Reading 3-2

Their permanent gardens orchards and pastures instead


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Unformatted text preview: ecies (see below), and much more evidence for agriculturally driven language expansions, in Eurasia than in the Americas. their permanent gardens, orchards and pastures, instead of migrating to follow seasonal shifts in wild food supplies. (Some hunter–gatherer societies in especially productive environments were also sedentary, but most were not). Food production was accompanied by a human population explosion that has continued unabated to this day, resulting from two separate factors. First, the sedentary lifestyle permitted shorter birth intervals. Nomadic hunter–gatherers had previously spaced out birth intervals at four years or more, because a mother shifting camp can carry only one infant or slow toddler. Second, plant and animal species that are edible to humans can be cultivated in much higher density in our gardens, orchards and pastures than in wild habitats. Food production also led to an explosion of technology, because sedentary living permitted the accumulation of heavy technology (such as forges and printing presses) that nomadic hunter–gatherers could not carr...
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