"Nick Maclaren" wrote
Janet wrote:
says...

It was primitive women who did the grinding. The men were out all day
hunting
and gathering.

So who was sowing and harvesting those grain crops?

The women? :-)

Who cleared land of stones and trees and cultivated the soil fine
enough to sow the grain in?

In Britain, that's a damn good question - see Rackham and others.
My personal speculation is that it was normally done by neither
sex, but by ring-barking and intensive grazing. In most areas,
that will convert woodland to grassland in under a century, and
grassland is easy to convert to cultivation.

In parts of the third world nothing has changed.

In this country, hunter-gathering (found food) preceded agriculture
(the clearing of forest to create grazing, breeding/tending livestock,
cultivating soil to grow crops).

Yup. By a LONG way. Homo sapiens is one of two current land mammals
that has been here longest (tens of thousands of years). Clearing
the woodland didn't start until c. 3,000 BC.

This site explains the timeline......
http://www.ukagriculture.com/country...de_history.cfm


--
Regards. Bob Hobden.
Posted to this Newsgroup from the W of London, UK