Difference between revisions of "8. What are the characteristic plants and animals exploited by the early regional civilizations (Near East, South Asia, the Far East, sub-Sahara Africa, North and South America?"

Revision as of 17:31, 15 January 2015

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The characteristics of plants and animals exploited by the early regional civilizations are simple and logical. Basically, the civilizations had a need. They needed food stability, ways to access that food, and ways to create it. The answer to their question was simple: domestication and farming. The reason the early civilizations chose animals like goats to domesticate was this: the goats were in the right place at the right time, and provided meat, milk and had many other beneficial uses. The early people had a need for these animals. The animals were there, in the Jordan River Valley, and very beneficial. It was for this reason that the early people chose goats as the first domesticated "farm animal". The same case happened with the wheat they domesticated and began to cultivate. This wheat, when processed correctly, could be made into a carbohydrate, a staple need for the diet of the early people. They found, when harvesting the wheat, that the seeds could be taken from the plant and stored, as could the flour that was made from grinding the wheat. This was majorly beneficial, and one main reason that wheat is the cereal grain they harvested rather than another such as barley. Once the early people found that the wheat could be stored, they built storage facilities to house their surplus. Then, if and when a drought came, they would have flour to bake bread with, and seeds to replant with when the drought ended. The characteristics of the plants and animals exploited by the early regional civilizations were that the plants and animals were available, beneficial, and easy to tame, domesticate, and use.

Sources

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History Manual pages 62 and 64

Andie Kapiloff