Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:

villages, cultivating, outpaced, diet, harder, Jericho, wheat, agriculture, foraging, collective, sanitary, omnivorous, domesticated, externally, difficult, individuals, agriculture, evolution, accumulation, affluence

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the life of farmers and peasants was quite                   difficult compared to the way of life of previous Homo sapiens

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as humans slowly became dependent on           wheat, there is much that it did not offer us:

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it's very clear that wheat did not offer us a better         diet

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humans are                     omnivorous, they survive by eating a very wide variety of foodstuffs

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grains like wheat made up only a small fraction of the human diet before the agricultural revolution

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a diet based on grains and cereals is poor in minerals and vitamins, and is hard to digest compared to other foods

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did not offer humans more security

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the life of a peasant is usually less secure than the life of a hunter/gatherer

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you are economically and existentially at risk when your diet is based mainly on just one or two types of domesticated plants like rice or wheat or corn

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e.g. flooding or parasites will cause starvation

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hunters/gathers gather and eat many different foodstuffs so is not effected when one type of food is effected by e.g. disease or flooding or drought

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did not offer safety from human violence

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in the transition from hunting and gathering to                       agriculture, humans had less room for compromise for their conflicts

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                foraging bands, when saw that it was losing in a conflict with an enemy, it could usually move on to a different place

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peasants in towns, when threatened either internally or                     externally, it was much less feasible for them to move, as retreat meant to give up the fields, houses, animals, and basically all their livelihood

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since if they moved they would probably die of starvation, they would usually fight to the death in their                 villages

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violence was eventually brought under control with the advent of larger social structures but it took thousands of years, but at first, the life as a                         domesticated farmer or peasant was not more secure than living in a flexible and mobile hunter/gather clan

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most people today enjoy an extremely higher degree of                   affluence and security than what people experienced in throughout history

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we tend to think that the transition from hunter/gatherer life to agriculture was an improvement in human life, but it looks this way only from the perspective of the early 21th century.

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what did wheat offer humans in return for humans adopting the difficult life of agriculture which made wheat one of the most widespread and populous plants on the planet?

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the answer is: wheat did not offer much for people as                       individuals

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however, wheat did give something to Homo sapiens as a                     collective, it enabled humans to produce more food per area of land

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all this extra food enabled the number of Homo sapiens to grow exponentially, it enabled many more people to live in the same territory

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one of the earliest villages began to grow about 9,000 years ago in               Jericho

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individuals working the fields and living in villages were probably more hungry, less healthy and less happy than their hunter/gatherer forefathers, but there were many more of them, and unfortunately, evolution measures success not by the amount of hunger or pain or suffering, but by the numbers of copies of DNA in existence of a particular species. If there are no more copies of a species, it goes extinct and is an evolutionary dead-end. If the species has many copies of its DNA spreading around, it is considered an evolutionary success. As far as                   evolution is concerned, 1,000 copies of a particular DNA is always better than 100 copies of a DNA no matter what the condition of that plant or animal happens to be. The effect of the agricultural revolution was to keep many more people alive under worse conditions, and this was largely brought about by wheat.

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but why would any individual care about the evolutionary calculus? why would any hunter/forager willingly become a farmer and start working the fields 10-12 hours a day to produce plants which could support more people.

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one answer is that there was never a conscious, one-time decision, it was an                         accumulation of many small steps with no step being the decisive transition

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but it is clear that by 8,500 BC, the Middle East was already populated by communities which spent them time cultivating wheat and barley

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the more they cultivated, the less time they had to hunt and forage

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the more people, the less ability to hunt and gather

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life in villages enabled women to have a baby every year rather than every two or three years which was the case with hunter-gatherers

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women hunter-gathers would wait until their children could walk by themselves before having another baby

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in villages there was always work to be done in the fields which encourage women to have as many children as possible

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infectious diseases were passed from domesticated animals to people

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                sanitary conditions were worse in villages, e.g. sewage

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people living close together

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wheat porridge for breakfast, wheat bread for lunch, and wheat gruel for dinner led to a weakened immune system

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hunter-gatherer babies subsisted on their mother's milk longer, peasant babies ate wheat gruel much earlier, therefore in village, a third of the babies died before reaching adulthood

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yet birth still                 outpaced death and so humans became more numerous

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                      cultivating fields of plants is less suitable for the mind and body than wondering in the forest in search of rabbits and deer and mushrooms

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with passing of time, this wheat bargain became more burdensome for Homo sapiens

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the average person in Jericho in 8500 BC lived a             harder life than the average person in Jericho in 13000 BC

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each generation continued to live like their parents but with little improvements in agriculture to make the new life of                       agriculture more tolerable, and each of these improvements added together to a heavy burden, i.e. farmers have a lot of work from sun up to sun down