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  3. The Origins of Plant and Animal DomesticationP1: Plant and animal domestication

The Origins of Plant and Animal DomesticationP1: Plant and animal domestication

游客2024-01-02  15
问题 The Origins of Plant and Animal Domestication
P1: Plant and animal domestication is the most monumental development to have taken place in the past 13,000 years of human history. It’s relevant to all of us, scientists and non-scientists alike, because it provides most of our food today, it was prerequisite to the rise of civilization, and it transformed global demography. The development of agriculture was accompanied by fundamental changes in the organization on human society: disparities in wealth, hierarchies of power, and urbanization.
P2: Phrases like "plant and animal domestication" and "the invention of agriculture" create the impression that the transition was the discovery of a brilliant sage made in a flash of insight—that if you sow seeds, the crop will grow, and that a dependable food source could be easily grown rather than collected from the wild. Most scholars don’t think so. It seems more likely a gradual cultural evolution that humans used and manipulated wild plants and animals for many hundreds of thousands of years. The transition to gardens, fields, and pastures was probably gradual, as the natural outgrowth of a long familiarity with the environmental requirements, growth cycles, and reproductive mechanisms of whatever plants and animals humans liked to eat, ride, or wear.
P3: For years, scholars argued that cultivation and animal domestication were invented in one or two locations on Earth and then diffused from those centers of innovation. Genetic studies are now showing that many different groups of people in many different places around the globe learned independently to create especially useful plants and animals through selective breeding. In fact, both patterns played a role in agriculture innovation. Worldwide, approximately 11 regions are believed to be centers of origin of agriculture, identified as the location in which native plant and some animal species were domesticated independently of each other In contrast, in other regions the origin of agriculture is based, at least in large part, on crops and livestock that were introduced to those regions and originally come from the centers of origin.
P4: Scholars used to assume that people turned to cultivating instead of gathering their food either because they there was a shortage of food resources, or because agriculture provided such obviously better nutrition. Reasons for such preconditions include an increase in human population density in combination with decreases in big-game species because of overhunting. Accordingly, the transition to agriculture was not a voluntary act, but rather occurred as a result of the need to find alternative sources of food. By no means did this present advantages over hunting and gathering, as it was more labor and time-intensive and was, in addition, associated with the risk of crop failures and thus with hunger. A varied diet based on gathered (and occasionally hunted) food probably provided a wider, more secure range of nutrients than an early agriculturally based diet of only one or two cultivated crops. It is more likely that populations expanded after agricultural successes, and not before.
P5: Richard MacNeish, an archaeologist who studied plant domestication in Mexico and Central America, suggested that the chance to trade was at the heart of agricultural origins worldwide. Many of the known locations of agricultural innovation lie near early trade centers. The several centers of domestication were almost contemporaneous and developments were very rapid. However, over time these specialized food foragers built up larger populations per unit of land area and were forced to begin exploiting lower quality resources over larger areas. This, as MacNeish suggested, served in part as a motive for early food gatherers to pursue cultivation and animal-raising. Perhaps eventually, because of market demand, it grew into the primary source of sustenance.
P6: E. N. Anderson, writing about the beginnings of agriculture in China, suggests that agricultural production for trade may have been the impetus for several global situations now regarded as problems: rapid population growth, social inequalities, environmental degradation, and famine. As more labor was required to supply the trade, humans produced more children, then more resources were put into producing food for subsistence and for trade. Gradually, hunting and gathering technology was abandoned as populations, with their demands for space, destroyed natural habitats. Meanwhile, a minority elite of hunters or food foragers quit doing what kept them alive and took to trade exclusively. Yet as ever larger populations depended solely on agriculture, when some large scale natural disaster took place, famine became more common.
P3: For years, scholars argued that this transitional stage lasted in some location until resource stress or environmental change led to a diffusion from those centers of innovation. ■ Genetic studies are now showing that many different groups of people in many different places around the globe learned independently to create especially useful plants and animals through selective breeding. ■ In fact, both patterns played a role in agriculture innovation. Worldwide, approximately 11 regions are believed to be centers of origin of agriculture, identified as the location in which native plant and some animal species were domesticated independently of each other. ■ In contrast, in other regions the origin of agriculture is based, at least in large part, on crops and livestock that were introduced to those regions and originally come from the centers of origin. ■ [br] The word "monumental" in the passage is closest in meaning to
选项 A、innovative
B、surprising
C、complex
D、enormous
答案 D
解析 【词汇题】monumental意为“巨大的”。
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