Access to water directly helped early humans develop agriculture.
Before about 11,000 years ago, people are used to hunting wild animals and gathering plant in the environment they lived. At a particular time in history, humans began to grow specific plant.
People relied on this plant for food and they deployed various ways to protect the plants from animals and human attack. While the population of the people living in the natural habitat increases, there was a need to grow more plants, which required consistent water than what the rain provided.
As more people began to farm, they acknowledged that supplies of excess water would lead to better crop yield and the animals would be healthier.
Therefore, in order to provide alternative to water from rainfall, the people created water control systems which include cisterns, well, run off diversion system and irrigations. This water control system really helped the population to provide excess water for crops and they didn’t rely on the local rainfall.
V. Gordon Childe called the water control system as part of the Neolithic Revolution together with animal and plant domestication. With the creation of the water control system, the people created denser population areas and were able to consolidate it.
However, the creation of these water control system made excess water available for human use and by late 1940s and early 1950s, anthropologists, Karl Wittfogel and Julian Steward proposed that the creation of the water control system was a significant factor in the early civilization development.
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KEYWORDS:
- water control system
- civilization development
- neolithic revolution
- plant and animal domestication
