What is a sedentary lifestyle? How to understand the expression “settled way of life” Environmental degradation.

I love history very much, and this event in the development of human society could not but interest me. I am happy to share my knowledge about what is settledness, and talk about the consequences that were caused by a change in lifestyle.

What does the term "settled" mean?

This term means the transition of nomadic peoples to living in one place or within a small area. Indeed, the ancient tribes were very dependent on where their prey was going, and this was quite a natural phenomenon. However, over time, people moved to production of the desired product, which means that there is no need to move after the herds. This was accompanied by the construction of dwellings, housekeeping, which required the creation of things necessary in everyday life. Simply put, the tribe equipped a certain territory, while considering it their own, and therefore was forced to protect it from uninvited guests.

Consequences of the transition to settled life

The transition to this way of life and the domestication of animals radically changed the lives of people, and we still feel some of the consequences today. Settlement is not only a change in lifestyle, but also significant changes in the very worldview of a person. In fact, the land began to be valued, ceasing to be a common property, which led to the beginnings of property. At the same time, everything acquired, as it were, tied a person to one place of residence, which could not but affect the environment- plowing fields, building defensive structures and much more.

In general, among the many consequences of the transition to settled life, the most striking examples can be distinguished:

• increase in the birth rate- as a result of increased fertility;
• drop in food quality- according to research, the transition from animal to plant foods has led to a decrease in the average height of mankind;
• increase in incidence- as a rule, the higher the population density, the higher this indicator;
• Negative influence on the environment- clogging of soils, rivers, deforestation and so on;
• load increase- Maintenance of the economy requires more labor than just hunting or gathering.

One of the paradoxes of the transition to a settled way of life is the fact that with an increase in productivity, the population increased and dependence on agricultural crops. As a result, this began to present a certain problem: in the case of a poor supply of food, the load on all spheres of life increases.

"Our Earth"

Settling and domestication are not only technological changes, but also changes in worldview. The land has ceased to be a free commodity available to everyone, with resources arbitrarily scattered across its territory - it has become a special territory, owned by someone or a group of persons, on which people grow plants and livestock. In this way, sedentary of life and a high level of extraction of resources leads to the emergence of property, which was rare in previous gathering societies. Burials, heavy goods, permanent housing, grain handling equipment, and fields and livestock tied people to their place of residence. human influence on the environment became stronger and more visible after the transition to a sedentary lifestyle and growth Agriculture; people began to change the surrounding area more seriously - to build terraces and walls to protect against floods.

Fertility, sedentary lifestyle and nutrition system

The most dramatic consequence of the transition to a sedentary lifestyle are changes in female fertility and population growth. A number of different effects combined led to an increase in population.

Birth Distribution Intervals

Among modern foragers, female pregnancy occurs every 3-4 years, due to the long period breastfeeding characteristic of such communities. Duration does not mean that children are weaned at 3-4 years of age, but that feeding will last as long as the child needs it, even in cases of several times per hour (Shostak 1981). This feeding stimulates the secretion of ovulation-suppressing hormones (Henry 1989). Henry points out that “the adaptive value of such a mechanism is evident in the context of nomadic foragers because one child who needs to be cared for for 3-4 years creates serious problems for the mother, but a second or third during this interval will create an unsolvable problem. for her and endanger her health…”.
There are many more reasons why feeding lasts 3-4 years in foragers. Their diet is high in protein, also low in carbohydrates, and lack soft foods easily digested by infants. In reality, Marjorie Shostak noted that among Bushmen, modern foragers in the Kalahari desert, food is coarse and difficult to digest: “To survive in such conditions, the child must be over 2 years old, preferably much older” (1981). After six months of breastfeeding, the mother has no food to find and prepare for the infant in addition to her own milk. Among the Bushmen, infants over 6 months of age are given solid, already chewed or ground food, complementary foods that begin the transition to solid foods.
The length of time between pregnancies serves to maintain long-term energy balance in women during their reproductive years. In many foraging communities, increasing the caloric intake of feeding requires mobility, and this style of feeding (high in protein, low in carbohydrates) can leave the mother's energy balance low. In cases where food supply is limited, the period of pregnancy and lactation can become a net waste of energy, resulting in a sharp decline in fertility. Under such circumstances, this gives the woman more time to regain her fertility. Thus, a period when she is neither pregnant nor nursing becomes necessary to build her energy balance for future reproduction.

Birth Rate Changes

In addition to the effects of breastfeeding, Allison notes the age, nutritional status, energy balance, diet and exercise of women in a given period (1990). This means that intense aerobic exercise can lead to changes in the interval between periods (amenorrhea), but less intense aerobic exercise can lead to poorer fertility in less obvious but important ways.
Recent studies of North American women whose occupations require a high level of endurance (distance runners and young ballet dancers, for example) have indicated some changes in fertility. These data are relevant to a sedentary lifestyle because the activity levels of the women studied correspond to the activity levels of women in contemporary foraging communities.
The researchers found 2 different effects on fertility. Young, active ballerinas experienced their first menstruation at age 15.5, much later than the inactive control group, whose members experienced their first period at age 12.5. A high level of activity also appears to affect the endocrine system, reducing the time a woman is fertile by 1-3 times.
Summing up the impact of foraging on female fertility, Henry notes: “It seems that a number of interrelated factors associated with the nomadic gathering lifestyle exert natural birth control and may explain the low population density in the Paleolithic. In nomadic forager communities, women seem to experience as long periods of breastfeeding while raising a child as high energy drains associated with foraging and occasional nomadism. In addition, their diet, which is relatively high in protein, leads to low fat levels, thereby reducing fertility.” (1989)
With the increase in the settled way of life, these boundaries of female fertility were weakened. The period of breastfeeding was reduced, as was the amount of energy expended by the woman (Bushman women, for example, average 1,500 miles a year, carrying 25 pounds of equipment, collected food, and, in some cases, children). This does not mean that a sedentary lifestyle is physically undemanding. Farming requires its own hard work, from both men and women. The difference lies only in the types of physical activity. Walking long distances, carrying heavy loads and children were replaced by sowing, cultivating the land, collecting, storing and processing grain. A diet rich in cereals has significantly changed the ratio of proteins and carbohydrates in the diet. This altered prolactin levels, increased positive energy balance, and led to faster growth in children and earlier onset of periods.

The constant availability of grains allowed mothers to feed their children soft, high-carbohydrate cereals. Analysis of children's feces in Egypt showed that a similar practice was used, but with root vegetables, on the banks of the Nile 19,000 years ago ( Hillman 1989). The influence of cereals on fertility is noted Richard Lee among the settled Bushmen, who have recently begun to eat cereals and are experiencing a marked increase in their birth rate. Rene Pennington(1992) noted that the increase in Bushmen's reproductive success may be due to a decrease in infant and child mortality.

The drop in food quality

The West has long regarded agriculture as a step forward from gathering, a sign of human progress. Although, however, the first farmers did not eat as well as the gatherers.
Jared Diamond(1987) wrote: “When farmers focus on high carbohydrate crops such as potatoes or rice, the mixture wild plants and animals in the hunter/gatherer diet provides more protein and a better balance of others nutrients. One study noted that Bushmen consumed an average of 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein per day, well above the recommended daily allowance for people their size. It is almost impossible that the Bushmen, eating 75 species of wild plants, could die of starvation, as happened to thousands of Irish farmers and their families in 1840.”
In studies of skeletons we will come to the same point of view. Skeletons found in Greece and Turkey dated to the Late Paleolithic averaged 5'9" for males and 5'5" for females. With the adoption of agriculture, the average height of growth has decreased - about 5000 years ago, the average height of a man was 5 feet 3 inches, and a woman about 5 feet. Even modern Greeks and Turks are not, on average, as tall as their Paleolithic ancestors.

Increasing danger

Roughly speaking, agriculture first appeared, probably in ancient southwestern Asia, and possibly elsewhere, to increase the amount of food available to support an increasing population under severe resource stress. Over time, however, as reliance on domesticated crops increased, so did the overall insecurity of the food supply system. Why?

Share of Domesticated Plants in Food

There are several reasons why early farmers became more and more dependent on cultivated plants. Farmers were able to use previously unsuitable land. When such a vital necessity as water could be delivered to the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the land for which wheat and barley are native, was able to grow them. Domesticated plants also provided more and more edible plants and were easier to collect, process, and cook. They are also better in taste. Rindos listed a number of modern food plants that were bred from bitter wild varieties. Finally, the increase in the yield of domesticated plants per unit of land led to an increase in their proportion in the diet, even if wild plants were still used and were as available as before.
Dependence on a Few Plants.
Unfortunately, depending on fewer and fewer plants is quite risky in the event of poor harvests. According to Richard Lee, the Bushmen living in the Kalahari Desert ate over 100 plants (14 fruits and nuts, 15 berries, 18 edible resins, 41 edible roots and bulbs, and 17 leaves, beans, melons and other foods) (1992). In contrast, today's farmers rely mainly on 20 plants, of which three - wheat, corn, rice - feed most of the world's people. Historically, there were only one or two grain products for a specific group of people. The decline in the yield of these crops had catastrophic consequences for the population.

Selective Breeding, Monocultures and the Gene Pool

Selective breeding of any plant species reduces the variability of its gene pool by destroying its natural resistance to rare natural pests and diseases and reducing its long-term chances of survival by increasing the risk of severe harvest losses. Again, many people depend on specific plant species, risking their future. Monoculture is the practice of growing only one type of plant in a field. While this increases the efficiency of the crop, it also leaves the entire field unprotected from being destroyed by disease or pests. The result can be hunger.

Increasing Dependence on Plants

As cultivated plants began to play an ever greater role in their diet, people became dependent on plants, and plants in turn became dependent on humans, or more accurately, on environment created by man. But humans cannot fully control the environment. Hail, flood, drought, pests, frost, heat, erosion, and many other factors can destroy or significantly affect a crop, and they are all beyond human control. The risk of failure and hunger increases.

Increasing number of diseases

The increase in the number of diseases, especially associated with the evolution of domesticated plants, for which there were several reasons. First, before the sedentary lifestyle, human waste was disposed of outside the residential area. With the increase in the number of people living nearby in relatively permanent settlements, the disposal of waste became more and more problematic. A large amount of feces has led to the appearance of diseases, and animals and vegetable waste feed on insects, some of which are disease carriers.
Secondly, a large number of people living nearby serve as a reservoir for pathogens. Once the population becomes large enough, the likelihood of disease transmission increases. By the time one person has recovered from the disease, another may have reached the infectious stage and infect the first person again. Therefore, the disease will never leave the settlement. The speed with which a cold, flu, or chickenpox spreads among schoolchildren is a perfect illustration of the interaction between a dense population and disease.
Thirdly, sedentary people cannot simply walk away from the disease, on the contrary, if one of the gatherers becomes ill, the rest can leave for some time, reducing the likelihood of the disease spreading. Fourth, an agricultural type of diet can reduce disease resistance. Finally, population growth provided ample opportunity for microbial development. Indeed, as discussed earlier in Chapter 3, there is good evidence that land clearing for farming in sub-Saharan Africa has created an excellent breeding ground for malaria mosquitoes, resulting in a spike in malaria cases.

environmental degradation

With the development of agriculture, people began to actively influence the environment. Deforestation, soil deterioration, clogging of streams, and the death of many wild species all accompany domestication. In a valley on the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates, the irrigation waters used by the early farmers carried large amounts of soluble salts, poisoning the soil, rendering it unusable to this day.

Work Increase

The growth of domestication requires much more labor than gathering. People must clear the land, plant seeds, take care of young shoots, protect them from pests, collect them, process seeds, store them, select seeds for the next sowing; in addition, people must care for and protect domesticated animals, select herds, shear sheep, milk goats, and so on.

(c) Emily A. Schultz & Robert H. Lavenda, excerpt from the college textbook Anthropology: A Perspective on the Human Condition Second Edition.

domestication outcomes

and sedentary lifestyle albedoadmin

"Our Earth"

Fertility distribution intervals

Among modern foragers, female pregnancy occurs every 3-4 years, due to the long period of breastfeeding characteristic of such communities. Duration does not mean that children are weaned at 3-4 years of age, but that feeding will last as long as the child needs it, even in cases of several times per hour (Shostak, 1981). This feeding stimulates the secretion of hormones that inhibit ovulation (Henry, 1989). Henry points out that “the adaptive value of such a mechanism is evident in the context of nomadic foragers because one child who needs to be cared for for 3-4 years creates serious problems for the mother, but a second or third during this interval will create an unsolvable problem. for her and endanger her health…”

There are many more reasons why feeding lasts 3-4 years in foragers. Their diet is high in protein, also low in carbohydrates, and lack soft foods easily digested by infants. In fact, Marjorie Szostak noted that among the Bushmen, modern foragers in the Kalahari desert, food is coarse and difficult to digest: "To survive in such conditions, the child must be over 2 years old, preferably much older" (1981). After six months of breastfeeding, the mother has no food to find and prepare for the infant in addition to her own milk. Among the Bushmen, infants over 6 months of age are given solid, already chewed or ground food, complementary foods that begin the transition to solid foods.
The length of time between pregnancies serves to maintain long-term energy balance in women during their reproductive years. In many foraging communities, increased caloric intake during feeding requires mobility, and this style of feeding (high in protein, low in carbohydrates) can leave the mother's energy balance low. In cases where food supply is limited, the period of pregnancy and lactation can become a net waste of energy, resulting in a sharp decline in fertility. Under such circumstances, this gives the woman more time to regain her fertility. Thus, a period when she is neither pregnant nor nursing becomes necessary to build her energy balance for future reproduction.

The drop in food quality

The West has long regarded agriculture as a step forward from gathering, a sign of human progress. Although, however, the first farmers did not eat as well as the gatherers.

Jared Diamond (1987) wrote: “When farmers focus on high-carbohydrate crops such as potatoes or rice, the mixture of wild plants and animals in the hunter/gatherer diet provides more protein and a better balance of other nutrients. One study noted that Bushmen consumed an average of 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein per day, well above the recommended daily intake for people their size. It is practically impossible that the Bushmen, eating 75 species of wild plants, could die of starvation, as happened to thousands of Irish farmers and their families in 1840.
In skeletal studies we will come to the same point of view. Skeletons found in Greece and Turkey dated to the Late Paleolithic averaged 5'9" for males and 5'5" for females. With the adoption of agriculture, the average height of growth has decreased - about 5000 years ago, the average height of a man was 5 feet 3 inches, and a woman about 5 feet. Even modern Greeks and Turks are not, on average, as tall as their Paleolithic ancestors.

Increasing danger

Roughly speaking, agriculture first appeared, probably in ancient southwest Asia, and possibly elsewhere, to increase the amount of food available to support an increasing population under severe resource stress. Over time, however, as reliance on domesticated crops increased, so did the overall insecurity of the food supply system. Why?

The increase in the number of diseases

The increase in the number of diseases is especially associated with the evolution of domesticated plants, for which there were several reasons. First, before the sedentary lifestyle, human waste was disposed of outside the residential area. With the increase in the number of people living nearby in relatively permanent settlements, the disposal of waste became more and more problematic. A large amount of faeces has led to the appearance of diseases, and insects, some of which are carriers of diseases, feed on animal and plant waste.

Secondly, a large number of people living nearby serve as a reservoir for pathogens. Once the population becomes large enough, the likelihood of disease transmission increases. By the time one person has had time to recover from the disease, another may have reached the infectious stage and infect the first again. Therefore, the disease will never leave the settlement. The speed with which a cold, flu, or chickenpox spreads among schoolchildren is a perfect illustration of the interaction between a dense population and disease.

Thirdly, sedentary people cannot simply walk away from the disease, on the contrary, if one of the gatherers becomes ill, the rest can leave for some time, reducing the likelihood of the disease spreading.

Fourth, an agricultural type of diet can reduce disease resistance.

Finally, population growth provided ample opportunity for microbial development. Indeed, there is good evidence that land clearing for farming in sub-Saharan Africa has created an excellent breeding ground for malaria mosquitoes, resulting in a spike in malaria cases.

environmental degradation

With the development of agriculture, people began to actively influence the environment. Deforestation, soil deterioration, clogging of streams, and the death of many wild species all accompany domestication. In the valley below the Tigris and Euphrates, the irrigation waters used by the early farmers carried large amounts of soluble salts, poisoning the soil, rendering it unusable to this day.

Increasing work

The growth of domestication requires much more labor than gathering. People must clear the land, plant seeds, take care of young sprouts, protect them from pests, collect them, process seeds, store them, select seeds for the next sowing; in addition, people should care for and protect domesticated animals, select herds, shear sheep, milk goats, and so on.

domestication outcomes

and sedentary lifestyle albedoadmin

Settlement and domestication, together and separately, transformed the lives of people in such a way that these transformations still affect our lives.

"Our Earth"

Settling and domestication are not only technological changes, but also changes in worldview. The land has ceased to be a free commodity available to everyone, with resources arbitrarily scattered across its territory - it has become a special territory, owned by someone or a group of persons, on which people grow plants and livestock. Thus, the sedentary lifestyle and the high level of resource extraction leads to the emergence of property, which was rare in previous gathering societies. Burials, heavy goods, permanent housing, grain handling equipment, and fields and livestock tied people to their place of residence. The human impact on the environment has become stronger and more visible since the transition to sedentism and the growth of agriculture; people began to change the surrounding area more seriously - to build terraces and walls to protect against floods.

Fertility, sedentary lifestyle and nutrition system

The most dramatic consequence of the transition to a sedentary lifestyle are changes in female fertility and population growth. A number of different effects combined led to an increase in population.

There is a term "neolithic revolution". When you hear him, you imagine a mass of bearded, disheveled people in skins, armed with primitive axes and spears. This mass runs with warlike cries to storm the cave, where a crowd of exactly the same people, bearded, disheveled, with primitive axes and spears in their hands, has settled. In fact, this term denotes a change in the forms of management - from hunting and gathering to agriculture and cattle breeding. The Neolithic revolution was the result of the transition from nomadism to settled life. That's right, at first a person began to lead a sedentary lifestyle, then he mastered agriculture and domesticated some types of animals, he was simply forced to master it. Then came the first cities, the first states... Current state world - a consequence of the fact that a person once moved to a settled way of life.

The first permanent human settlements appeared about 10-13 thousand years ago. Somewhere they appeared earlier, somewhere later, depending on the region of the world. The oldest, the first - in the Middle East - about 13 thousand years ago. One of the first of those found and excavated by archaeologists is Mureybet in Syria, on the banks of the Euphrates. It originated about 12,200 years ago. It was inhabited by hunter-gatherers. They built houses in the style of nomadic rented dwellings - round, 3-6 meters in diameter, but much more solid: they used pieces of limestone, fastened them with clay. The roof was covered with reed stalks. The reliability of dwellings is the only thing in which the inhabitants of the settled Mureybeta surpassed the nomads. The more important factor is food. They ate in Mureybet more poorly than nomads. Depended on the case - wild beans, acorns and pistachios will be born this season, or the harvest will be insignificant, there will not be enough tribe; whether a herd of gazelles will pass nearby or not, whether there will be enough fish in the river. Domestication (or “domestication”, in scientific terms) of plant foods in Mureybet happened a thousand years after the settlement appeared: they learned to grow wheat, rye and barley on their own. The domestication of animals happened even later.

Shortly speaking, food reasons to create a settlement on the banks of the Euphrates was not. Permanent settlement, on the contrary, created regular food difficulties. The same in other regions - the inhabitants of the oldest settled villages ate more poorly than their nomadic contemporaries. If we take all the regions where the transition from nomadism to sedentism took place earlier than others - the Middle East, the regions on the Danube and in Japan - it turns out that from one to three thousand years passed between the appearance of settled settlements and the traces of the first domesticated plants (that is, in the Syrian Mureybet residents relatively quickly figured out how to grow their own grain). Currently, most paleoanthropologists believe that the inhabitants of the first stationary settlements lived much poorer and ate less varied and plentiful than wandering hunters. And food security, food security is one of the main reasons for the movement human civilizations. This means that food disappears - it is not because of it that people began to live settled.

An important point - the dead were buried in residential buildings ancient settlements. Previously, the skeletons were cleaned - they left the corpses on the trees, they were pecked by birds, or they independently cleaned the meat, soft tissues from the bones, - after that they were buried under the floor. The skull is usually separated. Skulls were kept separately from other bones, but also in a dwelling. In Mureybet they were put on shelves in the walls. In Tell Ramada (Southern Syria) and Beysamun (Israel), the skulls were placed on clay figures - stands up to a quarter of a meter high. For people 10 thousand years ago, it was probably the skull that symbolized the personality of the deceased, which is why there is so much reverence, so much respect for him. Skulls were used in religious ceremonies. For example, they were “fed” - food was shared with them. That is, all the attention was given to the dead ancestors. Perhaps they were considered indispensable assistants in the affairs of the living, they always kept in touch with them, they were addressed with prayers, with requests.

Based on the finds of burials in the most ancient settlements, the religious historian Andrei Borisovich Zubov deduces the theory that humanity began to move to a settled way of life because of its religious beliefs. “Such attention to ancestors, ancestors who continue to help the living in their temporary, earthly, and eternal, heavenly needs, such a sense of interdependence of generations could not but be reflected in the organization of life. The graves of the ancestors, the sacred relics of the family, had to be brought as close as possible to the living, made part of the world of the living. The descendants had to be conceived and born literally "on the bones" of the forefathers. It is no coincidence that burials are often found under those adobe benches of Neolithic houses on which the living sat and slept.

The nomadic way of life, characteristic of the Paleolithic, clashed with new religious values. If the graves of the ancestors should be as close as possible to the house, then either the house should be immovable or the bones should be moved from place to place. But the veneration of the giving birth element of the earth required stationary burials - the embryo of a new life, the buried body, could not be removed from the womb as necessary. And so the only thing left for a man of the protoneolithic age was to settle down on the ground. New system life was difficult and unusual, but the spiritual upheaval that took place in the minds of people about 12 thousand years ago required a choice - either to neglect the family, community with ancestors for the sake of a more well-fed and comfortable wandering life, or to bind oneself forever with the graves of ancestors with indissoluble bonds of unity earth. Some groups of people in Europe, in the Near East, in Indochina, on the Pacific coast South America made a choice in favor of the genus. It was they who laid the foundation for the civilizations of the new Stone Age,” concludes Zubov.

The weak point of Zubov's theory is again food impoverishment. It turns out that ancient people who stopped wandering believed that their ancestors and gods wished them a half-starved existence. To come to terms with their food disasters, food shortages, they had to believe. “Ancestors-skull-bones blessed us for starvation, for a thousand years of starvation,” parents taught their children. This is how it comes out of Zubov's theory. Yes, it could not be! After all, they prayed to the bones for the bestowal of great benefits: to save them from the attack of predators, from a thunderstorm, so that the upcoming fishing and hunting would be successful. Rock art of that period and earlier - a lot of wild animals on the walls and ceilings of the caves - is interpreted as a prayer for successful hunting, plentiful prey.

"Paleolithic Venuses" - they were used to get the support of the forces of Life. Incredibly, it is impossible that in the most different regions people of the world decided that the gods, higher power want them to settle down and starve. Rather, on the contrary: a settled tribe, burying the bones of their ancestors under the floors of their dwellings, understands that their diet has decreased, and decides that this is punishment from their ancestors - because they violated the way of life, nomadism, adopted by their ancestors, thousands of generations of ancestors back in time. Not a single tribe would settle voluntarily if this led to food problems. Voluntarily - no. But if they were forced, forced - yes.

Violence. Forcibly, some tribes forced others to settle. For the vanquished to guard the sacred bones. One tribe won, beat another, forced the vanquished to guard the skulls and skeletons of their dead ancestors as an indemnity. Bones in the ground, skulls on the shelves - the defeated, the oppressed "feed" the skulls, spend holidays for them - so that the dead fathers would not be bored in the next world. Where is the safest place to store the most valuable? At home, yes. Therefore, bones under the floor, skulls on the shelves of round dwellings.

Probably, the winners of the vanquished were used not only to protect the dead. In the oldest settled settlement in Europe - Lepenski Vir, in Serbia, on the banks of the Danube, it appeared about 9 thousand years ago - the oldest part of the settlement had a seasonal character. The beaten tribe, or the weakest of the tribe, were forced to settle for several months of the year in order to do some work in the interests of the strongest. They produced axes or spears, harvested wild plants. Worked in the interests of the strongest.

Over time, the winners, the strongest, also switched to settled life - most likely, when they realized that with the help of the vanquished, all their needs could be resolved in general. Of course, special dwellings were built for the owners of the settlement: larger in area, with altars, additional premises. Among the remains of one of the oldest settlements of Jericho, they found an 8-meter-high tower with a diameter of 9 meters. The age of the tower is about 11,500 thousand years. Ran Barkai, a senior lecturer in the Department of Archeology at Tel Aviv University, believes that it was built to intimidate. Vyacheslav Leonidovich Glazychev, professor at the Moscow Architectural Institute, is of the same opinion: “The tower is still a kind of castle that dominates the entire town and opposes its ordinary inhabitants to a power that is separate from them.” The Jericho Tower is an example of the fact that the strongest also began to move to settled life and control those whom they forced to work for themselves. The subordinates, the exploited, probably rebelled, tried to get rid of the rulers. And the rulers came up with the idea of ​​sitting in a powerful tower, hiding in it from an unexpected attack, from a night uprising.

Thus, coercion, violence - at the root of the origin of the settled way of life. A sedentary culture initially carries a charge of violence. And in its further development, this charge increased, its volumes grew: the first cities, states, slavery, more and more sophisticated destruction of some people by others, deformation of religious thinking in favor of submission to kings, priests, officials. At the root of settled life is the suppression of human nature, the natural need of man - nomadism.

“Without Coercion, no settlement could be founded. There would be no overseer over the workers. The rivers would not overflow,” a quote from a Sumerian text.

Feb 16, 2014 Alexander Rybin

Lifestyle of gobies. The biology of gobies is not well understood. Gobies are inhabitants of the bottom, for the most part leading a sedentary lifestyle and, if they make migrations, then for a very short space. In the Caspian Sea, there is some periodicity in their approaches to the shore and leaving the sea from the coast. Some gobies are fish that live permanently in the sea and spawn there; the other part - the inhabitants of brackish and highly desalinated waters, not avoiding even entering the mouths of rivers; finally, the third are inhabitants fresh water.[ ...]

Lifestyle. They switch to a sedentary lifestyle in early spring, when winter flocks gradually break up into pairs.[ ...]

Sedentary animals have such specific features of territoriality as adaptation, which allows them to optimally use the conditions they need and reduce competition. At the same time, a sedentary lifestyle is fraught with the danger of increased competition and rapid depletion of food resources. As an adaptation for delimiting habitats between individuals, families or colonies, individual or group sites appear, protected either directly or by warning signaling. In birds, such signals are the songs of males, in mammals - usually marking the occupied territory, more often with odorous marks (excrement, urine or the secret of special glands - anal, hoofed, interhorn, eye, etc.). At normal population density, the occupied areas do not exceed those limits at which the connection between neighboring individuals or groups is completely broken. Individual sites may partially overlap, which is ecologically necessary for contact between individuals of different sexes or interrelationships in the colony. In some insects with diffuse territoriality, to maintain communication between the sexes, there are special odorous glands that secrete pheromones to attract individuals of the opposite sex.[ ...]

There are significant biological advantages to a sedentary lifestyle. In particular, free orientation is facilitated in a familiar territory, the animal spends less time searching for food, finds shelter from the enemy faster, and can also create food supplies (squirrels, marmots, field mice) if necessary. At the same time, a sedentary lifestyle threatens to rapidly deplete food resources if, for example, the population density becomes excessively high.[ ...]

The pike leads a sedentary lifestyle. She does not migrate, but lives in the selected area and protects it from other pikes. If the individual hosting the site is caught, then another one appears in its place. The pike moves and feeds only during daylight hours.[ ...]

Fish leading a sedentary lifestyle are called tu-aquatic (residential). These include perch, pike, crucian carp, tench, etc.[ ...]

With the transition to a sedentary lifestyle, a person began to transplant flowers from fields and meadows to his home, to take care of them. In new, more favorable conditions, they became more magnificent, more beautiful. The best specimens were multiplied and improved from generation to generation.[ ...]

Species that are characterized by a sedentary lifestyle, as a rule, are characterized by an intensive type of territory use, in which individual individuals or their groups (mainly family groups) exploit resources in a relatively limited space for a long time. Species characterized by a nomadic way of life are characterized by an extensive type of territory use, in which cord resources are usually used by groups of individuals (sometimes very numerous), constantly moving within a vast territory.[ ...]

Farming meant the transition of large nomadic groups to a settled way of life. The minimum energy costs for movement during the cultivation of the land were ensured by the distribution of farmers on individual plots with the formation of farms or small villages. At first, the communities were small, up to 20 people or a little more.[ ...]

In the Neolithic age, man began to move away from the herd way of life. This time dates back to the invention of ceramics, the transition to a settled way of life, the formation of differentiated social cells. From gathering and hunting, he began to move to agriculture (growing plants and breeding animals). On the European continent, the beginnings of agriculture, accompanied by the domestication of plants and animals, as well as Neolithic technology, date back to 9-6 millennia BC.[ ...]

In general, the behavior of the majority of traced fish reflects a sedentary lifestyle, a commitment to limited areas, and not to constant “wandering” over a vast area. Separate individuals, as was established during observations of the behavior of bream in river beds, can remain in a small area (several tens of meters) for up to 2 days. .[ ...]

The discovery of agriculture and the transition of large nomadic groups of people to a sedentary lifestyle made it possible for man to increase the share of consumption of plant foods from cultivated areas to values ​​comparable to all primary production by growing edible monocultures. At the same time, competing types of consumers were being squeezed out. As a result, the required fodder area has been reduced to a few hectares per person. On arable land, a person consumes such a share of biomass at which its natural reproduction is no longer possible. Therefore, a person was forced to take over the functions of reproduction by annual cultivation, fertilization and sowing of arable land, spending on this energy that was previously used to bypass the fodder territory of the gatherer.[ ...]

During the day, the sabrefish is in constant motion, but at the same time it leads a sedentary lifestyle: individuals of one flock usually stay within a certain section of the reservoir. At night, it hides in various shelters or uneven bottoms.[ ...]

According to the type of use of space, all mobile animals are divided into sedentary and nomadic. A sedentary lifestyle has a number of biological advantages, such as free orientation in familiar territory when looking for food or shelter, the ability to create food supplies (squirrels, field mice). Its disadvantages include the depletion of food resources with excessive high density populations.[ ...]

Birds (Aves). They were domesticated much later than the horse and dog, during the transition to a sedentary lifestyle and primitive agriculture. Domestic chickens are descended from wild bankers that were domesticated in India. They came to Europe through Iran. The wild ancestor of ducks of modern breeds are mallard and musky ducks. The domestic goose descended from the gray wild goose and the dry goose, the guinea fowl - from the wild guinea fowl.[ ...]

In the population of common perch in the lake. Windermere (England), the vast majority of individuals lead a sedentary lifestyle, and in the pike population of the same reservoir, the proportion of mobile individuals was much larger. note the opposite trend in Behavior in representatives of this species.[ ...]

Some species and groups of insect species that have been sedentary for at least several generations, such as beetles of the genus Tachigatia (Arnoldi, 1941), aphids (Aphidodea), and many coccid eids (Coccodea), keep colonially, and colonies can reach an extremely high density (coccids and aphids can, for example, cover significant areas of plants in a continuous layer, without gaps) (Fig. 17).[ ...]

Modern man has mastered almost all regions of the planet, and for the last 8-10 thousand years it has been characterized by a sedentary lifestyle. Wherever a person lives, the natural and social conditions of life at a particular point in the biosphere determine his health and are his environment.[ ...]

Banking chickens were first domesticated by the Malay tribes, probably during the Neolithic period. When in ancient india agriculture (a settled way of life) arose, domestic animals were already bred there, including chickens. There is a mention of domestic chickens in the "Vedas" of the ancient Hindus, compiled 2 thousand years before our era. Chickens were brought to Europe much later (500-400 years BC) from Persia (Iran) under the name "Persian birds".[ ...]

In the Neolithic era, which refers to the post-glacial period, man already had earthenware, finer, sharpened and polished stone tools and led a sedentary lifestyle. Neolithic deposits are famous Lake Ladoga; many of them were found in other places of the USSR (in the black earth zone, in Ukraine, the Urals, the Caucasus, in Siberia, in Far East), as well as in Western Europe (in particular, in Switzerland). The bones of both wild and already domesticated animals were found in these deposits. Excavation data show that, following the dog, in the Neolithic era, man tamed and domesticated first the pig, then the sheep, goat and cattle (this sequence apparently changed in different places). The horse was domesticated much later.[ ...]

Char in the Lake Saimaa system can be caught with pike-perch tackle or with the help of a "mirror bullet". It is necessary to know the habitats of char (it belongs to salmon fish leading a sedentary lifestyle). Hooks must be especially sharp, as the char takes very carefully when the lure moves slowly.[ ...]

Couples of different ages are quite common. It has been shown, for example, that winter flocks of tits (Parus montanus, P. cristatus) are formed in autumn, after the end of migrations of young birds. The latter, moving to a settled way of life, are grouped with adult unrelated local birds. Considering that breeding pairs are formed from the composition of winter flocks, the probability of formation of unrelated and uneven-aged pairs is quite high. In some cases, there is an active preference for a sexual partner of a different age group. Thus, the age cross turned out to be quite common in the Moscow population of rock pigeons Columba livia (S.I. Pechenev, 1985). In experiments with the same species, a sexual preference was established for individuals who were more experienced (having more broods) and younger; at the same time, young birds that had no breeding experience were preferred to old ones (more than 7 years old), although they were experienced (N. Burley, N. Moran, 1979).[ ...]

The policy of the USSR towards the indigenous peoples of Chukotka was mainly associated with a forced transfer from tribal relations to the socialist path of development. Ethnic settlements were organized in the district, the indigenous people were forced to lead a settled way of life.[ ...]

Starting from the 8th millennium BC. e. in Western Asia begin to practice various methods tillage and cultivation of agricultural crops. In countries Central Europe this kind of agrarian revolution took place in the 6th-2nd millennium BC. As a result, a large number of people switched to a settled way of life, in which there was an urgent need for deeper observations of the climate, in the ability to predict the change of seasons and weather changes. By the same time, people discovered addiction weather events from astronomical cycles.[ ...]

The history of animal husbandry is inseparable from the history of man, the first traces of which, as is known, date back to the end of the Tertiary period (the Cenozoic era, 500-600 thousand years ago). The domestication of animals began much later (8-10 thousand years BC) and coincides with the new stone age (Neolithic period), when humanity began to move towards a more sedentary lifestyle. Domestication occurred as a result of several reasons: the depletion of hunting grounds, the unification of communities and tribes, the concentration a large number people and increasing their need for food.[ ...]

Real ways The formation of such groups has been traced, for example, in the course of rodent control in natural foci of infections. Thus, the Mongolian gerbils Meriones unguiculatus, which survived after the treatment of large territories with raticides, left their territories and switched to non-directional movements, during which they met with other animals and already in groups again switched to a sedentary lifestyle. Characteristically, during the period of migrations between gerbils, peaceful, contact forms of behavior clearly prevailed (D.P. Orlenev, 1981; D.P. Orlenev, S.V. Pereladov, 1981). Craving for contacts has also been shown in experiments with rodents, although in general this issue has not yet been studied clearly enough. It is possible that this property is not equally expressed in representatives of different sexes and ages. In experiments with the tree lizard Urosausus ornatus in natural populations, the removal of females caused a sharp increase in the mobility of males: only 5% of them remained in their territories; under the same conditions, the removal of males did not cause an increase in the mobility of females.[ ...]

Pigs are omnivores and herd animals. wild boars came close to human habitation. They were caught, trained to eat leftover food and used for meat. Later they began to catch pregnant queens. In captivity, they brought offspring, which people fattened and killed. So, gradually there was a domestication of pigs. The domestication of cattle proceeded much later, during the period of man's transition to a more settled way of life. The horse was domesticated later than cattle.[ ...]

Natural and climatic features had a significant impact on the development of the territory of Chukotka by Russian explorers. For the indigenous population, the ability of the territory to feed the people living on it, as well as the presence of natural and biological resources. In the future, natural and climatic features began to be taken into account only when choosing a site for the construction of a new locality during the period of economic development of the region and during the forced transfer of the indigenous population to a settled way of life (Research Final Report, 2000).[ ...]

If the rate of change and energy flux can be calculated from abundance and biomass data, a more reliable estimate of the value of a population in its community can be obtained. This is a relatively simple case: Ogske-Ntit are strictly herbivorous insects, are sedentary and have only one generation per year; the herbage consists of only one type of plant, which serves as the only source of food and shelter for insects. The number and biomass of individuals per 1 m2 were determined at time intervals of 3-4 days. With the help of these data, population growth, or productivity, was determined, for which the weight of those individuals that died during the population count period was added to the weight gain of living individuals. Productivity was expressed in kcal/m2 per day. Then, the oxygen consumption (respiration) of adults and nymphs of different sizes was determined in the laboratory depending on temperature. On the basis of these data, for each time period, the respiration of the population was calculated in relation to the average wet biomass and these data were reduced to the actual temperature of the environment. Using the appropriate coefficient (Ivlev, 1934), oxygen consumption was converted into calories. The overall rate of assimilation in the population was obtained by adding the values ​​of production and respiration.