Fertile Crescent: Food Production

o Mediterranean agriculture was diverse but experienced very little technological improvement. Suffered from overcropping and overgrazing, then deforestation and soil erosion.

The Fertile Crescent stretches like a crescent moon from the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf, containing Egypt and Mesopotamia. The terms mentioned throughout the essay are different empires and locations. Sumer was the first civilization and is located in the narrowing plain between the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. About 5,000 years ago, Sumerians developed writing, construction of cities, and domestication of animals. The Akkadians took over Sumer around 2350 BCE when Sargon I. became leader and began seizing territories as reward for winning a war. Ancient egypt, laid southwest of the Fertile Crescent alongside the Nile River in Africa. People have lived there since around 5000 BCE and began

The rise of food production in the Fertile Crescent was made possible by the Mediterranean climate.  In contrast, Mesoamerica, New Guinea, and the Eastern US were limited in the available large seed grasses, domestic able animals, edible pulses, and high protein domestic plants. Arrival of appropriate founder sort speed up the food production where suitable plants were previously lacking.  Local inhabitants routinely master their local ethno biology (thus few domestications have occurred in modern times).  However, there can be reactionary populations resisting change.  Of 200,000 wild plants, only about 200 have been domesticated for consumption, and 12 species account for 80% of world food tonnage.

Three advantages were the climate of the Fertile Crescent was wet in the winters and dry in the summers, ancestor crops were already very productive and fruitful, and many of the crops that inhabited the Fertile Crescent were self-pollinating.

Hunter-Gathers have a great understanding of the potential plants have in their environment. Some groups were conservative and resisted change, however some were ready to innovate. The Fertile Crescent had climate that favored annual plants and species mix. The result was an array of crops including protein-rich cereals and pulses. Other regions, including New Guinea and the eastern United States, lacked such a variety of crops.

The establishment of food production proved to be more fulfilling than hunting and gathering since it reduced the risk of starvation. Despite being provided with some of the advantages that came with transitioning to agriculture, many regions remained as hunter-gatherers. While some areas, such as the Fertile Crescent and Eurasia, had many advantageous plants and animals that could be domesticated, other areas, New Guinea, Eastern United States, and Mesoamerica, possessed limited availability. Some areas are simply not suited to agriculture of any kind, while others may support some crops that are suitable for domestication but not others. Likewise, while there were big animals living in several regions, those species were not suitable for domestication since they did not follow the six requirements, which involved being sufficiently obedient, humble to humans, cheap to feed, able to breed well in captivity, immune to diseases, able to grow rapidly (Diamond 1999, 169). On the other hand, in some areas, food production developed independently. However, only a few places developed food production without any outside influence, which included the Fertile Crescent in western Eurasia, China, the eastern United States, Mesoamerica, and New Guinea. In the Andes and Amazonians, and three areas of Africa, food production was also probably an independent development, but there are

When humans turned to agriculture, they had to depend on the weather for crop production and a good harvest, which did not always turn out to their favour. Neolithic farmers faced drought,

13,000 years ago, a time before inequality, humans began to prosper in the Middle East known as the Fertile Crescent. The Fertile Crescent stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. It was one of the first successful civilization to thrive and flourish. People who settled in the Fertile Crescent shared the same status, wealth, and power. Major innovations also took place first in the Fertile Crescent and then influenced other parts of Eurasia; these innovations developed homes, agriculture, and livestock.

The beneficial continental circumstances enjoyed by Eurasians first appears in vegetation. The Fertile Crescent was endowed with diverse, abundant, and highly productive cereals and pulses such as wheat, barley, and pea that yielded both starch and protein. These food staples were domesticated very quickly and with little effort by Eurasians, whose newfound farms gave rise to specialization and division of labor. Conversely, in the Americas, the sole cereal crop of corn took many more thousands of years of domesticated refinement to prove useful to humans. Mr. Diamond also places great emphasis on the geographic East-West orientation of Eurasia. A plant growing at a given latitude can grow at that latitude the world over. Thus, Eurasia's East-West orientation was highly conducive to the rapid spread (by trade) of productive domesticated grains across the continent. Conversely, the Americas, Africa, and Australia were impaired by their North-South orientation, which dictated that domesticated plants from people of one latitude were of little use to their neighbors to the North and South. Compounding the effect, the trade of agricultural technology in Eurasia ultimately led to trade in other things, such as technological advances, including writing and language

Climate can control what a human can grow. The people of the fertile crescent are able to grow wheat and good crops as well as feed and tame and domesticate animals. While people of Papua New Guinea have the sago tree and not able to grow crops. You can feed Animals as well as make bread with wheat and are able to store

Plant domestication leads to a major difference in society because it permits the members of that society to reproduce, form permanent societies, and create a bureaucratic society ( also gives the ability to tax). For example, “ by collecting huge quantities of wild cereals in a short time when the seeds were ripe,and storing them for use as food through the rest of the year, some hunting-gathering people of the Fertile Crescent had already settled down in permanent villages even before they began to cultivate plants.) ( pg 131)

Human beings are social creatures. We organize ourselves in bands of efficiency to make our lives easier. From the tiniest village in the Amazon to the great cities of Ney York and Tokyo, everyone plays a role in which we work, entertain, reproduce, aid, build and provide. However, unlike other animals on this planet, our socialization affects our provisions, that is how and what we eat and drink. Consequently, the designs that fluctuate societal nature over periods of human history have changed the method and means by which we tackle agriculture.

The civilizations in the fertile crescent developed, over time, because the fertile crescent sits, in between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Therefore, there is fertile Mesopotamian soil and expansion of irrigation from the rivers. Furthermore, there isn't rain but the flooding of rivers, brings in bountiful nutrients for the dirt. I knew there were civilizations in this region because; to start there is left over evidence of boats, pyramids, temples, crop fields, and housing. Therefore, the evidence could not just appear out of nowhere, and a pyramid can't be sculpted by a river. Furthermore, also adding on to the fact, it can't just appear, there are hieroglyphs and statues made out of gold, jade, silver, and stone.

Climate affects the the type of agriculture we have around us. The Fertile Crescent was a good place to grow wheat, lentils, and peas. They were able to grow there because they didn’t need a lot of water they used the animals that could be domesticated to help plant and collect the food and didn’t need rich soil to grow the food they also didn’t take long to grow they also had a lot of protein. It was also useful to store the food for later and the plants they grew was able to be stored for a long time and since the area they lived in was dry there food was able to keep their food dry if it got wet the food would be messed up. Others civilizations didn’t have the animals and types of food that the fertile crescent had they were hunters and

Mesopotamia was a successful farming community early on. Utilizing the Tigris and Euphrates rivers this community was able to create a successful way of farming through the use of irrigation and drainage ditches (Duiker & Spielvogel, 2010). Once the use of irrigation became large scale and widely used it was possible to support a larger community base and thus encouraged expansion throughout the civilization.