Agriculture, being the most ancient type of human activity, developed rather unevenly in different countries.
What is agriculture?
Agriculture, which arose in the era of the primitive system, is the result of a long period of development of mankind.
It began when people already knew how to hunt and were collecting wild fruits. Human labor began to be expended on the production of plants, on the isolation and reproduction of the most useful species, on a certain impact on them to adapt to their needs.
The history of agriculture: the emergence, tools
The origin of agriculture occurred a long time ago when people noticed that various grains of fruits or ears, having fallen on the soil (and loose), sprout and again bear fruit. It was then that they came up with the idea that in this way it is possible to grow food. Since then, they began to plant and grow seeds of edible plants.
For sowing, the most even plots of land were chosen, moreover, located closer to the water. People learned to loosen the land cleared from weeds by peculiar hoes, after which they threw grain into this land. It was a hoe type of farming. After the ripening of the crop, they collected it with the help of a sickle, consisting of an arched wooden or bone base (handle), into which sharp fragments of stones were inserted.
The emergence of agriculture contributed to the creation of newer and more convenient tools. After a certain time, people built a plow. At first it was just a pole with a sharp bitch at its end. She simply became attached to a team of bulls. It was possible to cultivate more land with this tool, and it was also noticed by people that the yield from such a plowed field was higher than from the land cultivated by a hoe. The plowed land plowed deeper and the seeds planted deeper gave better seedlings.
First grown plants
The first plants grown by humans were barley, wheat, and millet. And their homeland is Western Asia (the peninsula of Asia Minor and the regions adjacent to it). It was in these places that the most ancient settlements of farmers were found. Their foundation took place 10,000 years ago. Then, from these places, agriculture began to gradually spread throughout the world.
We can conclude that such agriculture in those days when people were already more sedentary in their lives, contributed to the emergence of new inventions, more convenient and improved tools. Thanks to this process, craft also began to develop - the manual small-scale production of tools and various devices.
Development of agriculture by territory
A large number of archaeological and paleobotanical scientific studies indicate a connection between the origin of agriculture in antiquity and the zones of mountain plateaus and valleys in the subtropical zone. The famous scientist N. I. Vavilov identified several very ancient foci of the emergence of agriculture (VII-III millennium BC. E.):
- Near-Asian (wheat, barley, etc.).
- The mountain and eastern valleys of China (wheat, rice, millet, etc.).
- Mexico (pepper, beans, etc.).
- The central part of Peru (pepper, pumpkin, cotton, beans, etc.).
What is farming in faraway America? There, it arose completely independently of other territories of the continent and, probably, is even more ancient.
The oldest areas in the world in terms of developing agricultural culture in the world after Mexico are Peru, India, Bolivia, China, Egypt and Syria.
In Western Europe, the emergence of agriculture dates back to V-IV millennia BC.
In the territory of Russia and territories adjacent to it, agriculture arose in the Stone Age. Moreover, the oldest foci are the regions of the whole of Transcaucasia and Central Asia.
Conclusion
Having dealt with the question of what agriculture is, we can conclude: having mastered this type of activity and cattle breeding, mankind has gradually moved from appropriating (as it was in ancient times) farming to producing - the process of improving tools for labor has gone faster. And this contributed to the emergence of the craft.