Understanding vocabulary helps you access course content and become a better reader, a better writer, and a better communicator. This word wall activity will help you begin to learn some of the key vocabulary from the unit.

In this activity, you’ll work with your class to create a word wall using the Unit 7 vocabulary.

Your teacher will assign a vocab card to each of you. Once you get yours, take a few minutes to look it up in the Vocab Guide and then examine the unit itself (click around and quickly skim the content) to see where in the unit your word might be most applicable. Then, add as many antonyms to your card for your word as possible. Be careful if you decide to use the “related words” section from the vocab guide—it doesn’t distinguish between synonyms and antonyms. Your teacher will give you a limited amount of time to write antonyms. Then, the people with the most correct antonyms at the end of the time will put their words on the word wall first.

Your teacher may add some fun twists to this assignment, so be sure to listen closely for directions!

For most of human history, our ancestors gathered, hunted, and fished for their food. But something changed about 12,000 years ago that led to groups of foragers settling down, farming, and creating complex societies. This transformation was such a big deal that historians call it the Agricultural Revolution. The causes of this revolution, and its many consequences, are what we’ll explore in this video.

Humans were foragers for thousands of years, so why did some people make the switch to farming in different parts of the world around the same time? That’s one of the questions you’ll try to answer in this unit. It may seem like a simple story of progress, but history is much more complicated.

Preview

As a reminder, open and skim the transcript, and read the questions before you watch the video.

Key Ideas – Factual

Think about the following questions as you watch this video:

1. Rachel argues that farming added a lot of complexity to our lives. What had to happen for the Standard of Ur box to exist?
2. How does the Standard of Ur provide us with evidence about how complex societies interacted?
3. How did early humans transform their environments?
4. What are sedentary foragers and why did these foragers become the first farmers?
5. How did farming lead to a social hierarchy, laws, and shared belief systems?
6. How do we know so much about the transition from foraging to farming to complex societies?

Thinking Conceptually

1. The transition from foraging to farming, also known as the Agriculture Revolution, happened independently in different places around the world. Why do you think so many people in so many different places decided to transition from foraging to farming starting around 12,000 years ago?
2. Rachel ends the video by asking if you think that the transition from foraging to farming was a simple progression that happened in different places around the world. Do you think it was that simple? Think of one example that might contradict this story of increasing complexity.

As in other This Threshold Today activities, in this activity you’ll search for and read news articles that expose connections between today’s world and a threshold of increasing complexity, in this case Threshold 7: Agriculture. Our understanding of the origins and impacts of agriculture is not fixed, and this activity will help you to explore the ways events of the past continue to influence our world today.

Reading, claim testing
As part of this activity, you’ll be reading news articles online. These will vary in difficulty and style, so, where possible, use the skills you’ve learned as part of the Three Close Reads process to help you better understand these texts. When searching for information online, you’ll also use claim testers to evaluate credibility of the sources you encounter.

When humans first began to practice agriculture about 10,000 years ago, not only were their lives transformed but the surface of the Earth was transformed as well. Humans were no longer forced to move from place to place in search of food. They could settle down in one place, and they could produce more food than they needed in that place, resulting in human population growth. Humans also altered the surface of the Earth more deliberately to make more land available for agriculture. Cutting down trees and digging irrigation canals are just two of the ways that humans made the land more suitable for growing crops. Because farming resulted in such dramatic changes to the Earth and in the way humans lived, it qualifies as the seventh major threshold of increasing complexity in this course. Scientists and historians—and all of us—are continuing to learn more about the beginnings of agriculture and what this development has meant for our species.

You can join in this process of discovery by searching for news stories about the rise of agriculture. Before you start your research, review the following questions you can use to determine the credibility of a source:

• What person or group is behind the website where you found the article?
• Why are they sharing this information?
• What authority do the author and website have about the topic?
• How does the author’s perspective impact their argument?
• Can you find other sources that agree with the claims in this article?

Another way to evaluate credibility is to uncover why an article was written in the first place, or in other words, the purpose of an article. There are different reasons people write and make claims, and understanding those reasons can help you decide if the arguments are credible. Discuss purpose with your class. Once you’ve done that, time to dive into research! To do this, ask yourself:

• Why was the article or website created in the first place?
• Who is its intended audience?

You can look at these sites to help you get started:

• Live Science: The Most Interesting Articles, Mysteries & Discoveries
• Smithsonian Magazine: History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places
• BBC.com
• NPR—Breaking News, Analysis, Music, Arts & Podcasts
• WIRED—The Latest in Science, Technology, Culture, and Business

The development of agriculture gave humans greater access to more reliable food sources by harnessing more of the Sun’s energy. As a result, population grew dramatically, and people began to settle down to form larger, denser communities like cities and agrarian civilizations. More people began to share ideas with each other, which meant rates of innovation and collective learning increased.

In this video, David Christian provides an introduction to agriculture. Christian’s focus is on the ingredients and Goldilocks Conditions that made the development of agriculture possible. Understanding why and how agriculture developed is critical if you want to understand agriculture's impact on human history.

Preview

Agriculture originated in the wake of the last ice age as climate was undergoing changes and human populations were beginning to grow.

Key Ideas—Factual

Think about the following questions as you watch the video:

1. How long ago did the last ice age end?
2. Why was human population growth after the ice age a problem for human communities?
3. Why was a warmer, stable climate important to the development of agriculture?
4. What is domestication?
5. Why does David Christian call agriculture an energy "bonanza" for humans?

Thinking Conceptually

Human population growth increased dramatically with the development of farming. What do you think might happen if human population continues to grow? Can humans continue to grow enough food to support population growth? Think about how agriculture is still important to us today.

Answering the driving question in this lesson will help you begin to think about why the adoption of agriculture brought about such significant changes in the way humans lived and how the lives of foragers compared to the lives of farmers.

Your teacher will assign one of the following driving questions for you to think about:

• Was farming an improvement over foraging?

Use the DQ Notebook Worksheet – Unit 7 to respond to the assigned question to the best of your ability. Be prepared to talk about these ideas with your class.

At the end of the last ice age, competition for limited resources and the existence of warmer, wetter climates were conditions present in many parts of the world. Foragers had used migration to relieve population and resource pressures in the past, but this was no longer an option once humans had migrated to all corners of the world. Thus humans were forced to innovate in order to survive, with agriculture becoming the solution. Farming originally developed in the Fertile Crescent, but humans in China, Papua New Guinea, West Africa, Mesoamerica, and the Andes also began to domesticate plants and animals in order to gain access to more energy and food.

Although humans aren’t the only animals to practice agriculture, they are the only species to exploit this technology to the extent that they do. Agriculture provides humans with access to the huge amounts of the energy stored in plants as a result of the process of photosynthesis. Understanding how agriculture made population growth possible and how this led to an increase in innovation and collective learning is a crucial aspect of the Big History story.

Preview

Humans were foragers for most of their history, relying on what the natural environment provided them to meet their energy needs. The foraging lifestyle was a very successful lifestyle, as it allowed modern humans to survive for almost 200,000 years. But it was not a lifestyle that allowed for high rates of growth or innovation. Foragers typically had to migrate frequently to access the food they required, and they had to find ways to limit population growth to ensure the survival of the group. At the end of the last ice age, population growth and competition for resources pressured humans to look for new ways to feed everyone. Agriculture was a solution that allowed humans to feed larger and larger populations and settle down in one place.

Key Ideas—Factual

Think about these questions as you watch the video:

Part I

1. How do the plants that humans choose to cultivate benefit from human attention?
2. What is symbiosis?
3. What does David Christian mean when he says that plants were changed by agriculture but that humans were changed too?
4. When and where did farming begin?
5. Where did farming develop next?

Part II

6. Why did agriculture develop in so many places at about the same time?
7. Why couldn't humans just migrate to relieve population at the end of the ice age, just as they had always done?
8. How did the world's climate change at the end of the last ice age?
9. How did the ways the Natufians lived differ from how foragers lived?
10. Why did people like the Natufians feel pressure to begin farming?
11. What does Christian mean when he says that climate change made agriculture possible and overpopulation made it necessary?

Thinking Conceptually

Do you believe there is any limit to the growth of agriculture around the world? Do you think agricultural production can always be increased to support growing human populations?

Humans first domesticated dogs prior to the development of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Early dogs developed into the breeds that we see now through the process of artificial selection. After dogs, we went on to domesticate cows, sheep, goats, camels, horses, oxen, and other livestock. These beasts of burden gave an advantage to populations in Afro-Eurasia because of their usefulness in farming and trade. Domesticated animals in the Americas included llamas, turkeys, and guinea pigs, none of which could be used as working animals.

This video invites you to think about pets in a new way. More than just companions for early humans, dogs might have played a key role in the development of farming.

Preview

We have learned that humans domesticated dogs as pets long before the development of agriculture. In this video, Jacqueline Howard speculates on the role pets played for early foraging humans and how pets might have contributed to the domestication of beasts of burden and the advent of farming.

Key Ideas—Factual

Think about the following questions as you watch the video:

1. What animal was the first to be domesticated by humans? Approximately when did this take place?
2. How did domesticated dogs transition from their wolf-like origins over 10,000 years ago to the tremendous variety of breeds that exist today?
3. How did the domestication of animals affect the expansion of early civilizations around 10,000 years ago?
4. What immediate advantage did horses, camels, oxen, and donkeys give to the inhabitants of Afro-Eurasia over peoples living in the Americas?
5. What animals were first domesticated in the Americas?

Thinking Conceptually

Beasts of burden such as horses, oxen, camels, and donkeys gave Afro-Eurasia a distinct advantage over societies that developed in the Americas. Rewind the clock 10,000 years and add a single species—the horse—to the American world zone. How, if at all, would this have shifted the balance of power throughout the world?

Collective learning is a defining characteristic that distinguishes humans from other animals and is a key concept in the Big History units that focus on humans. In this article David Christian explains the process of collective learning in more detail. Understanding collective learning is essential to learning about the connections between agriculture, civilizations, and innovation.

Skimming for Gist

Foragers could create only very small collective learning networks because they lived in small groups and were constantly on the move. The development of agriculture provided increased possibilities for expanding and connecting networks of collective learning.

Understanding Content

By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions about networks of collective learning:

1. What is a network?
2. Why does size play an important role in collective learning networks?
3. Why is diversity an important factor in collective learning networks?
4. Why can an uneven distribution of information and connectedness lead to uneven distribution of wealth and power in collective learning networks?

Thinking Conceptually

At the end of the third close read, respond to this question: Do you consider yourself to be connected by your phone and computer to a lot of other people? Do you have friends who are less connected than you? Do you have friends who are more connected? Do you agree with the idea that when there are an uneven number of connections among people, groups, or countries that this unevenness can lead to differences in the way power, wealth, and influence are distributed?

This activity will provide you with the opportunity to formalize and deepen your understanding of what it means to “domesticate” a plant, by having you write a biography of an important crop. Taking an in-depth look at one important crop will help you understand why its cultivation had such a profound impact on the way humans live.

Reading, writing
Since you’re being asked to write a more traditional five-paragraph essay for this assignment, use the BHP Writing Rubric to help focus your writing goals. You can also use the Three Close Reads Worksheet as well as the research cards from This Threshold Today to help you prepare to write your essay.

You will research and prepare a four- or five-paragraph essay on one of twelve key crops from human history. (Your teacher may assign you a specific crop or may let you choose your crop.) In your research you should look for the following information about your crop:

• the crop’s scientific name
• where and when the crop was first domesticated and what people first domesticated it
• the crop’s nutritional value (carbohydrates, proteins, and fats)
• the crop’s growing cycle and requirements for water, nutrients, and sunlight
• any farming techniques or technologies humans use to grow the crop the crop’s significance to the Big History story

You will find the Agriculture and Civilization Infographic to be a very good starting point in your research. You will want to supplement this information with information from the Internet and other resources as well.

Before beginning to write your paper, be sure to review the Big History Writing Rubric to remind yourself of the standards for an essay in Big History.

Other requirements for your essay include the following:

1. It should be four to five paragraphs in length.
2. The first paragraph should be an introduction with a clear thesis statement.
3. The last paragraph should be a conclusion and wrap up.
4. The middle two-three paragraphs should present the best evidence about the crop.

This essay assignment will pose a certain degree of challenge for you because the research for this particular essay is driven by very specific questions about a very specific crop. Therefore, it may be tempting for you to get caught up in each question (and its answer) instead of what ties these questions together. This could easily lead to a paper that looks more like a series of questions and answers as opposed to a narrative that draws on those questions and answers. To help you avoid this pitfall, review two specific standards from the Big History Writing Rubric: “Analysis and Evidence” and “Organization.” When everyone has completed the activity, you will peer edit a classmate's essay using the Peer Review Rubric. Make sure you pay particular attention to the “Analysis and Evidence” and “Organization” sections of the rubric while reading your partner’s essay. On your partner's Peer Review Rubric, write at least three recommendations for improving his/her essay based upon these three standards.

There are many types of historians and scientists that help us learn about the past. In particular, archaeologists and scientists like archaeobotanists can examine artifacts to find evidence that support and expand our understanding of early societies and civilizations. Scientific evidence of early agriculture has taught us that early farmers were intelligent, they experimented with different kinds of plants, they invented new technologies and tools to increase their production, and their knowledge was passed along as part of collective learning.

This reading will help you understand how historians can draw conclusions about early periods in history without a lot of evidence from written records. In particular, this article focuses on our discoveries about early agriculture and how influential people such as archaeologists are in helping us understand history. This further illustrates that history is not only done by historians, but by scholars from multiple disciplines. Providing concrete examples of how this is done will give you a better understanding of early agriculture, how our understanding of early agriculture has changed over time, as well as an increased understanding of the kinds of sources of evidence that are used to understand early farming.

Skimming for Gist

Although we know a lot about early agriculture, we don’t always explore how we know what we know. This is especially important since there are very few written records from these early time periods. Archaeologists are the source of much of our knowledge of early time periods.

Understanding Content

By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. What are the four factors archaeologists use to determine where to dig?
2. What evidence have archaeologists found in Banpo that gives them information about early farming practices there?
3. What is an archaeobotanist?
4. How do we know that the squash found from the Guilá Naquitz cave is the same species as the modern pumpkin and the summer squash?
5. How did farming in Australia look different from farming in East Asia and Mexico?
6. What are the conclusions the author draws from the three cases?

Thinking Conceptually

At the end of the third close read, respond to these questions: What other things might archaeologists or archaeobotanists be able to learn from looking at artifacts found at dig sites? How would this evidence help them better understand history?

This activity will help you become more familiar with your LBH topic, which will enable you to formulate better research questions when you start your final project.

Before you start working on your LBH biography, your teacher will review three important pieces of the LBH project: the Collaboration Rubric, which will be used at the end of this activity to grade how well you worked with your group; the Little Big History Object Worksheet, which you’ll use to answer general questions about your group’s LBH object; and the criteria for a Little Big History.

When your teacher has completed the review, join your group and get to work on your Little Big History Biography.

The goal of this activity is to give you and your group an opportunity to begin a general investigation of your object. You shouldn’t worry that you’re doing only very general research at this point. Eventually, your group will narrow its research focus and create specific research questions. In order to do this, though, you need to be aware of the information about your object that’s available. In doing this, you may discover new lines of inquiry and interest, or you may find that a line of inquiry will be too difficult to follow.

For this initial biography, your group will research the following questions about your object:

1. How long have people been using it?
2. Where and how did it originate?
3. How has it or its use changed over time, and how does that connect to thresholds of increasing complexity?
4. How have different people used it?
5. What were the major changes in its form and use?
6. How does this object of study fit within the concept of thresholds of increasing complexity?

For each question, come up with at least one answer and one unique resource. Use the Little Big History Biography Worksheet to document your answers and resources.

You can decide as a group how you want to break up the work. You can find a time to work together outside of class or you can assign each member of the group certain tasks to complete. Be sure that as part of your plan, everyone in the group is very clear about their assigned responsibilities. You’ll only turn in one worksheet per group, so if you’ve divided up the questions, be sure to compile your answers into one sheet.

Once your group has completed the worksheet, fill out the Collaboration Rubric individually. Be sure to turn in the Collaboration Rubrics and the Little Big History Object Worksheets to your teacher.