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是原文吗？农业起源
The history of the debate about the origins of agriculture usually starts with V. Gordon Childe, who developed the idea of the ‘Neolithic Revolution’. He was a renowned synthesiser of archaeological thinking, who became Professor of Prehistory at Edinburgh University in 1927, and published two highly influential books: Man Makes Himself in 1936, and What Happened in History in 1942. He argued that agriculture arose as a consequence of abrupt climate change after the end of the last ice age. He proposed that this led to progressive desiccation that forced the withdrawal of humans, animals and plants to the banks of rivers and oases. The close contact that now prevailed between humans, plants and animals thus led to the first attempts at domestication. Where successful, this resulted in rapid population growth and the establishment of permanent settlements. His analysis took a rather simple view of how this challenge developed. Childe argued that the climate shifted from the cool wet conditions at the end of the LGM to the hotter, drier weather of the Holocene. This simplified approach does not tally with the changes that have been presented earlier. Moreover, it does not include a detailed interpretation of the impact of the complicated nature of this transition, with events like the Younger Dryas exerting particular influence over the move to agriculture.
The somewhat sweeping nature of Childe’s ‘catastrophic’ explanation of the origin of agriculture ran into considerable resistance. Instead, a consensus formed around agriculture being the product of ‘population pressure’. Around 12 kya hunter-gatherers began to produce significantly more offspring than they could feed. While population levels of hunter-gatherers are generally maintained at a ‘carrying capacity’, for whatever reason some palaeolithic populations began to grow. This increase led to an inevitable limitation of resources and made the adoption of the hardship and toil of agriculture inevitable. What was not clear was what drove the population explosion: why did hunter-gatherer population dynamics suddenly require people to embrace food production with all its laborious and timeconsuming drawbacks rather than sticking to the freedom of hunting and gathering? Part of the story may be that sedentism and the more frequent use of settlements made child rearing easier. Women did not have to carry young children as part of a nomadic existence and this could have led to larger families. Even so, what was missing was some driving force behind the change, and needless to say, climate change seems to be an obvious possibility.
The two most important features of the period between the end of the LGM and the start of the Holocene are the dramatic changes in climatic conditions after Heinrich event 1 and shifts in the climate variability, notably the sudden decline after the Younger Dryas. The scale of the warming in the Bølling/Allerød period provided considerable opportunities for the most adaptable communities, notably in southwest Asia in what is known as the Fertile Crescent, to exploit the abundance that came with warmer temperatures and greater rainfall. There is also a suggestion in the figures that climatic variability declined somewhat during these warmer spells (see Fig. 2.9b), which may have permitted the establishment of a more settled existence in favourable locations. Although the Older Dryas interrupted this climatic amelioration, the period of amelioration probably provided the opportunities for populations in favoured areas to rise. The savage cold and aridity of the Younger Dryas brought this period of advance to a grinding halt. The return to near-ice-age conditions posed the most frightful challenge to the burgeoning communities of the Fertile Crescent. Driven to oases and riversides, they may have found agriculture the only option for survival.
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发表于 2018-10-14 00:48:39
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