EVOLVING TECHNOLOGY THE EVOLUTION OF AGRICULTURAL TECHNOLOGY PAULA MARIE Britannica Educational Publishing IN ASSOCIATION WITH ROSEN EDUCATIONAL SERVICES
People have always used technology to help them selves get food and eat it that is if we consider that technology includes everything from basic stone tools to advanced computer programs Today people have access to an amazing variety of foods from all over the world partly thanks to modern technology and partly because of ancient inventions However agricultural technology has still not solved problems like famine and malnutrition and many people have unequal access to nutritious foods These and ad ditional challenges such as global warming mean that sustainable agriculture will be vital to our future Agriculture has no single simple origin It devel oped gradually and independently in many regions of the world People everywhere were already adept at finding wild plants and animals they could eat As they turned from gathering wild foods as well as hunt ing and fishing to agriculture they developed new kinds of tools and ways of creating food In addition to stone tools they made tools out of antlers and bones posts and digging sticks out of wood fishing nets out of plant fibers storage containers out of gourds and baskets out of grass and leaves Over many thou sands of years people made more efficient tools and they became more organized at growing food 4 INTRODUCTION
People domesticated a wide variety of plants and animals at different times Parts of the Middle East have traces of grain farming from thousands of years ago Agriculture might have begun even earlier in Southeast Asia Both of those areas were rich in animals suitable for domestication and in varieties of plants and both had mild climates Additionally agriculture was developed in East Asia and in the Americas thousands of years ago People didn’t always domesticate the animals around them especially those in water Sometimes trapping animals or rais ing them in enclosures was easier than completely domesticating them People built fish weirs to trap fish in rivers and estuaries They modified beaches These African farms in Burundi grow coffee for export as well as crops to support many more peo ple than could be fed by hunting and gathering 5
