This activity provides you with an opportunity to start thinking about the impact that farming can have on the way humans live and relate to each other. It will also allow you to think about the kinds of questions archaeologists and historians might ask when they must rely upon artifacts rather than written evidence to learn about the past.

Your teacher will break the class into small groups and have each group quickly analyze a set of burial images. Look carefully at the images and use the worksheet to answer the following questions about each:

1. Describe the burial: what does the tomb or grave look like? How was the body prepared? Were there any objects in the grave or tomb?
2. What conclusions would you draw about the wealth, power, and social status of each of the individuals from these three burials? Explain the reasoning behind your conclusions.

After your group has had some time to think and discuss the images and you’ve completed the worksheet, your teacher will ask your group to share your answers with the whole class. Later in the lesson, you will have a chance to form a deeper understanding of how the way humans lived and related to others was impacted by the development of agriculture.

History is the study of the past, but it’s more than the simple memorization of dates, names, and places. Historians learn about the past by collecting evidence and asking questions in order to build a better understanding of the past.

In this video, Professor Bob Bain describes the discipline of history. It’s important for you to understand how historians use evidence to re-create the past.

Preview

Bob Bain argues that historians study the past by questioning evidence.

Key Ideas—Factual

Think about the following question as you watch the video:

1. How does Bob Bain answer the question, "What do historians do?"
2. Why does Bain say that doing history is a lot like "understanding a mystery"?
3. According to Bain, how is science different from history?
4. What kinds of questions might a historian pose about a simple object, like a clock?
5. Do all historians ask the same questions?

Thinking Conceptually

At this point in the course, you’ve learned about the nature, evidence, and questions important in a number of scientific disciplines. Given what you’ve learned about the nature, evidence, and questions important to the discipline of history, does it sound like a “scientific” discipline in the same way these other disciplines do?

Language allows humans to pass on important and complex ideas to other humans. Writing, a later development, allows humans to preserve human communication in a more durable form. Some human societies have relied on oral tradition to preserve important stories and records, but if these stories are not passed on from one generation to the next, they can easily be lost. Oral tradition can be limited in the amount of information stored by the amount of information that an individual can memorize. In societies that use writing, limitations like these are unlikely to hold back the accumulation and preservation of knowledge.

It’s important to learn about how writing has allowed for a significant acceleration in collective learning because it enables humans to save and share information across generations.

Skimming for Gist

Humans were capable of collective learning before the invention of writing, but writing provided a way of recording human language and preserving it that dramatically increased the power of collective learning.

Understanding Content

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

1. What does David Christian mean when he says that "tracking the past" is different from "memory of the past"?
2. What is an "oral tradition"? How is "proper history" different from an oral tradition?
3. What is evidence-based history?

Thinking Conceptually

How has writing been a positive innovation for humans? Does writing have any negative impacts that you can think of?

What counts as a written source? Historians tend to prefer written sources as evidence. Many societies, including the Ancestral Pueblo of the American Southwest, are often said to have left behind no written sources. Yet, at sites across the Southwest, hundreds of thousands of petroglyphs stand out from the basalt rock as stark reminders that history is complicated and there are many types of evidence. In this video, Matthew Martinez gives us a tour of the Mesa Prieta Petroglyph Project, explaining how the stories embedded in Pueblo oral traditions come alive in this special place.

In Unit 7, you’re learning about the rise of complex agricultural societies. This video provides evidence to extend and challenge the narratives you will encounter about the development of agricultural societies. Though the Ancestral Pueblo—and many other Indigenous American societies—never developed a written language, they did develop complex societies and used other methods to pass down scientific and historical information across thousands of years. Through the process of collective learning, these communities learned, improved on, and passed down their knowledge about the environment, developing increasingly complex methods of astronomical tracking and recording.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

Remember to open and skim the transcript, and then read the questions below before you watch the video.

Key Ideas – Factual

Think about the following questions as you watch this video.

1. What are petroglyphs and how are they made?
2. What does Dr. Martinez mean when he says, “these are our libraries”?
3. What are some common types of petroglyphs and what does Dr. Martinez say is their meaning?
4. Why were astronomical knowledge and markers important to Pueblo society? What were some images used for astronomy?

Evaluating and Corroborating

1. Dr. Martinez makes the claim that petroglyphs are a kind of writing and are part of a larger oral tradition through which Pueblo people pass on their learning through generations. Can you think of any other types of historical evidence you’ve encountered in this course that come from nonwritten sources?

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was a Tunisian scholar and politician. He traveled widely across North Africa and Andalusia and held positions such as prime minister, political advisor, and judge. Along the way, he met many accomplished rulers and officials. These experiences helped Ibn Khaldun develop theories for how societies, governments, and economies took shape. He wrote about the rise and fall of civilizations throughout history and is often thought of as the “father of the social sciences.”

In this unit, you are looking at similarities and differences between human societies, asking how societies develop, expand, and collapse. This biography of Ibn Khaldun shows how one scholar compared many societies as he traveled, worked in various governments, and wrote his ideas down. It shows us how he was the first to think about the concept of history as we think about it now. It also gives us a glimpse into his theories about the formation of societies—theories that have been used and built upon for hundreds of years. Ibn Khaldun’s ideas about complex societies provides additional evidence for you to answer the question, “To what extent was farming an improvement over foraging?”

Read 1: Observe

As you read this graphic biography for the first time, review the Read 1: Observe section of your Three Close Reads for Graphic Bios Tool. Be sure to record one question in the thought bubble on the top-right. You don’t need to write anything else down. However, if you’d like to record your observations, feel free to do so on scrap paper.

Read 2: Understand

On the tool, summarize the main idea of the comic and provide two pieces of evidence that helped you understand the creator’s main idea. You can do this only in writing or you can get creative with some art. Some of the evidence you find may come in the form of text (words). But other evidence will come in the form of art (images). You should read the text looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the main idea, and key supporting details. You should also spend some time looking at the images and the way in which the page is designed. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. What happened in Ibn Khaldun’s political career? How did this affect his work as a scholar?
2. What is ‘Al Muqaddimah’? Why was it important?
3. What does Ibn Khaldun say is a key element in society’s functioning?
4. How did Ibn Khaldun approach important figures like Timur?
5. Looking at just the images and colors in this graphic biography, what ideas do you think the author could be conveying about societies during this time?

Read 3: Connect

In this read, you should use the graphic biography as evidence to support, extend, or challenge claims made in this unit of the course. On the bottom of the tool, record what you learned about this person’s life and how it relates to what you’re learning.

1. How did the work of Ibn Khaldun influence what was known about the rise and fall of societies? How might this have contributed to the increasing complexity of civilizations?

To Be Continued…

On the second page of the tool, your teacher might ask you to extend the graphic biography to a second page. This is where you can draw and write what you think might come next. Here, you can become a co-creator of this graphic biography!

Historians study very different kinds of evidence from that studied by geologists or chemists, and their questions about evidence can be very different as well. Historical evidence poses some new but very interesting interdisciplinary challenges. In this activity, you’ll decide what kinds of questions scholars from different disciplines might ask about a piece of evidence that is clearly chosen from the discipline of history.

Your teacher will decide whether you’re going to work alone or in groups, and then will assign the event or object that you’ll think about when filling out the worksheet. Your job is to think about how you would assemble a research team to most deeply understand the event. This worksheet will help walk you through that process. You’ll also have to explain why your team is the best team for this job.

Once you’ve completed the worksheet, you’ll be asked to share what you came up with, why your team is the best one for the job, and what your team would know and ask. You will end by discussing whether or not you think that the interdisciplinary study of historical objects is different from the interdisciplinary study of scientific objects.

After early humans migrated out of Africa into other parts of the world, farming societies popped up all over the Earth. These agrarian societies were able to support many more people than in the days of foraging, and the increased number of people increased collective learning around the world. Increased collective learning led to more innovation, the spread of knowledge, and even more people. However, this increase also led to humans depleting their resources and causing cycles of population decline and rise due to the limited carrying capacity of the Earth and the increased complexity in the world.

Crash Course Big History Episode #7. In this video, John and Hank Green talk about how humans migrated from Africa to the rest of the Earth. Some results of these migrations were increased populations, more innovations, and a huge increase in collective learning. This video should help students understand how the agrarian era began, and also how migration can increase complexity, change culture, and most of all, increase knowledge around the world. Today, migrations are still a catalyst for these types of changes, and it’s important to understand the effects of the movement of people around the globe.

Preview

For most of our existence, humans have been hunter-gatherers. Early humans migrated out of Africa and across the world into four distinct world zones. In each of these zones, agriculture developed, which brought on what is referred to as the agrarian era. This all occurred within the last 10,000 to 15,000 years—relatively recently considering that the Universe is 13.8 billion years old.

Key Ideas – Factual

Think about the following questions as you watch the video:

1. What are the four world zones?
2. What are the theories of why humans created agriculture?
3. What were some of the positive and negative impacts of agriculture?
4. When and where did agriculture emerge around the world and how did this impact where the first states emerged?
5. What is the Hobbes versus Rousseau debate?
6. What does Hank Green claim is the underlying theme in all of human history?
7. How did collective learning raise the carrying capacity of the world during the agrarian era?
8. What was the typical cycle of population rise and decline in the agrarian era?

Thinking Conceptually

Think about the idea of viewing human history through the lens of carrying capacity. Even though we are no longer in the agrarian era, are we still doing things that are similar, such as maxing out our resources due to population increases, and then causing different ways of population decline? If so, where do we see the impacts of this? If not, how is today different in terms of carrying capacity than during the agrarian era?

At the start of the unit, you looked at the driving question without much to go on. Now that you have more information, revisit the driving question. This time, you will cite specific passages and evidence from the content in the unit that provide insights into answering the driving question.

• Driving Question: Was farming an improvement over foraging?

Now that you’ve spent some time with the material of this unit, you should look back over the content covered as well as any additional information you’ve come across and write down any quotes or evidence that have provided you with new insights into the driving question for Unit 7 that your teacher has assigned. Once you’ve finished, use the DQ Notebook Worksheet to describe how this new information has impacted your thinking.

As long as humans have existed, some of them have always called Africa home. Shouldn’t Africa, then, have been the place where agriculture found its roots, instead of the Fertile Crescent? The fact that Africa was the cradle of our civilization actually prevented it from developing agriculture first. Since the entirety of human history had been spent on the continent, humans became extremely well-adapted to African conditions and were able to hold out as foragers for much longer. Once agriculture was established in West Africa, around 3000 BCE, it spread quickly and led to population growth in larger, agrarian civilizations.

This reading will help you gain an understanding of agriculture’s delayed origins in sub-Saharan Africa. You’ll learn the answer to this important question: Widely known as the cradle of civilization, why wasn’t this area of Africa also the site where agriculture was first developed, rather than the Fertile Crescent?

Skimming for Gist

Human origins have been traced back to sub-Saharan Africa, but the origins of agriculture are clearly found outside of Africa, in the Fertile Crescent. The appearance of agriculture in Southern Africa was delayed significantly but took hold roughly the same time it did in the Americas. This delay had much to do with the rich history of hominines on the continent of Africa and how these creatures evolved to effectively utilize its land.

Understanding Content

By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions about the origins of agriculture in Africa:

1. What was particularly unique about the animals living in sub-Saharan Africa that gave them an evolutionary advantage over those living in regions such as Australia or the Americas?
2. How did life as an early farmer compare to that of a forager?
3. When and where did farming first take hold in sub-Saharan Africa?
4. What evidence suggests that farming in West Africa arose independently from Egypt or the Fertile Crescent?
5. Sub-Saharan Africa experienced a delay in the arrival of agriculture when compared to Egypt and the Fertile Crescent. This delay had its pros and cons. Describe some of them.

Thinking Conceptually

Think about the meaning of the following statement: “Over long stretches of evolutionary time, humans had learned to live with Africa and Africa had learned to live with us.” Be prepared to discuss your answer with the class.

As Islam grew and connected large parts of Afro-Eurasia, ideas and information spread at unprecedented rates. One major result of these new networks was what historians call the “Arab Green Revolution,” a period of agricultural growth that improved efficiency and crop yield, thus producing more food to feed larger populations. As a result, technology, trade, and culture flourished in these increasingly complex societies. Ibn Bassal was an agricultural scientist who collected new plants and techniques throughout his extensive travels. By refining and sharing these ideas, Ibn Bassal played an important role in growing both new crops and collective learning.

In Unit 7, we explore how the rise of agriculture helped create increasingly complex societies. This graphic biography tells the story of one scholar, Ibn Bassal, who played a key role in transforming how people in Afro-Eurasia farmed. He drew on the collective learning of numerous societies to refine and spread agricultural techniques. Ibn Bassal’s story will help you gain a better understanding of the impact of agriculture on humans and on the development of complex societies.

Read 1: Observe

As you read this graphic biography for the first time, review the Read 1: Observe section of your Three Close Reads for Graphic Bios Tool. Be sure to record one question in the thought bubble on the top-right. You don’t need to write anything else down. However, if you’d like to record your observations, feel free to do so on scrap paper.

Read 2: Understand

On the tool, summarize the main idea of the comic and provide two pieces of evidence that helped you understand the creator’s main idea. You can do this only in writing or you can get creative with some art. Some of the evidence you find may come in the form of text (words). But other evidence will come in the form of art (images). You should read the text looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the main idea, and key supporting details. You should also spend some time looking at the images and the way in which the page is designed. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. How did Ibn Bassal’s pilgrimage to Mecca contribute to the development of agriculture in Al-Andalus?
2. Why was Ibn Bassal’s book Diwan al-Filāḥa (Book of Agriculture) significant?
3. How did Ibn Bassal improve the efficiency of farming? What evidence can you see of those developments today?
4. According to the author, the Arab Green Revolution was perhaps the most important event in human production since the agricultural revolution. Why do you think the author makes that claim?
5. Looking at just the images and colors in the graphic biography, what ideas do you think the author could be conveying about agriculture during this time?

Read 3: Connect

In this read, you should use the graphic biography as evidence to support, extend, or challenge claims made in this unit of the course. On the bottom of the tool, record what you learned about this person’s life and how it relates to what you’re learning.

1. What does Ibn Bassal’s story tell you about the way agriculture expanded collective learning?

To Be Continued…

On the second page of the tool, your teacher might ask you to extend the graphic biography to a second page. This is where you can draw and write what you think might come next. Here, you can become a co-creator of this graphic biography!

In this activity, your group will explore the questions you might research for your Little Big History project. Formulating questions is a very important step in any research project; so completing this activity will help you stay on track for completing the project successfully.

Before getting to work on this activity, your teacher will review the characteristics of good research questions with you:

1. A good question supports the possibility of answers from multiple perspectives. In other words, the problem should be framed in a way that would generate a variety of viewpoints with different kinds of support.
2. A good question must be researchable. Don’t ask something you can’t find an answer to!
3. A good question is not a yes/no question. A good question should require more explanation—there should be a why that helps answer the question.
4. A good question has the appropriate scope—it’s not too big or too small for the intended outcome.
5. A good research question should be interesting to the researcher.

Keep these ideas in mind as you work on your questions.

You will do this activity in your Little Big History project groups. The first thing you need to do is to take a few minutes to write down some potential questions you might research. Once each member of your group has generated a few questions, you should share and discuss these questions with the other members of your group. Which questions seem like the most interesting to explore? Which questions best fit the criteria for good questions? Someone in the group should write down a list of your three to five best questions and submit them to your teacher.

Your teacher will provide you with feedback about your choices and the quality of your questions before you begin to work on the next stage of the project.

Have your completed Comparing More Civilizations Worksheet from Lesson 7.1 available to use as a resource.

In this activity, you will explore the rise, fall, and collapse of civilizations. In particular, you will examine three theories of why civilizations collapse. This will help you understand that civilizations don’t always end for the same reason, and that multiple viewpoints can be taken for explaining the ending of civilizations. Understanding how to analyze the end of civilizations is an important skill for students of history and historians, and can also help to forecast how modern societies might end.

Causation
If you’re able to determine the cause for collapse, you’ll be better able to argue for the theory you align with. Additionally, this is an excellent opportunity to think about multiple causation.

In Lesson 7.1, you focused on some great civilizations of the past. Although your museum projects had a positive focus, you’re now going to explore the downfalls of the societies that you examined earlier. There are different theories surrounding the collapse of civilizations, and you’ll be looking at each collapse through the lens of all three theories to try to make an argument for why these societies fell.

The three theories are:

1. Internal weakness: Did the increasing complexity cause so much fragility that the civilization couldn’t maintain itself?
2. External conquest: Was another civilization able to take over this civilization because the internal structure couldn’t hold up?
3. Environmental disaster: Did an environmental disaster (natural or human created) take down the civilization?

In groups, fill out the Rise, Fall, and Collapse of Civilizations Worksheet for three different societies. Use your Comparing More Civilizations Worksheets to get started, as well as the information accumulated from your Early Civilizations Museum Project. Pick 3 of these four societies and do research to find out why these civilizations collapsed. Then, determine if the reason for collapse aligns with one of the three theories. Cite your evidence for each determination in the chart, and be sure you use claim testers to assess the validity of your claims and sources. After you’ve completed the chart, think about the following questions. Be prepared to discuss your ideas with your class.

1. Do any of the societies’ collapses clearly point to one theory over another?
2. Could a society collapse due to multiple factors?
3. Did any of you research a society whose collapse did not fall in line with any of the three theories of collapse?

You’ll take one of the civilizations that you examined in the previous activity and write a five-paragraph essay that argues one of two reasons for that civilization’s collapse: Was that civilization pushed or did they jump? This will encourage you to think more deeply about the end of civilizations as well as the internal and external factors that are in play in civilizations in general.

You’re going to pick a civilization you’ve already researched, and then use the information from your Early Civilizations Museum Project, your Comparing More Civilizations Worksheet, and your Rise, Fall, and Collapse of Civilizations Worksheet to write a five-paragraph essay about whether that civilization was pushed (external forces were the main cause of its downfall) or it jumped (something internal was responsible—they were their own worst enemy). A “pushed” example: Two empires went to war. You might say the winning empire “pushed” the losing empire into collapse. An example of a civilization having “jumped” can be found in the Easter Island Activity earlier in the course: One of the theories for the collapse of Easter Island is that the inhabitants depleted the natural resources they needed to survive. The people were, in a sense, the cause of their own destruction—they “jumped.”

Your essay must include the following:

1. An assertion about whether the chosen civilization was pushed or jumped.
2. Evidence that supports your assertion in at least two of the paragraphs. In addition, you should point to one (or more) of the three theories from the last activity as part of your evidence. The three theories are:
   • Internal weakness: Did the increasing complexity cause so much fragility that the civilization couldn’t maintain itself?
   • External conquest: Was another civilization able to take over this civilization because the internal structure couldn’t hold up?
   • Environmental disaster: Did an environmental disaster (natural or created by humans) take down the civilization?
3. One paragraph should talk about the counter-evidence that makes your argument even stronger. For example, if you argue that the Easter Island civilization “jumped,” you have to provide some counter-evidence showing that they were not pushed. In this case, it could be that there was no evidence of anyone settling on the island when it first collapsed, and therefore the cause of the collapse had to be internal.

Grade your essay using the Big History Writing Rubric before you turn in your paper to your teacher.

Now that you’ve had the opportunity to identify, analyze, and revise BHP student writing in relation to the Claim and Focus, Analysis and Evidence, and Applying BHP Concepts areas of the BHP Writing Rubric, you’ll put the pieces together and examine a piece of writing more holistically (looking at the essay as a whole instead of just as parts) by attending to them together in your revision. To help you manage this next level of complexity, we’ve provided sentence starters. Although the rows of the rubric mentioned, along with Organization, are a useful tool for breaking down elements of writing, eventually those elements need to be seen as a whole, since the areas of focus are interrelated. In the best historical writing, these connections are clear. This is the first activity of three that will help you put the pieces back together.

Reading
This activity asks you to analyze another student’s essay, and then to revise parts of it based on criteria from the BHP Writing Rubric. The connection between reading and writing really comes alive with this activity!

In this activity, you’re going to look at another BHP student essay and revise it. However, this time we’re upping the ante—things are going to get complicated. Instead of looking at just one row of the BHP Writing Rubric, you’re going to revise text from three of the areas you’ve been focusing on: Claim and Focus, Analysis and Evidence, and Applying BHP Concepts.

This isn’t easy to do, so we’re providing you with sentence starters to help make the process a little simpler. Are you wondering why you have to do this? Well, the rubric is really a tool to help break down, identify, and evaluate different elements of writing. However, it doesn’t necessarily reflect one really important aspect of good historical writing: showing the interrelatedness of the different areas of the rubric. For example, to successfully use texts as evidence, you need to connect that evidence to your major claim or thesis. If your major claim or thesis isn’t clear, it’s hard to connect the evidence to it, and vice versa.

Get into groups of three or four and look at the Revising Investigation Writing – Sentence Starters Part 1 Worksheet. Once everyone in your group has read the essay, discuss and underline what you think the major claim or thesis is. Then, work together to improve the thesis statement by using one of the sentence starters provided.

Once you’ve done that, find and circle anywhere texts were used as evidence. Then, as a group, rewrite one of those sentences using one of the sentence starters provided. Finally, add a BHP concept to this essay. As you can see from the worksheet, this essay doesn’t include any BHP concepts. Use another sentence starter to help add the application of BHP concepts.

Be prepared to share your answer with the class. Remember, you’re about to start Investigation 7, and you should feel free to use these sentence starters as part of your essay!

Investigation 7 Prompt: To what extent was farming an improvement over foraging?

In this Investigation, you will examine anthropological evidence and data to assess whether agriculture improved humans’ quality of life. You will also consider competing points of view and address them as you make your arguments. Additionally, this assessment helps prepare you for document-based questions you will encounter on standardized exams.

Day 1
It’s time for another Investigation! You should be familiar with the process by now, so your teacher may decide to have you prepare for this Investigation in small groups, pairs, or even individually. This Investigation asks you to respond to the question, To what extent was farming an improvement over foraging?

First, your teacher will ask you to write down your conjectures—best guesses—about whether farming was an improvement over foraging. This is not a yes or no question. You should think about whether farming was a significant or slight improvement over foraging, or if it’s the other way around. You’ll have about 5 to 10 minutes to make notes and decide if farming was an improvement over foraging.

Now your teacher will break the class up into groups. Share your list with your group members and have a discussion about whether farming was an improvement over foraging. You’ll have to come to a group decision about this and list your group’s reasons for making your selection. Next, your teacher will either hand out or have you download the Investigation 7 Document Library. As you review each document, complete the graphic organizer and think about how each text supports, extends, or challenges your initial conjectures (best guesses).

Day 2
Now it’s time to write! You’ll develop a five- to six-paragraph essay arguing the degree to which life in agrarian societies was better or worse than life in foraging societies. Remember to use information from the Investigation 7 Document Library as well as other sources, BHP concepts, and evidence to support your argument or opposing point of view. It’s also important that you cite the sources you use as evidence in your essay.

In order to improve your writing skills, it is important to read examples—both good and bad—written by other people. Reviewing writing samples will help you develop and practice your own skills in order to better understand what makes for a strong essay.

Your teacher will provide sample essays for this unit’s Investigation prompt and provide instructions for how you will use them to refine your writing skills. Whether you’re working with a high-level example or improving on a not-so-great essay, we recommend having the BHP Writing Rubric on hand to help better understand how you can improve your own writing. As you work to identify and improve upon aspects of a sample essay, you’ll also be developing your own historical writing skills!