Content
It is believed that our ancestors were wild and uneducated savages. Of course, to some extent this was indeed the case, but at the same time they laid the foundations for industrial plant growing and cattle breeding, constantly domesticating many species of plants and animals. Grain crops play a special role in the history of civilization, without which it is simply impossible to imagine our life.
So when did the history of mankind and edible grains become closely intertwined? Scientists believe that this process began as early as the 11th millennium BC! It is to this period that archaeological finds belong, which show that around that time, a person already knew how to use grain crops. Of course, at that time there was no question of their purposeful cultivation, since the tribes were just beginning to take the first steps towards a sedentary lifestyle, having learned to collect and store their edible seeds for future use.
It should be noted that the rapid development of European civilization is largely due to the fact that its representatives were the first to massively use cereals for food and developed a technology for producing flour. This contributed to the survival of a large number of people, even in hungry and bad hunting years. It was then that agriculture became appreciated. Around the same time, breeding began, as grain crops previously had poor yields. It took centuries to create truly valuable and productive crops.
In those distant times, people knew how to bake only flat cakes from the resulting coarse flour. Real bread appeared only in the 4th millennium BC. The Egyptians learned how to bake it, and at first bread was such an expensive product that only the nobility ate it. It was he who was placed in the graves of the pharaohs. Considering the complexity of agriculture and the difficult manual harvesting of ripe cereals, such a reverent attitude towards bread is understandable.
Much has changed since then. Nowadays, the rich market for grain crops allows everyone to use flour products. Over the past thousand years, almost everything has changed, but the technology for producing flour and baking bread from it has basically remained practically unchanged.
However, grain crops are also unique in that they laid the foundation for many ancient civilizations. If man had not discovered the wonderful properties of wheat, our society would never have been able to reach such heights in progress. For many centuries, entire states have developed precisely in the agrarian way. By the way, Russia has developed as an agrarian country throughout its history, and even today this sector remains essential for the country's economy.
The grain crops themselves in Russia were not always distinguished by such a variety as they can boast today. For a long time, our ancestors cultivated mainly rye, millet and barley, which have retained their most strategic importance over the centuries. Recently, the number of cereals grown in our country has grown significantly, as breeders are constantly developing new varieties of them.
This lesson will consider the topic "Cultivated plants. Cereals ". During the lesson, we will get acquainted with the most important cultivated plants. Let us characterize the grain crops that a person grows in the fields.
Groups of cultivated plants
You already know that a person grows cultivated plants for the purpose of obtaining a harvest.In this case, a person uses different parts of plants: root, stem, leaves, flowers, fruits, and also seeds.
Let's look at what groups cultivated plants can be divided into.
Vegetable - these are plants that a person grows in fields and gardens.
Rice. 1 (Source)
Fruit Are plants that are grown in gardens.
Rice. 2 (Source)
Decorative - these plants are grown for the beauty of parks in flower beds.
Rice. 3 (Source)
Spinning - these plants are used to make fabric. Flax is a spinning crop. Threads are spun from flax stalks. Various fabrics are woven from them.
Figure 4 shows cotton... Inside the box is a white fluffy fiber, which is also used to make fabric and cotton wool. Clothes, bed linen, tablecloths and towels are sewn from cotton and linen fabrics.
Rice. 4 (Source)
Cereal crops
And the last group is cereals... The name "grain" comes from the word "grain". For food, a person uses the seeds of these plants - grains. The second name is cereals. Cereals or cereals are grown in the fields.
What crops does a person grow and how does he use them? Wheat, rye, oats, millet, barley, buckwheat, corn, sunflower.
Sunflower got its name because the flower turns in the wake of the sun. Vegetable oil is made from sunflower seeds.
Rice. 5 (Source)
Corn considered one of the most ancient plants. Corn grains are used to make cereals, oil and much more.
Rice. 6 (Source)
Proverbs about porridge:
What kind of dinner, if there is no porridge?
Cabbage soup and porridge are our food.
Porridge is our mother.
And what is porridge without cereals? A person produces cultivated grain plants in order to obtain grain from which cereals are made.
Buckwheat get buckwheat.
Rice. 7 (Source)
Barley gives us two types of cereals: pearl barley - this is a whole grain, and barley - crushed grain.
Rice. 8 (Source)
Millet goes for the production of millet.
Rice. 9 (Source)
In Ancient Greek mythology, there is a hero named Hercules. Whole legends have been written about his twelve exploits. Did you know that Hercules was also known as Hercules? This is now the name of the porridge, which he loved very much. And from which plant is it obtained? Oatmeal or rolled oats are obtained from oats, and also make oatmeal or cookies from it. Oatmeal is very healthy, it will make you very strong and healthy.
Rice. 10 (Source)
When our ancestors learned to grow grain crops, they ate fresh grains, and ground dry and hard grains, made flour, and boiled porridge.
Bread
But people learned how to bake bread much later. Imagine that people baked the first bread from pounded acorns. As time passed, people learned how to bake thin dry flat cakes. This was the bread until the smallest fungi - yeast - got into the dough. Imagine what horror the ancient people experienced when they saw that the dough in the pot began to rise as if it were alive. In horror, people threw the pot into the fire to get rid of the glamor. The dough was baked, and you got a fragrant, tasty, aromatic cake. It was a real discovery.
Rice. 11 (Source)
Proverbs about bread:
Bread is the head of everything.
Hood lunch, since there is no bread.
What kind of bread does your family eat? Let's find out why one bread is white and the other black? Black bread is made from rye flour. It is obtained from rye grains. Rye is a grain crop. White bread is made from wheat flour. It is obtained from wheat grains. Wheat is the second grain crop. Semolina is also made from wheat.
There he is -
Fragrant bread.
Here it is - warm, golden.
To every house
For every table
He came, he came.
It has come a long way to get the bread on our table. How much labor is put into it. You need to take care of bread, take as much as you can eat.If every student at school throws out a piece of bread weighing 30 grams, then we will throw out 15 kg of bread per day.
Boy,
Kicking bread
Boy,
Hungry not knowing for years,
Remember
What were the dashing years
Bread -
This is life, not just food.
They swore by bread,
They died for bread
Not for
To play football for them.
In a word
Folk wisdom lurks
That's what
Our people say:
“If you stopped appreciating bread,
You have ceased to be a man. "
Lesson conclusion
In this lesson, we got acquainted with cultivated plants. We learned that there are grain crops among them.
In the next lesson, the topic “Autumn harvest. Generalizing lesson ". During the lesson, we will get acquainted with the main cultivated plants.
Recommended reading list
1. Samkova V.A., Romanova N.I. The world around us 1. - M .: Russian word.
2. Pleshakov A.A., Novitskaya M.Yu. The world around us 1. - M .: Enlightenment.
3. Gin A.A., Fire S.A., Andrzheevskaya I.Yu. The world around you 1. - M .: VITA-PRESS.
Recommended links to Internet resources
Recommended homework
1. What groups of plants do you know?
2. Tell us what crops you know.
3. Who wants to know about cultivated plants that a person grows for other needs, read the story of A. Ivin "How your shirt was made."
Until very recently, we knew nothing about the roots of our own civilization. We had no idea who invented the wheel, agriculture, writing, cities and everything else. In addition to this, for some strange, inexplicable reason, few were eager to find out. Even historians wanted to leave the ruins of human history buried under the desert sands. This attitude seems as strange as the mysteries themselves.
Can you really come to terms with the loss of your own memory? Or will you do everything in your power to restore your past and your personality?
It seems as if we are hiding something from ourselves. Some will say that it was a breathtaking visit by ancient astronauts; someone will object, saying that this is an ancient human civilization destroyed by a cataclysm. In any case, we obviously buried these episodes by forgetting about them. Perhaps the memories are too painful. I have not yet been able to make a final choice between the various ideas. However, I am sure that the orthodox theories proposed by traditional archaeologists, historians and anthropologists do not stand up to scrutiny when scrutinized.
Curiously, we have developed the means to launch space probes to Mars, to split the human genome, and even to clone ourselves. But we are still marking time, trying to understand the secrets of the culture of the pyramids, prehistoric times, to explain how we made a quantum leap from the Stone Age to civilization!
Why have we, as a species, failed to preserve the threads that connect us in the most direct and concrete way with the past?
I get exactly the same nauseating feeling that crime reporters and homicide detectives get when they dig into unsolved cases for too long. We are missing something, or we are wrongly considering the situation.
Probably, obvious hints pass by us, for we are used to thinking about facts only in a certain light. In addition to this, it is difficult for us to ask all the right questions we need. It never occurs to you to go back to the basics, review all your knowledge and establish the real "facts."
We always have a choice: to make sense of the world or not to make such an attempt. Life provides an incredible amount of catch-up opportunities and a tremendous degree of freedom when it comes to learning. Our ancestors perfectly mastered the basic rules of the survival game during the unimaginably long Stone Age.
They didn't need to know that the Earth revolves around the Sun, or the structure of the atom, to be successful. But after the last ice age, something strange happened. The human race underwent a sudden transformation that sent us into uncharted territory. We are still reaping the consequences of those explosive events.
Let's go back and prepare the scene of early human evolution as scientists imagine it. Our ancestors found themselves in a world full of natural wonders, facing the challenges they faced. All problems were related to survival. To begin with, people did not have the tools, they had no choice to solve the problems presented to them. They could only go in a frontal attack, as all animals did. We must be mindful of the realities of these premises.
We know exactly how people lived in the Stone Age. Indeed, many tribes around the world have continued to lead just such a way of life for the past five hundred years. They were studied up and down.
We know that humanity was virtually homogeneous throughout the Stone Age. Even 10,000 years ago, people lived almost the same way of life, being in Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia or the Americas. They lived close to nature, hunted wild animals and collected wild plants, used stone tools, stone, wood and bone weapons.
People learned the art of kindling and controlling fire, they had a very accurate and detailed knowledge of the habits of animals, the topography of the earth, ideas about the cycles of nature, and how to distinguish between edible and poisonous plants.
This knowledge and way of life was carefully acquired, the experience accumulated for millions of years. The Stone Age people were misrepresented and misunderstood. They are not cruel dumbass. Without the long evolution they went through to lay the foundations for everything that is to happen, modern intelligence and modern civilization could not have evolved. The ancient ancestors perfectly assimilated knowledge, lived in complete fusion with nature, and, undoubtedly, were stronger and physically stronger than we are now.
In fact, the natural world that we inherited from the Stone Age man was absolutely whole and untouched. Everything remained as pure and virgin as it had been for millions of years of human evolution. Nature generously endowed those early humans with its abundance. They have learned to live in this natural environment. Statistically speaking, humans are hunter-gatherers. This is how we lived 99.99% of the time of our existence as a species. At least, these are the data of modern science.
It is very easy to understand how our distant ancestors lived. Life changed very slightly and very slowly. Early man adapted and got used to what worked. It was a simple yet demanding lifestyle that has been passed down from generation to generation - through examples and oral tradition.
There seems to be no mystery here. But things began to change dramatically after the last ice age. Suddenly, several tribes switched to a different way of life. Abandoning their nomadic way of life, they became sedentary, began to cultivate certain crops and domesticate several species of animals. The first steps to civilization are often talked about, but they were never really studied at a deep level. What made people change so dramatically? Explaining this is much more difficult than believing in the naturalness of the process.
The first question is the most basic and direct one. The people of the Stone Age did not eat grains. And cereals are the basis of agriculture and nutrition of civilization. The hunter-gatherer's meager diet consisted of meats from various species of wild animals and fresh wild herbs and fruits.
To begin with, consider the evolutionary divergence from conventional wisdom.Consider the mismatch between food after the “agrarian revolution” that began 10,000 years ago and what hunters were fed. Therefore, the human genome is most ideally adapted to the food that was at the disposal of people in the period before the development of agriculture.
As a result, we have a riddle that is as difficult to uncover as the secrets of the construction of the Great Pyramid. How and why did our ancestors make this leap? After all, they had practically zero experience in cultivating wild grain crops. How did they find out about the correct management of the economy, and in general about the edibility of cereals?
By the time the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations suddenly emerged, crops were already being interbred. Such work requires a high level of knowledge and experience, as well as time.
If you have at least some skill in working with wild plants or fruits, any experience of agricultural work, then you know: wild varieties are very different from crossed crops. It is well established that hunter-gatherers did not have the skill of breeding varieties or domestication of animals. Therefore, it would take significantly longer than historians insist, the time for the transition from zero to an advanced state.
We must ask the question: where did this knowledge come from? How did Stone Age man suddenly acquire the skill of domestication of plants and animals and do it very effectively? We see purebred dogs such as greyhounds in Egyptian and Sumerian art. How could they be withdrawn so quickly?
The following questions complicate the ability to support traditional explanations:
1) a very slow process of human evolution in the Stone Age;
2) the sudden creation and distribution of new tools of labor, new food products, new social forms that had no predecessors.
If early humans ate wild types of grains and experimented with hybridization for a long time and developed along some obvious stages of development, then this is understandable. But how can a Stone Age scenario be accepted for the construction period of the Great Pyramid at Giza?
Plant breeding is a difficult science. But we know that it was practiced in the Sumerian kingdom, in Egypt and ancient Israel. If you have any doubts about this, then imagine that we are growing the same primary crops that our ancestors created. Is it so? There are hundreds of wild plant species that can be domesticated. Why haven't we bred new crops from other wild species in the past three thousand years? How did the ancients choose the best species with an extremely low level of knowledge (if we believe that they have just emerged from the Stone Age)?
Our ancestors not only identified all these complex issues, but also quickly discovered the principles of making secondary products from cereals. The Sumerians baked bread and brewed beer five thousand years ago, but their closest predecessors (as anthropologists say) knew nothing of such things. They lived by collecting plants and killing wild animals. It seems that people got the guidance for action from someone who was already involved in advanced agriculture. But this instruction could not have been provided by their hunter-gatherer ancestors.
It is very difficult to reconstruct these rapid transitions, especially if they are accompanied by radical changes in all other areas of human life. How and why did people who know nothing but a nomadic existence and a primitive social structure change so quickly and so radically? What drove them to build cities and create a complex civilization when nothing was known about such forms of society?
In the Epipaleolithic Age (about 8000-5500 BC), the tribes in the Nile Valley lived in semi-underground oval houses with roofs made of clay and twigs.They made simple pottery and used stone axes and flint arrowheads, continuing to lead a semi-nomadic lifestyle, moving from one site to another depending on the seasons.
A huge number of tribes around the globe led just such a way of life. After that, how did people begin to mine, process and transport stones weighing from one to sixty tons in order to use them to build the most massive structure in the world? Why did change happen so quickly?
The fast transition simply cannot be explained rationally. All inventions and cultural achievements require time and a sequence of easily distinguishable stages of development. Where are the predecessors? It is very easy to trace the entire path of development of the Stone Age - from primitive tools to the stone ax and flint arrowheads. We must find the same stages as civilization develops.
But where are the smaller pyramids - much smaller? Where is the rough stone carving that should precede the exquisitely decorated steles? The slow evolution of forms from simple to complex is all that people know. But what does this have to do with clay huts covered with thatch - and then suddenly emerging large-scale architecture based on megalithic stone blocks, a complex artistic work that requires exquisite skill and knowledge.
Development phases are simply absent here.
Sumerian cuneiform tablets describe highly complex irrigation and farming systems, bakeries, and beer brewing. The Bible tells that the ancient Jews grew grapes and made wine, as well as yeast and non-yeast bread. We take these things for granted. But the questions behind them have never been raised.
Where did people learn in such a short period of time to select grain, turn grain into flour, bake bread from it? This is also true for viticulture. This is not about simple or obvious products.
We assume that their predecessors developed agricultural skills for a long time. This idea is quite logical, but it is not confirmed. The very first and very primitive agricultural experiment, which is confirmed by documentary records of archaeologists, was discovered in Jaarmo and Jericho. These are very modest settlements, where a few simple crops were grown. But people continued to hunt forest game and collect plants, so the villages were not in the strict sense of the word agrarian communities.
The problem is that no intermediate stage has been found between primitive people - and the Sumerian kingdom, Egypt. There are no small-scale ziggurats, pyramids, or any trace of development. It turns out that Stone Age artisans suddenly began to make exquisite sculptures and steles decorated with stone carvings.
Orthodox theories are beginning to rely more on “official” instructions from authorities than on well-argued and well-documented facts. We have come to a crisis in the fields of anthropology, history and archeology. After all, traditional theses are not able to resolve the issue with an ever-increasing number of anomalies. Explanations are inconclusive, hackneyed and increasingly boring, unable to prove theories. Individual fragments do not correspond to each other and do not add up to a reasonable whole.
We have mentioned earlier in this book a quote from the eminent paleoanthropologist Lewis Leakey. A few years ago, when Leakey was giving a lecture at the university, a student asked him about the "missing link" in evolution. The teacher replied: "There is not one missing link, but hundreds ..."
This is even more true for cultural rather than biological evolution. Until we find these links, we will, like patients suffering from amnesia, try to comprehend modern life and our collective history.
Agriculture, being the most ancient type of human activity, developed rather unevenly in different countries.
What is farming?
Agriculture, which arose in the era of the primitive system, is the result of a long period of human development.
It began when people already knew how to hunt and were collecting wild fruits. Human labor began to be spent on the production of plants, on the isolation and reproduction of the most useful species, on a certain impact on them in order to adapt to their needs.
Agricultural history: origin, tools
The origin of agriculture took place a long time ago, when people noticed that various grains of fruits or ears, falling on the soil (and loose), germinate and again bear fruit. It was then that the thought came to them that in this way it is possible to grow food. Since then, they began to plant and grow the seeds of edible plants.
For sowing, the most even plots of land were selected, and those located closer to the water. People learned to loosen the land cleared of weeds with peculiar hoes, after which they threw grains into this land. It was a hoe type of farming. After the harvest was ripe, they collected it using a sickle, consisting of an arched wooden or bone base (handle), into which sharp fragments of stones were inserted.
The advent of agriculture contributed to the creation of newer and more convenient tools. After a certain time, people also built a plow. At first it was just a pole with a sharp knot at its end. She simply became attached to a team of bulls. This tool could cultivate more land, and people also noticed that the yield from such a plowed field was higher than from the land cultivated with a hoe. The plow plowed the ground deeper, and the seeds planted deeper gave better germination.
First grown plants
The first plants grown by humans were barley, wheat, and millet. And their homeland is Western Asia (the peninsula of Asia Minor and the regions adjacent to it). It was in these places that the most ancient settlements of farmers were found. They were founded 10,000 years ago. Then, from these places, agriculture began to gradually spread throughout the world.
It can be concluded that such agriculture in those days, when people were already leading a more sedentary lifestyle, contributed to the emergence of new inventions, more convenient and improved tools of labor. Thanks to this process, craft began to develop - manual small-scale production of tools and various devices.
Development of agriculture by territories
A large number of archaeological and paleobotanical scientific studies indicate a connection between the origin of agriculture in antiquity with the zones of mountain plateaus and valleys in the subtropical belt. The famous scientist N.I. Vavilov identified several very ancient centers of the origin of agriculture (VII-III millennium BC):
- Near Eastern (wheat, barley, etc.).
- Mountainous and eastern valleys of China (wheat, rice, millet, etc.).
- Mexico (peppers, beans, etc.).
- Central Peru (pepper, pumpkin, cotton, beans, etc.).
What is agriculture in distant America? There it arose completely independently of other territories of the continent and is probably even more ancient.
The oldest regions in the world in terms of the development of agricultural culture in the world after Mexico: Peru, India, Bolivia, China, Egypt and Syria.
In Western Europe, the emergence of agriculture dates back to the V-IV millennia BC.
On the territory of Russia and the territories adjacent to it, agriculture arose in the Stone Age. Moreover, the most ancient centers are the regions of the entire Transcaucasia and Central Asia.
Conclusion
Having dealt with the question of what agriculture is, we can conclude: having mastered this type of activity and animal husbandry, mankind gradually moved from appropriating (as it was in ancient times) farming to producing - the process of improving the tools for labor went faster. And this contributed to the emergence of the craft.
Ancient people realized that you can grow your own food about 8 thousand years ago. Instead of constantly looking for edible plants, roaming from place to place, they began to collect the seeds of these plants and sow them near their homes.Of the resulting harvest, they ate part, and the rest were used for seeds in order to sow them again and get a new harvest. For sowing, the seeds of the most delicious and large plants were chosen, which eventually bore fruit: the plants grown on the "ancient beds" no longer resembled their wild ancestors.
What grew in the ancient beds?
The first plants to be planted by humans were apparently wheat and barley, which naturally grew in abundance in the Middle East. People began to live in permanent settlements and to look after their crops, to protect the harvest. Agriculture spread from the Middle East to Western Asia, Europe and Africa. In the VIII millennium BC. in the East, rice was cultivated, which to this day is the main grain of Asia. In South America, around the 3rd millennium BC. cultivated sweet potatoes and sweet potatoes (maize), and in Central America - pumpkin, corn and beans.
Wild rice
Cereals were domesticated a long time ago, and one of the oldest is rice. It is very high in calories and served as a good source of nutrition for ancient people. However, it took a lot of work to grow rice, which is very sensitive to the effects of the sun and moisture. Even today, growing it is a rather laborious work, because it is required that the sprouts germinate in the water, which protects them from the scorching sun. The ripe rice seeds were then stored in reserve, because they could be stored for many months.
Fields on terraces
Terraces are flat ledges that were created on slopes for crops. Ancient farmers arranged them for their fields, thus protecting the fertile soil from erosion. In mountainous countries such as Peru, on terraced slopes, ancient farmers grew potatoes, which grew high above sea level.
