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Chapter 2: Early People
Lesson 2: Early Herders and Farmers
Big Idea: Over time, people became food producers instead of food collectors.
Pastoral Societies
Vocabulary
1) domesticate to tame animals for human use.
2) livestock domesticated animals that provide people with
meat and milk for food and wool and hides for clothing.
3) nomads people with no settled home
4) pastoral society a group of people that live as nomadic
herders.
How did people raise their own food? People began to domesticate animals. They
used them for meat, milk, and clothing.
Another name for the Neolithic period: New Stone Age
When did people first begin to domesticate animals? 10,000 years ago
Pastoral Societies
Uses for domesticated animals:
• Cats used in the home for catching rats and mice
• Dogs helped people hunt and protected the band.
• Sheep, goats, and pigs provided people with meat and milk for food and wool
and hides for clothing
Why did the nomads move their livestock from place to place? When the animals
had eaten all of the grass, they had to move on to fresh grazing land.
Pastoral societies still exist today. Give one example of a group that lives this way.
The Bedouin people live in the deserts of northern Africa and southwestern Asia.
It is estimated that 1-2 million people
still live in pastoral societies.
Farming Societies
Vocabulary
1) cultivate take care of plants
It is believed that women were the first to start planting seeds.
What were some of the first wild plants to be cultivated?
• Barley
• Wheat
What was an important consequence of people cultivating plants? People stayed in
one place to take care of their plants. Permanent shelters were built.
When was the first plow developed? 8,000 years ago
What was the purpose of it? It broke up the soil so that seeds could be planted
more easily.
How did people make plowing even easier? They used cattle to pull the plow.
The Results of Change
Vocabulary
1) agriculture the raising of domesticated plants and
animals for use by people; farming
2) slash and burn a method of preparing fields for
farming; people cut down forest land and then burned
the trees, mixing the ashes with the soil to fertilize
it.
What was the most important change that farming brought about? Farming
provided people with a reliable food source.
What is subsistence farming? Raising just enough food to meet a group’s needs.
What happened when people raised more food than they needed?
• More people could live in one place.
• Families grew and the population increased.
What are some problems that early farmers faced?
• Crops could be destroyed by insects, plant diseases, and flooding.
• When crops failed to grow, the whole village suffered.
• People fought over limited amounts of fertile soil.
Why did slash and burn farming harm the environment? Trees were destroyed and
the soil was worn out. People would then move on and clear out even more trees.
In modern times, due to pollution, plants don’t often grow back over cleared areas.
The Results of Change
What did people do when farming allowed for more free time? People began to
develop new skills in arts, crafts, and trade.
Farming allowed for larger families, and the population grew.