagerly purchased farm produce or manufactures in

exchange for their hides, wool, dairy products, and sometimes

their services as soldiers and bodyguards. The ecological borders

between pastoral societies and town-building populations were

usually scenes of lively trade.

Because pastoral societies were mobile, not permanently settled,

they expressed social relationships not so much in terms of

where people lived but rather in terms of kinship, that is, who

was related by “blood” to whom—closely, distantly, or not at all.

They typically had a tribal organization, though this has nothing

to do with how “advanced” or “primitive” they were. Rather, we

define a tribe as a group whose members claim to be descended

from a common ancestor. Usually, a tribe is typically the largest

group in a region claiming shared descent. Tribes may also be

divided into smaller groups of people who see themselves as

A pastoral nomadic horseman of the Inner Eurasian steppe. This image on a carpet

dates to about 300 BCE.

Wikimedia Commons, Pazyrik horseman, c. 300 BCE, detail from a carpet in the State

Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, public domain.

relatively more closely related, from clans to lineages to nuclear

families.

In the latter part of Big Era Three, we see emerging an important

long-term and recurring pattern in history: encounters involving

both peaceful exchanges and violent clashes between agrarian

peoples and pastoral nomads of Inner Eurasia, the Sahara Desert,

and other sectors of the Great Arid Zone. An early example is the

far-reaching social and political change that occurred in the

second and first millennia BCE when several different pastoral

peoples of Inner Eurasia pressed into the agrarian, urbanized

regions of Southwest Asia, India, and Europe, sometimes moving

in peacefully, sometimes raiding, sometimes conquering.

Also, the mobility of pastoral societies and their vital interests in

trade meant that they served to link different agrarian societies

with one another and to encourage growth of long networks of

commercial and cultural exchange. The best known of these

networks is the Inner Eurasian silk roads, the series of trade

routes that pastoral peoples dominated and that moved goods and

ideas between China in the east and India, Southwest Asia, and

the Mediterranean region to the west.

Humans and Ideas

It was in Big Era Two that Homo sapiens evolved its capacity for

language. This wondrous skill meant that humans could engage

in collective learning, not only sharing information and ideas

from one community to another, sometimes across great

distances, but also passing an ever-increasing stockpile of beliefs

from one generation to the next.

In Big Era Three, world population started growing at a faster

rate than ever before. The size and density of communities

expanded, and networks of communication by land and sea

became more extensive and sophisticated. Along with these

developments came, as we might well expect, an intensification

in the flow of information and a general speed-up in the

accumulation of knowledge of all kinds.

One example is religious knowledge. In the early millennia of

Big Era Three certain ideas, practices, and artistic expressions

centered on the worship of female deities spread widely along

routes of trade and migration to embrace a large part of western

Eurasia. Another example is the idea and technology of writing,

which emerged first, as far as we know, in either Egypt or

Mesopotamia and spread widely from there to the eastern

Mediterranean and India. A third example is the horse-drawn

chariot, which may have first appeared in the Inner Eurasian

steppes and within less than a thousand years spread all across

Eurasia from western Europe to China.

Complex societies as centers of innovation. Since we are

focusing here on large-scale changes in world history, we cannot

discuss in detail the numerous scientific, technological, and

cultural innovations that complex societies achieved in Big Era

Three in Afroeurasia and, from the second millennium BCE, in

Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America) and South America.

To take just one early example, the city-dwellers of Sumer in

southern Mesopotamia, which is as far as we know the earliest

urban civilization, made fundamental scientific and technical

breakthroughs in the fourth and third millennia BCE. Sometime

before 3000 BCE, Sumerian scribes worked out a system of

numerical notation in the writing script they used, called

cuneiform. For computation they devised both base-ten (decimal)

and base-sixty systems. The base-sixty method has endured in

the ways we keep time and reckon the circumference of a circle

—60 seconds to the minute, 60 minutes to the hour, and 360

degrees in the circumference of a circle. Sumerians used a

combination of base-ten and base-sixty mathematics, together

with a growing understanding of geometry, for everyday

government and commerce, as well as to survey land, chart the

stars, design buildings, and build irrigation works. Other

technical innovations included the seed drill, the vaulted arch,

refinements in bronze metallurgy, and, most ingenious of all, the

wheel. This concept was probably first applied to pottery

making, later to transport and plowing.

Different cultural styles. Within complex societies, such as

those that emerged in the great river valleys, the interchange of

information and ideas tended to be so intense that each society

developed a distinct cultural style. We can discern these

distinctive styles today in the surviving remnants of buildings,

art objects, written texts, tools, and other material remains.

We should, however, keep two ideas in mind. One is that all

complex societies were invariably changing, rather than

possessing timeless, static cultural traits. The style of a

civilization changed from one generation to the next because

cultural expressions and values were invariably bound up with

the natural environment, economic life, and politics, which were

continuously changing as well. The second point is that early

civilizations were not culturally self-contained. All of them

developed and changed as they did partly because of their

connections to other societies near and far, connections that

played themselves out in trade, migration, war, and cultural

exchange.

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race By: Jared Diamond

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism that curse our existence. At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We're better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?

For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It's a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread until today it's nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive.

From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask "Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is silly. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries. Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-

laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the advantages of agriculture?

The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken place over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the B-minor Mass.

While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a better balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.

+++

So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren't nasty and brutish, even though farmes have pushed them into some of the world's worst real estate. But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with farming societies for thousands of years don't tell us about conditions before the agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps.

How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in recent years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.

In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to study as a pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts found well preserved mummies whose medical conditions at time of death could be determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry caves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be examined for hookworm and other parasites.

Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit a surprising number of deductions. To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner's sex, weight, and approximate age. In the few cases where there are many skeletons, one can construct mortality tables like the ones life insurance companies use to calculate expected life span and risk of death at any given age. Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.

One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9'' for men, 5' 5'' for women. With the

adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3'' for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.

Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio River valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."

The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. "I don't think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity," says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. "When I first started making that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it's become a respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate."

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early fanners obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition, (today just three high-carbohydrate plants -- wheat, rice, and

corn -- provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities.

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae c. 1500 B. C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A. D. 1000, the elite were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.

Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people in rich countries like the U. S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?

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Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts -- with consequent drains on their health. Among the Chilean mummies for example, more women than men had bone lesions from infectious disease.

Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field trip there studying birds, I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a 110-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned to a team of four men to shoulder together. When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.

As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to. While post-agricultural technological advances did make new art forms possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and were still being produced as recently as the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some Eskimos and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.

Thus with the advent of agriculture and elite became better off, but most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls.

One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over on person per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 times that.) Partly, this is

because a field planted entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it's because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until its old enough to keep up with the adults. Because farm women don't have that burden, they can and often do bear a child every two years.

As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It's not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn't want.

At this point it's instructive to recall the common complaint that archaeology is a luxury, concerned with the remote past, and offering no lessons for the present. Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.

Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow

achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us?

Study questions on Diamond’s “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”1. What does Diamond think is the worst mistake? How can archeology

provide evidence for this?2. Does Diamond agree or disagree with the idea that hunter-gatherers

had to work more than agriculturalists to provide for their food? Explain.

3. What does Diamond think about the idea that agriculture increases food security (when compared with hunter gatherers)?

4. What does the evidence suggest about health of hunter-gatherers compared with agriculturalists?

5. Explain why Diamond thinks agriculture lead to despotism, deep class division, including sexual inequality.

6. Does Diamond think it is ridiculous to claim that people were better off as hunter gatherers than agriculturalists? Which people?

7. Does Diamond agree that agriculture is what allowed the creation of art?

8. According to Diamond, why did hunter-gatherers take up farming?

Source: http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race Retrieved 1/9/13

Core and Foundational Civilizations

Mesopotamia Egypt Mohenjo-Daro & HarappaPOLITICAL Political Structures Forms of Government Empires Nationalism, Nations Revolts, Revolutions

ECONOMIC Agricultural, pastoral

production Economic Systems Labor Systems Industrialization Capitalism, Socialism

RELIGIOUS Religion Belief Systems Philosophies Ideologies Secularism Atheism

SOCIAL Gender Roles, Relations Family, Kinship Racial, Ethnic Constructions Social, Economic Classes Lifestyles Elites, inequalities

INTERACTIONS War Exchanges Globalization Trade and Commerce Regions, Transregional

Structures Diplomacy and Alliances

ARTS AND SCIENCES Art, Music, Writing, Literature Technology, Innovations Intellectual Math & Science Education

NATURE Demography, Settlement

Patterns Urbanization, Cities Migration, movement Human/Environment

Interaction Land Management Systems Region

Shang Mesoamerican/Olmecs Andean/ChavínPOLITICAL Political Structures Forms of Government Empires Nationalism, Nations Revolts, Revolutions

ECONOMIC Agricultural, pastoral

production Economic Systems Labor Systems Industrialization Capitalism, Socialism

RELIGIOUS Religion Belief Systems Philosophies Ideologies Secularism Atheism

SOCIAL Gender Roles, Relations Family, Kinship Racial, Ethnic Constructions Social, Economic Classes Lifestyles Elites, inequalities

INTERACTIONS War Exchanges Globalization Trade and Commerce Regions, Transregional

Structures Diplomacy and Alliances

ARTS AND SCIENCES Art, Music, Writing,

Literature Technology, Innovations Intellectual Math & Science Education

NATURE Demography, Settlement

Patterns Urbanization, Cities Migration, movement Human/Environment

Interaction Land Management Systems Region

Chapter 3 & 8 – Ancient & Classical Civilization: IndiaID’sAlexander the Great (8,9)AryansAshoka (8)Buddha (8)Caste (3)Chandragupta Maurya (8)Dharma (8)Guilds (8)

Gupta Dynasty (8)Jainism (8)Jati (8)Karma (3)Mahabharata (8)Mahayana (8)Maurya Dynasty (8)Nirvana (8)

Reincarnation (8)Sanskrit (8)Sati (3)Untouchables (3)Upanishads (3)Vedas (3)Vishnu & Shiva (15)White Huns (8)

Reading Guide Create PERSIAN Charts for the Mauryan Dynasty and the Gupta Dynasty

GeographyLocate and Label the following: Mauryan, Gupta, Himalayas, Deccan Plateau, Ceylon

Chapter 4 & 7 - Ancient & Classical Civilization: ChinaID’sConfucius (7)Daoism (7)Han (7)Laozi (7)Legalism (7)Mandate of Heaven (4)

Oracle Bones (4)Patriarchy (4)Qin (7)Shi Huangdi (7)Veneration of Ancestors (4)Warring States Period (4)

Wudi (7)Xia (4)Xiongnu (7)Zhou (4)

Reading Guide Create PERSIAN Charts for: Xia Dynasty, Shang Dynasty(in class), Zhou Dynasty, Qin Dynasty, Han Dynasty Create a diagram illustrating social order (pg 87-90). Make sure to include descriptions of each group.

GeographyLocate and Label the following: Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han

Chapter 5 - Ancient & Classical Civilization: Americas and OceaniaID’sMaori* Maya Olmec Teotihuacan

Reading Guide Create a PERSIAN Chart for the Mayans

Chapter 6 & 9 – Ancient & Classical Civilization: Persia and GreeceID’sAchaemenids (6)Aristotle (9)Cyrus the Great (6)Darius (6)Delian League (9)Hannibal*Hellenistic Era (9)

Illiad and Odyssey (9)Minoans (9)Mycenaeans (9)Peloponnesian War (9)Pericles (9)Persian Wars (6)Persian Wars (9)

Plato (9)Polis (9)Ptolemy (23)Satraps (6)Socrates (9)Zoroastrianism (6)

Reading Guide Create PERSIAN Charts for: Achaemenids, Seleucids, Parthians, Sasanids, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Greece (poleis)

GeographyLocate and Label: Achaemenid Empire, Alexander’s Empire, Mediterranean Sea, Anatolia, Aegean Sea

Chapter 10 - Classical Civilization: RomeID’sAugustus Carthage Consuls

Hannibal*Jesus of Nazareth Julius Caesar

Latifundia Pax Romana Punic Wars

Roman Republic Senate

Reading Guide Create a PERSIAN Chart for Rome (Empire)

GeographyLocate and Label: Roman Empire, Mediterranean Sea

Chapter 11 – Cross-Cultural Exchanges on the Silk RoadsID’sAugustineByzantine EmpireConstantine

DiocletianGermanic PeoplesHuns

Monsoon System PopeSilk Roads

Reading Guide Compare/Contrast the Spread of Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity – Make sure to include how each spread and where each spread. Compare/Contrast the Fall of the Han and the Fall of Rome

GeographyLocate and Label: The Silk Roads (land and sea routes), Arabian Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal, South China Sea

Locate and Label: Western Roman Empire, Eastern Roman Empire, Gaul, Rome, Balkans, Constantinople