Fertile Crescent: Food Production

The Fertile Crescent name is self explanatory. This is an area in the Middle East between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, that being said, this led to the development of early civilization. At the time, this region provided the population with enough irrigation for the crops. In order to provide for the growing population, water was essential. Both the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were able to fulfil those needs. Water was an environmental factor that surpassingly benefited the growth of human civilization.

The Fertile Crescent got its name from being a crescent shaped region in the Middle East that was extremely fertile after the end of the last ice age around 10,000 BCE.

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,

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

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.

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

After 11,000 B.C., technology in the Fertile Crescent developed immensely. Inventions including flint blades for harvesting, baskets and containers for collecting crops, and underground storage pits made it possible for food production to occur. “These cumulative developments constituted the unconscious first steps of plant domestication” (Diamond 111). Utilizing the further geographical advantage of rich soil, people of the Fertile Crescent leapt into the world of food production. Food production, in turn, yielded large food surpluses stored in baskets, allowing the society to move toward a sedentary lifestyle and a more organized, specialized community. Simple agricultural tool advancements led to a

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.

Fertile Crescent had environmental advantages; therefore, it had had more resources than in Mesoamerica. For example, only llama or alpaca could be domesticated in Mesoamerica, and no sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, or horses were found in the Eastern hemisphere. Thus, the people in Mesoamerica had to find a source of protein, and they started relying more on hunting and fishing than domesticating. Had people also lacked mineral-rich cereal grains, so they grew squash, beans, and teosinte, an ancestral form of corn or maize, to supplicate themselves with dietary protein. On the other had, in the Fertile Crescent, they could domesticate more various kinds of species, since they had already existed in the Fertile Crescent. Rich cereal grains, barley, wheat, lentils, and figs could be grown, and people could intake sufficient nutrients. With existing animals and plants in the Fertile Crescent, people could breed animals to produce more different types of species, which could provide them plenty of food. Even though a blight would strike the plants, people would still have other foods that they could feed themselves with. As a result, people of the Fertile Crescent were able to have a longer lifespan, and a greater population than it did in Mesoamerica. With more people to work together with, agriculture was able to thrive more in the Fertile Crescent than in

The excerpt explains that the fertile crescent one of the earliest areas to introduce agriculture, trade and urbanization to the world. It is especially known as the birthplace of beer

In examining early civilizations the livelihood of each new civilization rested on the crops grown on the farms. The geographical features of a land and knowledge of farming helped determine the type of crops the citizens would grow and would determine how much food was going to be available for the members of the villages. Due to the calm , predictable nature of the Nile River (Acrobatiq, 2014) and knowledge of the science of farming it allowed for better crops and helped Egypt develop faster as a civilization than India.

5. The Fertile Crescent, once the "bread basket," eventually fail due to endearment. the crops dried up. and there was a drought, however, after a period of time farming took over and so did the spread of domestication all over the

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

They also need a specific type of food source, which is controlled by the climate.The civilizations that have the right temperature and food for animals that can be domesticated are able to develop faster than civilizations that don’t have domesticated animals. This is because domesticated animals save a lot more time than going out and hunting, which makes more time to invent new things to help their civilization develop. The Fertile Crescent had a sub-arid climate with seasons. Because this allowed them to farm wheat and barley, the Fertile Crescent didn’t need as many people to help out with preparing their food. This opened up time for those who didn’t need to help out on the farms, and they discovered that not only they could capture and grow their own crops, but they could also capture and raise animals. Over time they figured out that most animals that can’t be domesticated is because of their diet, growth rate, tendency to panic, have a tendency to kill humans, or have problems with breeding in captivity,. An 1,000 pound animal needs about 10,000 pounds of food, and if a civilization were to domesticate a carnivore, then that animal would need 10,000 pounds of herbivore meat, which would need to be fed 100,000 pounds of crops, which is 90,000 pounds of food that could be used for humans to eat rather than their livestock’s food. If a

Syria and the greater Fertile Crescent are often thought of as the birth of agricultural societies, some 12,00 years ago. Recently, however, this area has experience the worst 3 year drought on record. The drought conditions exacerbated existing political, water and agricultural insecurity and caused mass agricultural failure, livestock mortality, massive rural to urban human migrations. Kelley et al set out to understand how these effects were the product of vulnerability and hazard severity by analyzing Syria’s liability to drought and the social impacts of the recent droughts leading to the onset of the Syrian civil war. The Kelley team completed their analysis through observations and climate models in order to assess how unusual the drought was within the observed records and the reasons why it was so severe.