Agriculture and Trade

Part 1
    The benefits to hunter gatherers are they are very active, so they are more in shape. They rely on skill, and have the knowledge to which plants they can eat and which ones they can not. The benefit to agriculture is that they don’t have to travel to find food, they grow it all themselves as well as their cattle.
    The disadvantage to hunter gatherers is they have to constantly move in order to find their food, and if they don’t know what they can and cannot eat it can get them killed. Disadvantages to agriculture is that studies show they are not as healthy as hunter gatherers, and their mouths are smaller causing problems.
    Hunter gatherers provide a healthier diet, shown in Razib Khan’s model when agriculture started an increase in death occured. It seems that hunter gatherers all together have a healthier lifestyle they are constantly moving and their food changes giving them diet change providing them with the nutrients that they need
    Early human populations most likely started using agriculture so that they could settle down in one location. It would be more productive to have one place to call home and raise your food there rather than chasing after your food daily. Generally speaking humans seem to like schedules and regularity, so if they can control their environment to produce the food they need at specific times of the year then it would make more sense.

Part 2

The availability of surplus and the ability to trade go hand in hand. If you have 20 pigs and 50 yams but you need 15 pigs and 40 yams to eat it means you have a surplus of 5 pigs and 10 yams, and you can only trade what you don’t need. In essence you can only trade what you have left over, you can’t trade things that don’t exist.

    A benefit to trading is that you have the ability to get something you don’t have. As a farmer you can only grow so many things, so you then have the ability to trade with someone else to gain what you need. Another benefit it you gain the aspect of community, it allows you to interact with different people forming bonds over what you have and what you don’t, what you don’t need and what you need to get.
    A negative social aspect of trading is that people can get taken advantage of causing certain people to lose product. Trading can also be very competitive causing problems among traders of the same items especially if one of the people has an advantage over the other. Monopolies are also a problem, they can set their price at what ever they want if their item is wanted by others.
    Agriculture made it easier for trade to happen, with agriculture more food is available and it gives different people the opportunity to work together to get what they need. Trading probably happened because one farmer had too much of one product and a different farmer had too much of a different product so they traded to get rid of their surplus and gain something they need.