Saturday, March 5, 2011

Colourful Running Tights

The first transition: from gathering to agriculture.


Among the theories that demographers argue there is a meeting point that no one who Mailing, all support the biological repercussions they had on individuals and societies, in paragraph health and increased fertility, discoveries and cultural events that have affected technological development. A determining factor in population growth and demographic change. Buorgois-Pichat (1969) argues that certain facts as important as the discovery of fire, the invention of agriculture and the steam engine, scored three different demographic transitions of great repercussion in the world population. Similarly, Livi Bacci (1990) argues that the spread of agriculture allowed the population is multiplied several times to increase the maximum food resources that nature offered to the hunter gatherers.

However, according to Lourdes Marquez Morfin and Patricia Hernández Espinoza in the demographic transition and the emergence of agriculture in Mesoamerica, in this first demographic transition marked agriculture as a cultural process of great importance for population growth There are two theories. Two gaps open by demographers that lead to a point of dispute or disagreement in terms of health, but not in fertility and the increase of the population. One of them, the classic, on the assumption that increased food or nutritional contribution allowed to accelerate the growth of the population, supported by agricultural and declining mortality. In contrast, the second theory argues that sedenterarización to which the population evolved was a sudden change in diet, reduced food quality, and increased risk of transmitting infectious diseases, increased contact density and can also would increased mortality.

However, from one to another theory, that sharing is facilitated settling parenting and decreased the time between births, which allowed the population growth. On this issue, Livi-Bacci said that agricultural development would have increased mortality, but even more encouraging increased fertility of the population. However, there are other dissenting voices in these two theories, like Robert McCaa (2002), he believes that " agriculture was not sustainable machinery of the demographic changes in the prehistory of America because there is evidence that some groups experienced horticulturalists in fecundity increases.

However, archaeological evidence is clear on the period between 8,000 and 4,000 BC, and depending on the region, there was a change in the subsistence economy tipped to produce agricultural products, while retaining the combination with the findings in hunting, fishing and gathering. Amelagos Cohen (1984) argue that by producing more food and have surpluses could food to sustain a larger number of people, just so they could keep the grains and seeds for other periods shortages, drought or other environmental problems.

Agriculture allowed a greater amount of food for more people and there are arguments by researchers to argue that to be better nourished and healthier in a reduction in premature mortality in older age and elevated the productive potential, allowing the population to grow and multiply. However, it is doubtful whether, in addition to quantity, with agriculture also exceeded food quality. It is shown that the two groups, hunter-gatherers and farmers, have different eating habits. The first diet was more balanced than that of seconds, according to Brown and Konner (2,000), consisted of a sufficient amount of protein (34%), carbohydrates (45%), fat (21%), vitamins and minerals. By contrast, food-based agriculture was supported mainly carbohydrates, in the case of Mesoamerica in the grain of corn. Added to this, the sedentary lifestyle changed the nomadic lifestyle and with it the kind of health and infectious diseases they suffered.

In Mesoamerica, the development of agriculture had spread fully 3,500 years ago, during the Preclassic period. There was of gradually, and separately in different regions. In those that have been investigated so far, especially in Mexico, in the Basin of Mexico, the Zapotec region and the Maya area population is estimated low, albeit with a steady growth since the early period to the terminal (1,500 to 0 BC), continuing until the end of the Classic (0 to 900 AD). According to Martínez Muriel (1993), during the Preclassic were developed many villages with a few hundred people, but it is in the Middle Classic, where the data are apparently higher population in cities such as Teotihuacan, the Basin of Mexico , Tikal in the Maya area and Monte Alban in the Valley of Oaxaca.

This time interval was important technological development in farming and the domestication of plants, so much so that in the classical period we had a total dependence on grains such as corn and beans. Sustained impact in small villages led to overcrowding were forming neighborhoods where dozens of people were staying organized in families. The times were engaged in subsistence had been left behind and went on to develop various activities and tasks and get new food for socio-economic patterns developed. The weather was favorable and allowed the growth of crops, resulting in greater longevity of adults and increased time to conception in women. In short, decisive factors for the growth of the Mesoamerican population.



0 comments:

Post a Comment