Human Diversity Adaptation

1. The
Diversity
of Humanity
Source: Humanity An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology , By:
Peoples and Bailey, pp128- 195

2. Outline
ADAPTATION:
FORAGING
– ADAPTATION
– BIOMES
– PRODUCTION
– FORAGERS
 ADAPTATION:
DOMESTICATION
– THE ADVANTAGES
OF
DOMESTICATION
– CULTIVATION
– HORTICULTURE
– INTENSIVE
AGRICULTURE
– PASTORALISM

3. Adaptation:
Foraging

4. Outline
ADAPTATION:
FORAGING
– ADAPTATION
– BIOMES
– PRODUCTION
– FORAGERS

5. Adaptation
Adaptation- The process by which an
organism develops physiological and
behavioral characteristics that allow it
to survive and reproduce.

6. Biomes
A Biomes is a large geographic region with
similar climatic, edaphic (Soil), and
vegetational characteristics.
Generally speaking, annual preciptation,
temperature, and incident solar radiation
determine the kind of soil and vegetation
found in a biome

7. Production
The activities in which the energy and raw
materials available in a local habitat are
exploited by people are called production.
Production transforms nature’s raw materials
into things that satisfy people’s materials
wants. Production thus takes something
that is in the environment ( a resource) and
makes it into something that people can
use (a good production).

8. The Organization of Production
 Division of Labor
– The labor is divided is to say simply that
different kinds of tasks are assigned to
different categories or groups of people.
Gender and age are universal bases for
division of labor, and in most societies
differences in skill and knowledge also are
an important basis assigning tasks to
indiviual

9.  Patterns of Cooperation
– Accompanying the division of labor, and
closely related to it, are patterns of
cooperation in production. Most kinds of
productive activity involve some kind of
cooperation: people combine their labor
with that of other people because this
allows them to produce more good with a
given labor input.

10.  Right of Access
– A given area of land or territory, or specific resource of a
territory, is allocated to some group. Member of this
group are allowed to exploit the territory’s resources,
others are prohibited from doing so, or may do so only
with permission.
– In preindustrial populations ownership of territory
and/or resources is frequently vested in a group- most
often a kinship (e.g., family) or residential (e.g., village)
group.
– Individual member of the group have a right (use right)
to exploit the resources of the area, but they must do so
without violating the culturally legitimate rights of the
other members over the territory’s resources.

11. Foragers
 Foragers, also called hunter-gatherers, are
populations who make little or no effort to
control the resources that provide their
subsistence but instead take what nature
offers when and where nature offers it.
 Twentieth century foragers were found
only in a few tropical rain forests, deserts
or dry savannahs, and tundras and boreal
forests.

12. Foraging and Sociocultural
Systems
They are surprisingly diverse, not only in
the wild foods they exploit but also in
other realms of their sociocultural lives.
Many of these characteristics are related
to how hunter-gatherers organize
themselves to exploit their habitats
efficiently .
– Seasonal Mobility
– Congregation and Dispersal
– Bands-

13. Adaptation:
Domestication

14. Outline
 ADAPTATION:
DOMESTICATION
– THE ADVANTAGES
OF
DOMESTICATION
– CULTIVATION
– HORTICULTURE
– INTENSIVE
AGRICULTURE
– PASTORALISM

15. Domestication
 The “taming” of the certain species of
plants and animals to increase their value
to humans- was perhaps the major
technological development in the history
of humanity.

16. The Advantages of Domestication
 For tens of thousands of years, foraging
nourished humanity well enough to allow our
species to spread over most of the land surface of
the earth.
 People began to exert some control over the
distribution and abundance of their food supply.
 If an area’s population rose above the long-term
carrying capacity, either the environment
degraded because natural food resource were
harvested at a rate than their rate of recovery

17. Cultivation
 Cultivators acquire their vegetable foods by
creating and maintaining an artificial community of
plants that have been intentionally selected for their
usefulness to humans.
 Cultivation generally supports higher population
densities for two main reasons.
– First, the domesticated plants cultivators consume are
the product of thousands of generation of selection for
their edibility.
– Second, virtually all the plants growing in an area (field)
are edible for human; that is, the domesticate grow more
e densely than the wild plants eaten by foragers.

18.  A good way to distinguish the three major
systems of cultivation is by the kind of
energy used to create an maintain the
community of domesticated plants.
 The important energy input are
– 1. Human Muscles
– 2. Domesticated animals
– 3. fuel-powered machinery

19.  These source give rise to three categories of
cultivation:
– Horticulture, in which the primary energy input
comes from human muscles (often supplemented by
fire);
– Intensive agriculture, in which much energy comes
from animals, who pull plow, power pumps for
irrigation, fertilize fields with their droppings, and so
forth;
– Mechanized Agriculture, in which most of the
energy used in plowing, irrigating, and other work on
farms comes from nonliving sources (e.g., oil,
electricity), and in which inanimate energy also is use
to manufacture fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides , and
other agricultural inputs..

20. Pastoralism
 Cultivators do not depend on their domesticated
animals to the same extent as do people knowns as
pastoralists, or herders.
 Herders acquire much of their food by raising,
caring for, and subsisting on the products of
domesticated animals.
 We Characterize a people as “pastoral,” we mean
that the needs of their animals for naturally
occurring food and water profoundly influence the
seasonal rhythms of their lives.

21.  Few pastoralists subsist entirely from the products
of their livestock; animal products nearly always
are supplemented by cultivated foods.
 Herders acquire these in one of four major ways.
– 1. The practice some horticulture or agriculture
themselves (often men and boys watch the herds and
women cultivate).
– 2. They trade animal products for vegetable foods and
other goods with neighboring cultivators.
– 3. They sell livestock, meat, hides, wool, milk, cheese,
or other products of their animals for money, which they
use to buy food and other supplies.
– 4. They use their livestock partly as beasts of burden,
which allows them to undertake long-distance trade from
which they profit.

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