Big+History+Project

"For 200,000 years, modern humans have acquired food by foraging – hunting animals, fishing, and scavenging food. This was a successful strategy for our ancestors, but it did not allow for dramatic population growth or for dense human communities to develop, which was not ideal for the promotion of collective learning or sustained innovation. Slowly, humans began to adopt farming. Although this transition was slow, its impact was significant. Farming allowed the human population to grow dramatically, and it allowed humans to live in larger, denser communities than foraging could support. These larger and denser communities eventually led to the development of cities and civilizations, which significantly increased the rate of collective learning and innovation." [|The Big History]

First we begin with agriculture and how it's growth transformed, or changed, human development. I would like your student to research news stories about early agriculture. The following page describes the assignment and suggests some starting places. Your student is to complete the 3 Agriculture cards that provides the basic information they discovered. Students complete this:


 * Collective Learning Article**

The foraging lifestyle differed in important ways from the farming lifestyle. Throughout the Era of the Foragers, human communities were small and not very dense. Humans had close contacts with the small number of people they lived with and perhaps some neighboring foraging communities. All in all, though, networks of collective learning could not be very extensive. This changed with the adoption of farming, which allowed more humans to settle down and live in one spot, and made possible population growth that the human species had never experienced before. Students read this: **While reading the article ** As they read, students should write down their answers to these questions: 1. Why does size play an important role in collective learning networks? 2. Why is diversity an important factor in collective learning networks? 3. Why can an uneven distribution of information and connectedness lead to uneven distribution of wealth and power in collective learning networks? Collective learning networks will expand during the Agrarian era. These expanding networks will help spur innovation, though, as you will see, the innovations in this age will be hard to sustain. Nonetheless, the expansion of collective learning networks during this era will be another key consequence of the human adoption of agriculture.

Agriculture is perhaps the most important human invention of all time, and each crop has a story of its own. Review pages 3-4. The assignment will be modified somewhat in class.
 * Biography of a Staple Crop - Assignment **


 * Where and Why Did Cities and States Appear - Vocabulary Words and Video Notes**