The Ways in Which History Has Changed

The development of agriculture dramatically impacted gender roles. In hunter-gatherer societies, women had the important jobs of gathering food, and taking care of the children and the house. As agricultural villages developed, the role of gardening and farming turned into a man’s job, leaving the women to care for the children and the house. Now that families had settled down, women could have more children. The status of women decreased in this transition because they now had to fully rely on men for food. The agricultural village was a much more labor intensive lifestyle than hunting and gathering. This lifestyle involves continuous labor; there was always work to be done whether it was concerning the domesticated animals or the fields of crops. In a hunter gatherer society, once there was enough food hunted and gathered to eat, the people could rest until more was needed (28).

5) Webs allowed for the exchange of knowledge, skills, seeds, and breeding stock with neighboring settlements. This exchange allowed for more successful aspects and methods used in some agricultural villages to be spread throughout the fertile crescent and to areas beyond. As communities began to exchanging seeds and animals, they paved the way for trade, both locally and between regions. This increase in the knowledge than humans exchanged with one another also enlarged the human web itself (29).

6) Eurasia was able to achieve a leg up over Sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and Oceania because it was larger in size, had a larger communications web that included more people, their climate was favorable, and they had more domesticable animals at their disposal. Africa was limited in size due to climate and disease. Growth in the America’s was limited due to the lack of pack animals. China was limited because rice farming was difficult, labor intensive and could not utilize pack animals. Oceania was limited in growth and development because of the inability