Hey, hey, how are you doing? Long time no see, you know, I missed you guys. But in any case, I thought we might jump into Rubenstein's AP Human Geography, Chapter 10, Key Issue 1. We're looking at where did agriculture originate?
Agriculture, you know, a lot of people say this chapter is boring, but I actually like it. I don't know, because we talk about the Green Revolution, we talk about food and how it affects us and where it all came from. It's kind of fun for me. So the invention of agriculture, it's kind of hard to... Guess where it came from?
Because it happened before recorded history, and they're not really sure. But when we talk about agriculture, it is the deliberate modification of the Earth's surface through cultivation of plants and rearing animals for sustenance and economic gain. The origins? They don't know, really.
The guess is that they came from like hunters and gatherers. But half the people in less developed countries are farmers, and they're feeding mostly themselves. So you think about that.
There's still a whole bunch of people that are having to live off whatever they grow. Compared to the United States where you've got only 2% of the people here in the United States, they're farmers. And for the most part, those people aren't even really supporting themselves with the food.
They're still just growing like one cash crop to sell to the masses. Way back in the day, thousands, hundreds of thousands of whatever you believe, you know, it was the earth 10,000 billions years of old. Or, you know, do you believe it's just whatever? The book says, you know, thousands of years ago, hunters and gatherers, they went around collecting things.
They fished, gathered plants, lived in small groups. They couldn't have too many people, though, because large numbers would exhaust the supply. They traveled frequently. They had homes that were mobile because they'd pick them up and move them to the next location as they followed the seasonal movement of animals and plants. Nowadays, there's less than.005% of the world's population that are hunter-gatherers.
Kind of hard to believe that there's actually some people that still are hunter-gatherers. There's a picture of some dude there right now. Today, examples of hunter-gatherers that still exist are Australia's spiniflex people, India's sentinelese people, and Botswana and Nambia's bush people.
The agricultural revolution. Boy, that sounds exciting, doesn't it? Hey, guys, I'm going to a party, and it's called the Agricultural Revolution.
Well, hey, that sounds good. Well, what is it? It's where people learn how to grow plants. Yep, it's a time when human beings first domesticated plants and animals, and they no longer relied on hunting and gathering.
So pretty much they stopped moving around and following their food. and they sat in their lawn chairs and watched the crops grow. And they're like, oh, this is easy. Cool, we'll just sit here and have more people and work on things like art and education.
How did this even happen? How do people know to start planting things? Well, they don't really know because, again, it's before recorded history. The thought is perhaps people noticed plants that were dropped on the ground, and then days or weeks later they're like, hey, this area where we dropped this food, it's growing new plants.
Maybe we should try planting some other things and see what happens. happens. Geographers believe that this was the reason for the sudden population increase. People stopped moving around, they planted and waited for more food to grow, they have more time, obviously, you know, so they can sit around, they can reproduce a lot more, and the population is going to grow. About 10,000 years ago the last ice age ended, which means the ice recedes, there's more land mass for planting foods, and you have better weather to grow the crops.
And people just have a preference for living in a fixed place with a permanent settlement as opposed to following the seasonal growth of plants and animals moving around. The hearths of crops, where do they originate? Well, in Southwest Asia, the thinking is this is where barley, wheat, lentil, and olive occurred about 10,000 years ago.
And from here, the wheat spread to the west, into Europe, and into Central Asia. The hearth for crops in East Asia was rice along the Yangtze River in China and millet along the Yellow River about 10,000 years ago. In sub-Saharan Africa, you see the origination of sorghums, yams, millet, and rice, again, about 10,000 years ago. And it probably moved south into the southern portions of Africa.
And in Latin America, you've got beans and cotton in Mexico, potato in Peru, and this happens about 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. And maize, which diffused north and south. North up into North America and south down all the way to the tip of South America. Whenever we say maize, it's the same thing as corn. It's just that we say corn in the United States.
So think of them simultaneously. Or simultaneously? I don't know.
I think it was the same thing. But here you can see a graphic of the spread of everything. So we just were talking about things in the Latin American region.
So you got cotton, lima beans, maize, potato, sweet potato, and they're diffusing north and south. Yam, sorghum, they're here in Africa and they spread north and south. You've got wheat, barley, lentils, rye.
This is like the bread basket. Remember this right here is Mesopotamia. It's what we call the...
breadbasket, the initial breadbasket of the world. East Asia, you got rice, of course, and Southeast Asia, you got the mango and the coconut, things like that, that become very popular. And they spread, they diffuse across the world from those locations. Animal hearths, look at these beautiful horsies over here. Yeah, I'm in a good mood today.
What? Can you take it? Yes, you can, because you need this course, because I'm the only one who does it for you.
So you're welcome. And it's my... Joy to do this for you.
Anyways, animal hearths. Southwest Asia. This is where they thought to have had the hearth for the domestication of the largest animals.
Think of cattle, goat, pigs, and sheep. All these things that we commonly think of in agriculture, we're thinking it came from Southwest Asia about 8,000 to 9,000 years ago. Dogs, man's best friend.
I myself have three dogs right now. You're welcome. That's information that you can keep with you.
Probably not going to be handy for the AP exam, but this will. Dogs, about maybe 12,000 years ago in Southwest Asia, East Asia and Europe, that's where they came from. And now they're all the way across the earth there. The horse, you think about the Mongolians, Genghis Khan.
One of the reasons why they conquered everything is because they had horse power. They were able to shoot with their bows and arrows off horseback. But they were moved very quickly. Well, there you go.
It originated in Central Asia. which may have been associated with the spread of the Indo-European language. Along with the mobile positioning and military strength of horses comes the Indo-European language.
Because agriculture had multiple origin and shows people produce food in distinctive ways and in different regions coming from diversity of plants, climate conditions, and cultural preferences, we get an idea of why people eat the different things that they do. Agriculture is a big part of that. Looking at the origin of animals, Middle East here, sheep, goat, pig, dog, big cattle regions, chicken, the horse up here in Central Asia, llama, alpaca, of course, is pretty much the only places where they are, turkey. You know, why didn't turkey originate in Turkey? You know, isn't that interesting?
Couldn't they have placed that together for some reason? But no, turkey originates here. You know, where do you hunt?
I don't even think about hunting turkey down here anymore. I always think of it up here in the United States. Subsistence versus commercial agriculture. When we say subsistence agriculture, this is found in developing countries and it's for the production of food for consumption by the family of the farmer. They don't have time, they don't have the money or resources to grow big crops.
All they're doing with their small plot of land is growing food for themselves. Commercial agriculture, on the other hand, is found in developed countries and it's production of food for sale. They're growing like one crop. to sell to a ton of people.
The differences are the percentage of farmers. In developed countries, we have very little farmers because they make food for a whole bunch of people using machines and all that. In developing countries, almost half of them are still farmers because they don't have the resources, money, time, small plots of land. They're growing it to feed themselves and their family. Consider in the USA, we only have 2% of our population that is farmers.
Those 2% grow food for the entire country. Differences between subsistence and commercial is use of machinery. In commercial agriculture, there's less farmers, there's more machines, and transportation is easier to the market because we've got things in the developed world like great transportation systems of trains, semi-trucks, vehicles. We've got big combines to help us.
Another difference is the farm size. In commercial agriculture, we've got these huge farm sizes that are controlled by very few people. Like one person has a combine, he's controlling vast lands and selling one crop.
Whereas opposed to in subsistence agriculture, small plot of land, family members growing all the crops they can just to feed themselves. Here's a look at hectares of land per tractor. So in the United States, we've got, it's pretty, it's almost confusing to look at this because it's kind of the opposite.
So you think about, here in the United States, we've got... Few a few tractors in a lot of land that's meaning Like one tractor is controlling a whole bunch of land because we're using commercial machines, commercial agriculture to grow one crop for tons of people. Same within Europe.
As opposed to like Africa here where you've got a whole lot of tractors and a whole lot of land. So that's not said right. Where we've got small pieces of land, what am I even saying? I'm gonna make sure I'm saying this right.
In Africa, you would have, I don't even know what I'm saying, people. Can you explain this to me, please? Because that'd be really helpful.
Let's use this as a training opportunity. You tell yourself what this means and you put it on the comment section of the video and then I'll look at it and I'll be like, oh yeah, that's what that meant. How about that? And that's the end of the video. Enjoy.
I hope you're having a great day. See you again on the next one.