Practice question · Sort into groups
Sort each consequence of farming: bad for the individual, or good for the population?
Groups: Worse for individuals · Better for the population
- New crowd diseases from living beside animals
- Shorter stature and rotten teeth
- Shorter birth intervals, so more children
- Ten times as many people on the same land
- More calories harvested per hectare
- Famine when a single crop fails
Hints
- Individual wellbeing and population size moved in opposite directions.
- Reading both columns together dissolves the apparent paradox.
Show the answer
Worse for individuals: Shorter stature and rotten teeth, New crowd diseases from living beside animals, Famine when a single crop fails
Better for the population: More calories harvested per hectare, Shorter birth intervals, so more children, Ten times as many people on the same land
Why
Read both columns together and the paradox dissolves: a species can make itself worse off and more numerous at the same time, which is why "was it progress?" is the wrong question.
Practise The Neolithic Revolution
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on The Neolithic Revolution
- How did wheat become domesticated?
- Domestication was a deliberate human decision to improve wild species.
- Farming populations grew rapidly while individual farmers were shorter, sicker and worked longer than…
- Why did farming begin independently in seven regions within a few thousand years?
- The Neolithic ratchet describes farming as hard to abandon once adopted. What locks a group in?
- Farming was invented independently, with no contact between the regions. How many separate centres are…
- What do the skeletons of early farmers show, compared with the foragers before them?