Digital Scrapbook Entry #2 – Agrarian Era

Period 7 World History 1
9/30/14
Agnes

  Agrarian Era's Positive Effects to Nowaday's      Negative Effects 

LINK1 of the article about positive effects:
http://www.waldeneffect.org/blog/The_positive_effects_of_agriculture/

LINK2 of the article about negative effects:
http://www.trincoll.edu/~cgeiss/tr/tr3/tr_3_p7.pdf

  
  In the era of hunters and gatherers, people always hunted to store food. Not long after this era, neolithic appeared, it's the time that people started to farm and raised animals that make themselves alive. There're good effects of agriculture but there's also bad effects in nowadays, not only affected the environment but also affected the food's quality.

(Agrarian era, people farming and keeping animals, those are the resources of their food production)

What good things did agriculture bring for us in the agrarian era?

—People started to have more choices of food, not only meat but also crops and other different

kinds of food.

—It kinda developed the civilization 

—People started to have the ideas that create new techniques

—People had more free time 

—They  were able to support many people and they didn't have to worry about the food supply.

One example is Egypt, it was a really successful civilization.

But besides those good things, with the development of civilization and cities,  however, nowadays  things started to change,  agriculture no longer only brings good aspects but also negative things,  for example Genetically modified food, they are not natural, and they have bad effects to the environment, bad for some kinds of insects. One specific example about agriculture brings bad effects is in China, the farmers have less devotion to farming and lands, they  feel like is hard to do farming and don't want to take this kind of  difficult job. And agriculture can't take the nature disasters.

Last but not least, for thousand of years , agriculture does bring us a lot of beneficial things that make our lives more comfortable and easy, and it's also the basic of our life, but on the other hand, it has negative effects, through the second article I can kinda learn that agriculture has the effect on Carbon Dioxide Emissions which increases the CO2 in the atmosphere. And brings some waterborne Zoonotic Diseases.

For the conclusion, through the information that I've read , I learnt about how agriculture brings both positive and negative effects to human beings and how they develop in human history.

Thoughts and Reflections on the experiment.

Agnes Yu.      Period 7.      9/24/14
Thoughts and Reflections on the expriement in class.

  Today we did an experiment. We had 15 minutes and we need to use the cups, silver paper, tubes and tape to installed an equipment to let the water go through the whole silver paper and run into the cups. We didn't succeed because when the water went through half way of the silver paper，the  whole equipment collapsed, and splashed the water and flow them out. 
  I think what's good about our expriment is we have an interesting idea that we could only use two tubes and cut two holes on one cup, we could insert the two tubes through the holes and the water would run into the cup by going through the tubes, it's easy and simple. But what could be improved is our whole equipment was not stable, the cups under the silver paper that we used to fasten the paper was too loose, we should used more tapes to tight them together. But one reason for us to not did that is we were running out of the time. So we will be faster next time and this is a really fun experiment to let us know how ancient people got the water.

Thoughts and Reflections on the Pig Lovers and Pig Haters

Agnes Yu    Period 7          9/22/14
Thoughts and Reflections on:
Pig Lovers and Pig Haters

3 Big Questions:
1) What are four explanations (explanations that really don't explain why this is done but are only believed to be true) as to why pork is not eaten in the Middle East?
2) What is the real reason pork is not eaten in the Middle East?
3) How is this an environmental issue?

  There were pig lovers and pig haters, even in the modern times those people still exist. Some people believed that pigs are unclean and they are dirtier than any other animals, also, just because that the emperor's physician, people believed that pigs are bad for health and it causes healthy problems. But for the pig lovers, they didn't eat pigs is because that they thought pigs are holy animals and they only sacrifice for the ancestors when they craving for pork. and only can be eaten when there're big events such as marriages.
   The writer thinks that what's true about people didn't eat pigs is also because of the religion, some religions believed that pigs are really divine, and they kept pigs to be a member of the family and treated them as human beings. But another reason was pigs are the vectors for human disease because they are unclean, also, they writer thinks that pig farming was a threat to the integrity of the basic cultural and natural ecosystems of the Middle East, while for the semi-sendentary, pigs were more of a threat than an asset. In addition, there's something about the temperature, the higher it is, the dirtier the pigs become, so there's some truth to the theory that the people think pigs are unclean.
  How is this an environmental? Between 7,000 and 2,000 B.C. pork became a luxury food, the natural conditions appropriate for pig raising, became increasingly more scarce, thus pork became even more of an economic and ecological luxury, they tasted good but it was too expensive for people to raise them, it coasts a lot more than just about money. Furthermore, the increase in the pig population also accompanied by the increase in the human population. What's more? To feed and raised pigs is also a manpower work,  Maring women complained about having a lot of hard works, they needed to plant the garden and feed their families and pigs at the same time, they needed to work much harder, they found themselves feed pigs rather than people, so on the other hand, the growth of the pig population might lead to the ''WAR''(competition) between man and pig.

Digital Scrapbook Entry#1 — Hunters and Gathers

 Period 7 World History 1
 9/18/14
Agnes
                               
                                        Hunters and Gathers Population 
                                        Compares with Modern Times Population

Link of the article about the Hunters and Gathers Population:
http://stutzfamily.com/mrstutz/population/pophistorymodule/history-2.htm

Link of the article about the Modern Times Population (Population Control in China):
http://countrystudies.us/china/34.htm


  Those are the two articles that I read for comparing the population from the Era of Foragers and Modern Times,  in some ways, they have connections, and I'll give the example of population control in China that relates to the ancient time.

                         ［The Era of foraging, people were trying to live in small groups and they were nomads.］

  In the Era of Foragers, people were always hunting and gathering, thus they also called ''Hunter-Gatherers'', they were nomads, they didn't live at the same places for a long time, the Hunter-Gatherers were always moving to other places.

[They were trying to live in small groups so there shouldn't be too many children]

  By reading the first article I've learnt that because of their life way (nomad) , they prefered to not to have so many children, in this society, women allowed to carry one child. But it's good to had only one kid at that time because in that society, they were trying to have small groups, if there's too many children that wouldn't satisfy the groups.

  Let's talk about the population in China,  people there are trying to control the population, in China, every family can only have one child, if there's another child, you should pay for it, also, you may lose your job, too.

                                         (This picture shows that every family can only have one child)

  What's the bad things about the population control? People in China will face problems like this:
—Old people are alone. There's even problem like their daughters or sons have arguments with them.
—The Aging of Population.
—Many places in China start to have problems that lack of offspring (daughters and sons)
—The amount of males and females are not equal.
—The quality needs to be improved.
—The decreasing of the quality of population.

  Through the 2 articles, we can know that small groups in the Era of Foragers, the population kept in a small scope, and the population was really stable and nice. But nowadays in Modern Times, such as in China, to have the control of population actually has a lot of problems that never happened in the foraging time. And we can see the relations between these two times, also, we can see how different they are.

What was man doing for 99% of all Human history? Why was he doing this instead of something else?

How Man Invented Cities Thoughts and Reflections

Agnes Yu Period 7.         9/7/14

Thoughts and Reflections on:

How did man invent cities? Where did he invent cities? Why did he invent them? Please include an IMAGE.

  At the very beginning, our ancestors was nomadic and lived in small groups.Then the new breed which called the homosapiens, developed the social tools and improved other things.

  Cities and agriculture may have appeared first in Near East, they invented cities in the places which had enough sources for living such as food. They started living in a full-fledged community.

  Why they invented cities is because of a lot of factors. For example, the life way as hunter-gather is not stable, with the rose of population, they had to store enough food for the people to live, it's not really safe and reliable way for them to keep hunting. Also,  circumstances forced hunter-gathers to evolve new ways of surviving, too. In addition, only when they invented cities, they population will change, when everything settled down, the women which lived in settled community will increase the number of babies, they had 5-8babies per month.

The IMAGE

3 discussion questions

1:What does the author mean "unnatural" in the first paragraph?


2:Paragraph 5 mentioned that people abandoned hunting and gathering as soon as a reasonable alternative became available to them, why does is mean?Why they abandoned them?


3:When people started settling down, what changed about the growth of population?

5 discussion questions

1：What will happen if ancient foragers live in a large group instead of small group?

2：Why is symbolic language importan?

3：How they control the growth quantity?

4：What's the different between Old Stone Age and New Stone Age?

5：What is Carbon Dating?