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Source C- Graph Of Changes In Rates Of Disease

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Source C- Graph Of Changes In Rates Of Disease

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This chart illustrates changes over time as humans moved from hunter-gather societies to societies formed around agricultural production. The chart indicates when agriculture appeared in human culture, when the first diseases and pandemics (widespread diseases) emerged, when the first famine appeared, and when humans began to develop new ways to produce food. The chart shows that over this period, death rates and population increased.

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Source B- Image Bank: Life in Paleolithic and Neolithic Communities

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Source B- Image Bank: Life in Paleolithic and Neolithic Communities

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Source A- Graph Of Population Changes in The Neolithic Period

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Source A- Graph Of Population Changes in The Neolithic Period

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Source C- Clay Tablet with Cuneiform Symbols

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Source C- Clay Tablet with Cuneiform Symbols

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The development of writing was a slow and gradual process. Sumerians began using tokens as counting stones to keep track of payments, taxes, and trade around 8000 BCE. Soon, however, this process became too difficult to manage. After about 4,000 years, people realized that the tokens were not really needed. Instead, they could make symbols that represented the tokens in clay.
By about 3000 BCE, Sumerian images of tokens on clay tablets began to change. This new style of writing came to be known as “cuneiform,” which means wedge-shaped. The strokes were made by pressing a reed stylus into clay. The direction of writing also changed: Instead of writing top to bottom, people began to write from left to right in horizontal rows.

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Another challenge people overcame was how to represent large numbers. Instead of making numerous inscriptions for large numbers, Sumerians developed a numbering system. Doing so allowed them to represent multiple instances of the same symbol. Like many people today, Sumerians used a base-10 system. Unlike people today, Sumerians also used a counting system in which the number 60 was a base.

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The first counting stones, like these, were made in the Neolithic period. This period was a time of great change for humans. People, who had been hunters and gatherers before, were starting to become farmers. Farming allowed people to produce more food than they could actually eat. The extra food provided by agriculture meant that some people did not have to spend their time gathering food. They could spend their time making other things, such as clothes, jewelry, and pottery, as long as they could convince the people who did produce food to give some of their surplus to them.
Some of the surplus food that was produced needed to be stored as seed for the next year, and the rest could be distributed to people who did not produce food themselves. Communities needed to decide how this would be done and how the land that produced the food would be owned. In Sumer, these decisions were first made by the priests who ran the temples and then by kings and their officials. They decided that much of the land belonged to the temple and the king and that everyone owed some labor, crops, or other goods as taxes or rents. They also decided they needed a way to keep track of these payments, which led to the development of these tokens.
Sumerians developed a system of tokens consisting of plain tokens that were designed in specific shapes, like a cylinder or a cone, and were meant to represent quantities and concepts, such as sweet or wood. Complex stones had carvings or marks to represent more complex ideas and specific things like wheat, sheep, and wool.

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Source C- Image Bank: Neolithic Farming Tools

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Source C- Image Bank: Neolithic Farming Tools

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Image 1: An ax (bottom) used for clearing, flint sickles (top right) used for harvesting cereal crops, and a flat rock and stone (top left) used for grinding flour.

Image 2: The ard was a tool used to break up soil to get it ready for planting crops.

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The chart shows temperature change over the past 18,000 years. The horizontal axis indicates the years before the present (B.P.). The vertical axis shows changes in temperature from the current average global temperature.

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Source A- Timeline of Neolithic Revolution

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Source A- Timeline of Neolithic Revolution

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Develop a claim supported by evidence that agriculture had a range of consequences for human culture.

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Write a paragraph about how writing emerged in Mesopotamia and describe the implication of that development.

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What were the consequences of agriculture for humans?

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How did the development of agriculture in Mesopotamia lead to the development of writing?

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Create a chart with information about how climate change and improved tools contributed to the development of agriculture.

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How did environmental changes and new technologies affect the development of agriculture?

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Was the development of agriculture beneficial for humans?