TPO21The Origins of Agriculture - 英檢

※ 引述《cloudballoon (氣球雲)》之銘言：
: How did it come about that farming developed independently in a number of world centers (the Southeast Asian mainland, Southwest Asia, Central America, lowland and highland South America, and equatorial Africa) at more or less the same time? Agriculture developed slowly among populations that had an extensive knowledge of plants and animals. Changing from hunting and gathering to agriculture had no immediate advantages. To start with, it forced the population to abandon the nomad's life and become
: sedentary, to develop methods of storage and, often, systems of irrigation. While hunter-gatherers always had the option of moving elsewhere when the resources were exhausted, this became more difficult with farming. Furthermore, as the archaeological record shows, the state of health of agriculturalists was worse than that of their contemporary hunter-gatherers.
: Traditionally, it was believed that the transition to agriculture was the result of a worldwide population crisis. It was argued that once hunter-gatherers had occupied the whole world, the population started to grow everywhere and food became scarce; agriculture would have been a solution to this problem. We know, however, that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies control their population in a variety of ways. The idea of a world population crisis is therefore unlikely, although population
: pressure might have arisen in some areas.
: Climatic changes at the end of the glacial period 13,000 years ago have been proposed to account for the emergence of farming. The temperature increased dramatically in a short period of time (years rather than centuries), allowing for a growth of the hunting-gathering population due to the abundance of resources. There were, however, fluctuations in the climatic conditions, with the consequences that wet conditions were followed by dry ones, so that the availability of plants and animals oscillated
: brusquely.
: It would appear that the instability of the climatic conditions led populations that had originally been nomadic to settle down and develop a sedentary style of life, which led in turn to population growth and to the need to increase the amount of food available. Farming originated in these conditions. Later on, it became very difficult to change because of the significant expansion of these populations. It could be argued, however, that these conditions are not sufficient to explain the origins of
: agriculture. Earth had experienced previous periods of climatic change, and yet agriculture had not been developed.
: It is archaeologist Steven Mithen's thesis, brilliantly developed in his book The Prehistory of the Mind (1996), that approximately 40,000 years ago the human mind developed cognitive fluidity, that is, the integration of the specializations of the mind: technical, natural history (geared to understanding the behavior and distribution of natural resources), social intelligence, and the linguistic capacity. Cognitive fluidity explains the appearance of art, religion, and sophisticated speech. Once
: humans possessed such a mind, they were able to find an imaginative solution to a situation of severe economic crisis such as the farming dilemma described earlier. Mithen proposes the existence of four mental elements to account for the emergence of farming: (1) the ability to develop tools that could be used intensively to harvest and process plant resources; (2) the tendency to use plants and animals as the medium to acquire social prestige and power; (3) the tendency to develop "social
: relationships" with animals structurally similar to those developed with people-specifically, the ability to think of animals as people (anthropomorphism) and of people as animals (totemism); and (4) the tendency to manipulate plants and animals.
: The fact that some societies domesticated animals and plants, discovered the use of metal tools, became literate, and developed a state should not make us forget that others developed pastoralism or horticulture (vegetable gardening) but remained illiterate and at low levels of productivity; a few entered the modern period as hunting and gathering societies. It is anthropologically important to inquire into the conditions that made some societies adopt agriculture while others remained
: hunter-gatherers or horticulturalists. However, it should be kept in mind that many societies that knew of agriculture more or less consciously avoided it. Whether Mithen's explanation is satisfactory is open to contention, and some authors have recently emphasized the importance of other factors.
: Answer Choices
: O One obstacle to the transition from a nomadic lifestyle to the sedentary lifestyle required by agriculture was that hunter-gatherers had not developed storage techniques.
: O It seems unlikely that agriculture emerged in response to a food shortage brought on by a worldwide population crisis that developed once the whole world was occupied.
: O The origins of agriculture maybe linked to climate change at the end of the last ice age, but this does not explain why earlier climatic instability had not led to agriculture.
: O The only available means of understanding the social organization and technical abilities of ancient hunter-gatherer societies is the study of contemporary hunter-gatherers.
: O One recent theory suggests that the invention of agriculture was made possible by the integration of various mental capacities in the human mind.
: O Little is known about why only some societies that adopted agriculture rapidly progressed to using metal tools, becoming literate, and developing a state.
: 答案給234
: 可是2 the whole world was occupied 這邊好像錯 文章不是說 不會嗎 頂多一些地區
: 4 好像不重要
: 我選356!!
我不同意補習班給的答案(356)，我認為正解是235。
原因:
1.有人說選項2是minor idea，所以不選，這我不同意。
選項2就是文章第二段大意，非minor:傳統以來一直認為是"人口壓力"造成農業社會
的發展和興起(雖然這樣的理論後來被認為是不成立的)
2.選項3即是第三段的大意
3.選項4錯，not mentioned
4.選項5即第五段(Steve Mithen提的理論)的大意
5.選項6我認為不對，WHY? 'Little is known about...'這裏明顯就錯了，文章在第五段
花了好大的篇幅介紹Mithen的理論就是用來解釋農業如何開始的，怎麼還會說是Little
呢? 有爭議還需要討論的地方是為什麼有些社會刻意選擇"不"發展農業 ，但不能說
有爭議=不知道(little is known)，再者，再配合上第六段最後一句"some authors
have recently emphasized the importance of other factors."既然有人著重在
其他造成農業發展的因素，表示就是有另外的理論用來解釋，所以不能說little is
known

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