Changes took
place in the men themselves as well as in the ways they lived. As time went on,
they made better tools and weapons. Then, too, we begin to find signs of how
they started thinking of other things than food and the tools to get it with.
We find that they painted on the walls of caves, and decorated their tools; we
find that they buried their dead. At about the time when the last great glacier
was finally melting away, men in the Near East made the first basic change in
human economy. They began to plant grain, and they learned to raise and herd
certain animals. This meant that they could store food in granaries and “on the
hoof” against the bad times of the year. This first really basic change in
man’s way of living has been called the “food-producing revolution.”
By the time
it happened, a modern kind of climate was beginning. Men had already grown to
look as they do now. Know-how in ways of living had developed and progressed,
slowly but surely, up to a point. It was impossible for men to go beyond that
point if they only hunted and fished and gathered wild foods. Once the basic
change was made--once the food-producing revolution became
effective--technology leaped ahead and civilization and written history soon
began.
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