Effect of Agriculture on Human Life – Essay
The emergence of agriculture played a significant role in human life affecting jobs, science, and religion. While the transition to agriculture may have been an accidental one it caused social life to change with it. Before agriculture, hunting and gathering societies were very different. In a hunting and gathering community everyone has the same job and science and religion are not big parts of life. In a hunting and gathering community you could just leave an area when it did not meet the needs they had unlike in an agricultural society. They also believed in animism. However, after the transition to agriculture they had job specialization, they had to study the environment, and they believed in different gods that all controlled different things.
Agriculture affected the way jobs were handled. While hunting and gathering societies were egalitarian and everyone grew up to have the same job of either hunting or gathering, in an agricultural societies there were some people who didn’t have a direct connection to growing crops, “…individuals who devoted …time to efforts other than the production of food” (Bentley and Ziegler, 25). Some people made tools out of metal that helped to cultivate food and to manage surplus of food and grain some people make pottery for storage. These were things that were also sold to the public for different reasons than these, for instance jewelry and decoration as well. Along with pottery in 7,000 B.C.E. and metallurgy in 6,000 B.C.E. also came textile production. It was necessary to have tools such as gloves to work as an agriculturalist and later on it also became an important role of society and the way people dress. Because of job specialization and people owning land (hunter and gatherer people do not own the land they use) people had different social status as well. Someone who was rich would have a bigger house, more jewelry, nicer clothing, and high quality pottery to adorn their house with and use for food, as opposed to someone who was poor who would have less of these luxuries and there was a leadership based on riches and influence, “Professional managers also appeared–governors, administrators, military strategists [since they now had something to protect], tax collectors…” (Bentley and Ziegler, 25). This was because the more land people had the more food people produced and because of the population explosion the demand for it was there and the more they would sell and make money for such things as these.
Science was also a big aspect of people’s lives because of agriculture. In order to be able to sell food and have luxuries it was necessary to successfully grow the crops. Women were the also the one who helped this move along. They were the ones who gathered the plants that were needed and were the first ones to notice what helped and what didn’t help their plants grow. Through trial and error they studied the things that helped their plants grow most. By validating and testing the reliability of their results they knew what to do in order to have this. Science became very important to agriculturalist unlike to hunting and gathering societies where they just picked up from a land that replenished itself without the need of any human maintenance, “vegetable foods are abundant, sedentary and predictable. They grow in the same place year after year…” (Borshay Lee, 100). When “asked why they hadn’t taken to agriculture” and planted the mongongo nut the Bushman of the Ju/’hoansi-!Kung said, “Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?” (Lee, 93).
While one would think that because there was science that religion would be something that they didn’t believe in ; however, the opposite is true, “Cities also gave rise to…priests, who…sought to discover meaning in human existence” (Bentley and Ziegler, 25-26). Agricultural societies had a very tight control over their crops because they didn’t let the environment control them, they controlled it; however, it was because of this control that they didn’t understand why sometimes things went wrong. They felt that because they were doing everything right then everything should have been going smoothly, so when something went wrong they blamed the gods. The gods they believed in mostly had to do with their agriculture system; there would be a god for the different aspects and things that helped to make the crops have a high or low yield, unlike in a hunting and gathering society where they were animist and just believed that there was not gods or goddesses but an energy in the world that was just there and that you didn’t have any direct contact with while going about doing things that needed to get done.
To conclude, agriculture was important to human society and affected jobs, science, and religion the most. It led to job specialization which affected economic and social status of people. Agriculture also led to not only a surplus of food but the need for science in order to cultivate the crops to have a high yield. Lastly agriculture led to the development of a religion where the gods are very human like and are very important to the daily life and crops that they had. It was because of many of these changes that our society is the way it is now.
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