Welcome to the beginning of history…

A rosy-cheeked teacherDear 7B,

This is an amateur mini-website called a blog. I created it for the use of my year 7 history class in 2008, so you can go several years back into the past and find pictures of other students and even their comments on tasks we have done.

You can visit this blog even when you are at home. In fact, some aspects of it will work better at home, because you will not be restricted there by the school’s blocking of sites such as Youtube.

The advantage of having a blog like this is that I can direct you towards good websites, give you tasks to do and ask you to leave comments on various topics.

Today, I want you to find out about the start of agriculture and the domestication of animals. After that, I want you to leave a comment about your first few days of high school.

Rules for commenting: No family names, no insults, no information leading to your identification by outsiders – just intelligent, thoughtful remarks that will amuse and educate others.

Welcome to high school, to history and to my class.

Kind regards from Ms Green

Work for Today:

A NEW WAY OF LIFE

When some people became farmers and herders, from about 10000BC, their lives changed dramatically.

  • Farming meant that people could settle in one place.

  • They could store food for the future.

  • Larger families were possible and in fact desirable. No longer did people have to carry their young children during long nomadic migrations. Instead, they needed all the labour they could get. Farming is intensive. This would have been the start of child labour! (We do our best to continue this trend at our school.)

  • People could eventually live in much larger groups, leading ultimately to more diverse societies, skills and occupations.

  • Farming could support a far larger population than hunting and gathering, so societies based on farming could grow quickly and become much more complex and varied.

  • Farming was not necessarily a better way to live; in some ways hunting and gathering in small bands would have been simpler, with fewer possessions, more sharing and less impact on the environment. But once the idea of farming began it spread; the societies that were based on this new way of living grew, prospered, diversified and often became powerful.

One of the changes in the New Stone Age was the domestication of animals. Go to this site for a timeline of animal domestication.

This photo was taken in Vietnam by my son Patrick and is used with this permission. It shows a domesticated cat. Cats are believed to have been domesticated first by the ancient Egyptians, whose huge grain stores needed protection from rodents.
This photo was taken in Vietnam by my son Patrick and is used with his permission. It shows a domesticated cat. Cats are believed to have been domesticated first by the ancient Egyptians, whose huge grain stores needed protection from rodents.

Animal domestication link

1. List the first six animals to be domesticated and the approximate date. Then click on your favourite to find out the evidence about when, how and why they were domesticated by humans.

Plants were also domesticated. This means that humans bred the plants for the qualities they most wanted in them. Plants with larger wheat grains were chosen just as goats were chosen for smaller horns. Gradually the domesticated population varied significantly from the wild one.

Table of plant domestication

2. Write down four of the important crops and the approximate date of domestication.