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From The World A History by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto Combined Volume pg 13-59 with edits for classroom use

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The remains of Ice-Age people reveal that on average they were better nourished than most later populations Only modern industrialized societies surpass

20 I C HA PTE R 1

The FlinlSlones- the TI and movie modern stoneshyage family imagined by cartoonists Wil l iam Hanna and Joseph Barbera-inspired childish fan tasy and sl apstick comedy But the more we know of the humans of over 20000 years ago the more modern they seem with arts ambitions religions social forums poli t ica l pract rces and merlta l arid physical capacit ies recognizably like those of our own

Marshall Sahl ins The Origina l Aff luerlt Society f rom Stone-Age EconomiCs

their intake of 3000 calories a day In some lee-Age commushynities people ate about five pounds of food a day The nature of the plant foods they gathered-few starchy grains relativeshyly large amounts of fru it and wild tubers middot -and the high ascorbic acid content of animal organ meats provided five times the awrage intake of vitamin C of an American today Abundant game guaranteed Ice-Age affluence High levels of nutrition and long days of leisure unequalled in most subseshyquent societies meant people had time to observe nature and think abo ut what they saw The art of the era shows the subshylime res ults Like all good jokes The Flilt~rotJes-the popular television cartoon series about a modern Stone-Age famil yshycontains a kernel of truth Cave people really were like us with the same kinds of mi nds and many of the same kinds of tho ughts

Ice~Age Art

In the depths of the Ice Age a stunningly resourceful way of life took shape We know most about the period in Europe where extensive art has su rvived because it was made in deep caves evidently chosen because they were inaccessible Only now are the effects of tourism too many respiratoI)1 systems too many camera flashes damshyaging these works in their once-secret caverns Most preh istoric art has been found in northern Spain and southwest France (see Going to the Source Chauvet Cave pages 36-59) About fifty cave complexes contain thousands of paintings mostly of animals and hundreds of smaller works Examples of sculptures carvings and othe r art objects are also scattered across Europe from Britain and the Atlantic in the west to the Oder River and Carpathian Mountains in the east and beyond to Ukraine and the Ural Mountains wh ich divide Europe and Asia

What was the art fo r It surely told stories and had magical ritual uses Some an shyimal images are slashed or punctured many times over as if in symbolic sacrifice Where early artists used stenciling (tracing around a pattern) it seems believable that footprints and handprints inspired it A good case has been made for seeing the cave paintings as aids to track prey The shapes of hooves the tracks dung seasonal habits and favorite foods of the beasts are among the artists standard stock of images

The technology that made the cave art was simple a palette mLxed from three di ffe rent colors of the mineral ochre (OH-ker)- red brown yellow-and animal fat applied with wood bone and animal hair Yet eve n the earl iest works appeal inshystantly to modern sensibilities The looks and litheness of the animal portraits spring from the rock walls produc ts of practiced specialized hands and of learning accumulated over generations Carvings from the same period exhibit si mi lar elegance- ivory sculptures of 30000-year-old arched -necked horses from Vogdshyherd in south Germany female portraits from Brassempouy in France and Dolni Vestonice in tvloravia over 20000 years old Clay models of bears dogs and women were fired 27000 years ago at Dolnf Vestonice and at Maininskaya in what is now Russia

Outside Europe what little we know of the peoples of the time suggests that they created equally skillfu l work Four painted rock slabs from Namibia in southwest Africa are about 26000 years old almost as old as any art in Europe and bear similar

middotTubers plants with f leshy stems ofterl underground

animal images The earliest paintings that decorate the rocks of Arnhem La nd in northernmost Australia show faint traces of long4 extinct giant kangaroos and scary snakes A clue to the very idea of representing life in art fades today (wm a rock face in Ken niff Australia where stencils of human hands and tools were made 20000 years ago Aut most of the evidence has been lost weathered away on exposed rock faces perished with ule bod ies or hides on which it was painted or scattered by wind from the earth where it was scratched

Ice-Age Culture and Society

4The d iscovery of so much comparable art of comparable age in such widely separated parts of the world suggests an important and often overlooked fact The Ice Age as the last great era of what we would now call a kind of globalization That is key clements of culture were the same allover the inhabited worJd People practiced the same hunter-gatherer economy with similar kinds of technology ate similar kinds of food enjoyed similar levels of material cult ure and- as far as we can tell-had similar religiOUS practices

The material culture- concrete objects people create- that many archeologi shycal digs yield offers cl ues to what goes on in the mind A simple test establi shes that fact We ca n make in fo rmed inferences about peoples religion or politics or their attitudes toward natlLre and society or their values in general by looking at what they eat hOI they dress and how they decorate their homes For instan ce the peo 4

pIe who hunted mammot hs to e)tinction 20 000 years ago on the Ice-Age steppes of what is now southern Russia built dome- shaped dwellings of mammoth bones on a circula r plan twelve or fifteen feet in diameter that seem sublime triumphs of the imaginat ion They are reconstructions of mammoth nature humanly reimag4

[ned perhaps to acquire the beasts strength o r to magically assume power over the species In fact o rdinary everyday activities went on inside these eXlraord inary dwellings-sleeping eating and all the routines of fam ily life-in communities on aerage of fewer than a hundred people But no dwell ing is purely practical Your house refl ects your ideas about your place in the world

Thanks to the clues material culture yields we can make some confident asser4

t ions about other aspect s of lee-Age peoples lives their symbolic systems their magic and the kind of social and political units they lived in Although lee-Age people had nothing we recognize as writing they did have hig hly expressive symshybols which we ca n only struggle to translate Realistic drawings made 20000 to 30000 years ago show recurr ing gestures and postures Moreover they ofte n in shyclude what seem to be numbers sign ifi ed by dots and notches Ot her marks whi ch we can no long interpret are undeniab ly systematic One widely occurr ing mark that looks like a P may be a symbol for female because it resembles the curves of a womans body What looks as if it might be a calendar was made 30000 years ago in the Dordogne region in France It is a flat bone inscribed with crescen ts and cirshycles that may reco rd phases of the moon

Clues to lhe spiritual li fe of lhe ti me appear in traces of red ochre the earliest substance that seems to have had a role in ritual The oldest known ochre mi ne in the world about 42000 years old is at Lion Cave in what is now Lesotho in south 4

ern Africa The vivid lurid color was applied in burials perhaps as a precious

O ut of the Ice Peopling the Earth I 2 1

cave art Until they dIed out-Ylctfms of competition with and explOItation by settler commUnitles-m t he early twentieth century the Sout hern Bushmen of South Afnca made cave paintings similar 10 those Their ancestors made more than 20000 years ago On rock surfaces and cave walls sh amans painted thei r ~islons Of the creatures of the sPiri t-world glimpsed in stateli of ecstasy on imaginary journeys beyond the ord inarily accesshySible wor ld

offer ing perhaps to imitate blood and reinvest the dead w ith li fe The speculation that people m ight also have used ochre to paint their livi ng bod ies is hard to resist

Ice-Age people also used symbols and substances such as ochre in magic and those who controlled them ielded power In pain tin gs and ca rvings we can glimpse the Ice-Age elite people considered special and set apart fro m the group In fi gures wearing animal masks- antlered o r lionlike-the wearer is transformed From anthropological studies of the recent past we know such disguises are norshymally efforts to com m un icate with the dead o r with the gods Bringing messages from other worlds is the Tole of a shaman (SHAH-mehn) someone who acts as an intermedia ry between humans and spirits or gods The shaman may seck a sta te of ecstasy in duced by drugs or dan ci ng or drumming to see and hear realms normally inaccessible to the senses He becomes the medium through which spirits talk to th is world Among the Chukchi hu nters of northern Siberia whose way of life an d env ironment are simil ar to Icc-Age peoples the shltlillans experience is rep resented as a journey to co nsult the spirits in a realm that only the dead can norma lly enter The shaman may adopt an animal disguise to acquire the animals speed or strength or identify with an animal ancesto r The shamans role can be an awesome source o f authority Shamans can chaUenge alpha males Like other rd igions shamanism in shyvolves spiritual insight which people of both sexes various levels of intellect and a ll kinds of physique can acquire It can replace the strong with the seer and the stge By choosing el ites who had the gift o f commu nicating with sp irit s Ice-Age societies could escape the oppression of the physically powerful or those privileged by birth

Althou gh we cannot be SliTe about the nature of the Ice-Age power class we know it existed because of glaring inequalities in the way Ice-Age people were buried In a cemetery at Sunghir (SOON-geer) near Moscow dated about 24000 years ago the highest-status person seems at first glance to have been an el derly man His burshyial goods include a cap sewn with foxs teeth and about twenty ivory bracelets Nearshyby however two boys of aboll t eight or ten years old have even more spectacular ornaments As well as ivo ry bracelets and necklaces and fox-tooth buttons the boys have animal carvings and bcautifu U) wrought weapons including spea rs of mamshymoth ivo ry each over six fcct long About 3500 finely worked ivory beads had been drizzled over the head 10rso and limbs o f each boy Here was a society that marked leaders for greatness from boyhood and therefore perhaps from birth

In our attempt (0 undcrstand where power lay in lee-Age societies the ti nal bits of evidence are crumbs from ridl peoples tables fragments of feasts Archaeologists have found ashes from large-scale cooking and the calcified debris of food at sites in northern Spain perhaps from as long as 23000 years ago The tally sticks that survive from the s1me region in the same period may also have been records of expendirure on feasts Vlhat were such feasts for Dy analogy with modem hunting peoples the most likely reason was alliance-making between communities They were probably not male-bondshying occasions as some scholars think beca use they are close to major dwelling sites where women and child ren would be present Instead from the momen t of its emershygence the idea of th e feast had practical consequences to bu ild and strengthen societies and enhance the power o f those who organized the fcast~ and cont rolled the food (for more discussio n of feasting see Going to the Source feas ting pases 152-1 55)

Peopling the New World

The New World Jas the last part of the planet Homo sapiens peopled We can be sure of th at much but il is no t easy to say exactly when o r by whom According to the for merly dominant theo ry a gap opened benyeneen glaciers towa rd th e end of the Jee Age A race of hunters crossed the land lin k betvcen North America and

Out of t he Ice Peopling the Earth I 23

Shaman In many societies communication With the spirit-world remains the responSibility of the speCial ists whom anthropologists call shamans Typically they garb and paint or disguise themshyselves to resemble spirits or the animals deemed to have prIVI leged access to rulms beyond human sense The shamans then ~ JOurney to the spirits 01 ancesto~ In trances Induced by danCing drumshyming or drugs Shamans often aCQU ire SOCial mllumiddot ence and pol i tical authority as heale~ prophets and a rb l tra to~ _

Sunghir burial A prolUSion of beads distinguishes the graves of people Of high status at Sunghlr in RUSSia from about 24000 yea~ ago The dlstribushylion of signs of wealth In burials suggests that even m the Ice Age inequalities were fi fe and that status could be Inhell ted

24 1 CHAP T E R 1

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The Peopling of the New World

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pol~i bJe 1 1lt1 migriltion route

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early habitation ~Ite desulbed on pilge 2S

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~ forager settle ment desc ribed on pages 26-27

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Asia where the Bering Strai t now flows to cilter a paradi se where no human hunter h ad ever trod before Thc abundance wa~ so great and the animals so unshywary that the invaders ate enormously and multiplied greatly The) spread rapi dly over the hemisphere hUllting th e great gam e to exti nction as they went Th e story 3ppealcd to an unsophisticated fo rm of US paTriot ism The Clov is people as these hunters were dubbed after an ea rly archaeological site in New Mexico seemed to resemb le modern American pioneers They exhibited quick-fire locomotion husshytl e and bustle technical prowess big appetit es irrepress ible strength enormous cultural reach and a talent for reforging th e environment

By comparison the truth about the peopling of the hemisphere is d isappo intingshyly undramatic T hese first great American superheroes-like most of their successhysors-did not really exist Although archeologists have excavated too few sites for a co mplete and reliable picture to emerge a new theory dominates We have evidence of early human settlement scanered from the Yukon to Uruguay and from near th e Bering Strait to the edge of the Beagle Channel- that is from the waterway that dishyvides North Am erica and Asia to the sou thern limjts of the South American mainshyland This evide nce is so widespread over so lo ng a period in so m any diffe rent geological layers and with such avast range of cultural diversity th at one conclusion is inescapable---ltolonists came at di fferent times br inging different cultures with them

No generally accepted evidence dates any inhabited sites iT) the American hem ishysphere earlier than abo ut 13000 BCE (see Map 13) T he first arrivals came du ring a time when glaciers covered much of North Am erica They stuck dose to the cold where th e game was fattest They followed corridors benleen walls of icc or alon g narrow shores away fro m glaciers Other arrivals came by sea and continued to come afrer the land bridge laS submerged Arou nd 10000 )ears ago a catastrop hic cluster ofexti nctio ns wiped o ut the manuno th mastodon ho rse gian t sloth sabershytoothed tiger and at least thirty-five other large species in the Americas New hunt shying techniques and perhaps new hunting peoples were probably partly responsible But we can only explain the even ts in the context of vast climatic changes that afshyfec ted habitats and the whole ecology on which these an imals depended

Many supposedJy early sites of human habitation have proved to be delusions of overenthusiastic archaeologists-false or at best unconvi ncing A few sites however offer strong evidence of the antiquity and range of settlemen t Most are in the eastern Uni led States- a long way from Asia It must have taken a lon g time for these peoplc to get there from the vicinity of th e modern Bering Strait [n the mid-1970s 15000shyyear-old baskcrwork and tools made with fine flints emerged fro m deep under the d isshycarded beer cans that topped a d ig at Meadowcroft on the Ohio River near the border of Pennsylvania and West Virginia Archaeologists are investigating similar sites beshytvmiddoteen the Ohio and Sava nnah Rivers Later in the 19705 excavations at Monte Verde (MON-teh VER-deh) in southern Chile revealed a twen ty-foot long wooden hideshycovered dwelling preserved in a peat bog fo r about 12500 years Nearby wCrt a big mastodon-butchery and a space devoted to making tools The inhabitants bro ught salt and seaweed from the coast forty miles away and medicinal herbs from mounshytains equally fa r in the opposite direction Halfmiddotchewed lum ps of seaweed show the eaters dental bites a boys footprints survive in the clay lining of a pit Tf Meadowcroft is a long way from the colonizers entry po illt n ear the Bering Strait southern Chile is a world away again-almosl as far as you can get in the Western Hemisphere How lo ng would it have taken the senlers of MOnle Verde to cross the hemisphere over vast distances and th rough many difte rent kinds of environments each dem anding new forms of adaptl1ian Most specialists think it must have taken thousands of years The quest ion of the date of the firs t peopling of the New Vorld therefore remains open

Out of the Ice Peop ling the Earth I 25

l Clovis Points

Monte Verde About 12000 years ago a younil permiddot son trod in fresh clay thai lined a hearth in Monte Verde Chile Peat sealed and preserved Ihe footmiddot pnnt to be rediscovered by archaeologiSts 111 the 1970s EllcavaMns at Monle Verde revealed II VIImiddot tage of mammoth hunters so old that it made previshyous theories about when people arflved in the Americas Questionable or even untenable

26 I C HA PTER 1

SURVIVAL OF THE FORAGERS M the ice cap retreated and the great herds shifted with it many human communishyties opted to follow them Archeology has unearthed traces of their routes Along fhe way in what is now northern Germa ny about 12000 years ago people sacrificed reindeer by deliberately weighting them with stones sewn into their stomachs and drowning them in a lake About 1000 years later hunters as far north as Yorkshire in England who left a weU-preserved camp at Starr Carr found an elwironmem as abundant as the cave artistss had been Not only was it fill ed with tundramiddotloving species such as red deer elk and aurochs (OW- roks)-huge shaggy wi ld catlleshybut also with wild boar in surroundings that were becoming patchily wooded

At Skateholm in Sweden about 8000 years ago hunters founded the largest known settlement of the era [t was a winter camp in an area where the eighty-seven different animal species roamed that the inhabitants ate trapping river-fi sh netting sea-birds harpooning seals and dolphin sticking pigs and driving deer into pits or pondlt In summer the people must have moved farther north They lie today in groves decorated with beads and ocll1e and filted with the spoils of their careers including antlers and boars tusks Their dogs are buried nearby These burly wolflike companshyions are sometimes interred with more signs of honor than humans were given Dogs were full members of societies where hunting prowess and skill in war determined stashytus Many of the human dead bear wounds from man-made weapons Here too is evshyidence of sexual specialization Women have only a third as many wounds as the men

TIle most persistentJy faithful followe rs of the ice were the Inuit (IN-yoo-it) of North America About 4000 )ears ago they invented the blubber-filled soapstone lamp Now they couJd follow big game beond the tundra and into the darkness of an arctic winter They could track the musk ox to the shore of the ocean and the caribou on its winter migrations when its fur is th ickest and its fat most plentiful This way of life persisted until the late twentieth century although the people who first practiced it have disappeared Migrants from the Arctic Ocean replaced them 1000 )ears ago

Climate change trapped other foraging peoples in envi ronments where they had to develop new ways of life Some of these environments offered new kinds of abundance Here were broad -leaved forests rich in acorns (which make nut ritious food for any humans who have enough time to fine-gr ind them)) and lakes and rivers funof aquatic life New World prairies held apparently inexha usti ble stocks of bison (though th e largest bison species was rapidly hunted to extinction) Beshytween the unstable per iods of climate change around 12000 years ago foragers even colonized dense tropical forests in southeast Asia and in th e New World at Pedra Pintada in Brazil where the Amazon River now flows This is a region where foragers today have to struggle to find foods they can di gest but it seems to have been more environmentally diverse toward the end of the Ice Age

Some societies perpetuated their foraging life in hot arid deserts as different from the best hunting grounds of the ree Age as it is possible to imagine This reshyqu ired two forms of adaptation First the thinly dispersed populations had to create collaborative networks Such interdependence explains why peoples who live in ecoshylogically shaky homelands often require people to marry outside the group (a pracshytice lolOwn as exogamy) and why they regard hospitality to strangers as a sacred obligation Second poor environments demanded that in habitants develop what we might caU orally tra nsmi tted science For a ni with accurate and extensive knowlshyedge of their habitat can people survive in harsh environments

The San or Bushmen of southern Africas Kalahari Desert illustrate the diffi shyculties and solutions Their domain has shrunk in the last fe w centuries as Bantu farmers Khoi herdsmen and white invaders have overrun much of their fonner

Out of t he Ice P eopling t he Eartn I 27

territo ry But their heart1and was already dr Yll the time of tne Sans firs t occupancy about 14000 years ago Tne increased rainfall that usually followed the retreaT of tbe icc hardly fell nere There are undergro und rivers but few permanent water holes The people watch fo r rare signs of rain and hurry to

gather the vegetation that accompa nies it The scrubland pla nt foods induding wa ter-bearing tubers and a kind of cact us su pply 30 percent of tnei r sustenance The rest comes from game which grazes on lough desert shrubs that humans can shynot digest

Laurens van der Post a South African adventurer who has written about the Bushmen once accompanied a band of San hunters in search of their favorite food eland a type of anteshylope O ne morning just after sunrise they found the tracks of a herd By three in the afternoon after nonstop pursuit at a tro t Bushmen Though now obliged to adopt a mixed th ey came on the herd and took aim To kill large game is almosl impossible with a oconomy su pported in part by farming and donamiddot

tions of food the San or Bushmen of southernBushmans bow He wounds the beast with a poisoned barb and fo llows it until it Africa have been among the most conservative of

drops from exhaustion and the effects of the drug before milking the kill On Ibis the worlds peoples They maintained their foragshyoCCllsion the hunters rail for twelve miles without stopping and the final mile was ing way 01 li fe essentially unchanged for millen shy

nla---desplte neighbors attempts to e~lermU1alean all-out sprint The next time they made contact with the herd one bull was seen them ThiS record of survival contrasts with the to be tiring It still took another fu ll hou r of pursuit until he fell Then wit hout rapid turnover of more ambitiOUS Civilizat ions that

pause or break for rest they were fresh enough at the end to plunge straight 3vay rad ically modify their en~lronments usually With

into the formidable task of skinning and cuning up the heavy animal l Bushm en disastrous results

who persist with thi s demanding way of life to this day are obviously pursui ng a commitment that has grown out of generations of invested emoti on As difficul t as it may be for us to understand the San would find it heart-wrenching to change a way of life for the mere sake of efficiency convenience or material ga in

In one sense the worlds food supply st ill depends o n fo raging The amount of food from hunti ng actually increased in the twentieth cen tury which may go down in history not only as the last age of hunring but as the greatest World-over today we practice a highly specialized mechanized and unu sual form of huntingshydeep-sea trawling Fish farming is likely to replace it in the future but in any case deep-sea fishing is a historical th rowback

IN PERSPECTIVE After the Ice

In the post~ke-Age world little by littl e ove r thousa nds of years rn ost societies aban doned for shy CHRONOLOGY aging and adopted fa rming or herding as the way (A N dates are apPfoximltlte-l

to get their food Among peoples who still li ve Over 3 million years ago Lucyd ose to the ice cap the Inuit remain faithfu l to 2-1 million years ago Homo erectus migrates from East Afnca 10 Afnea

their hunting tradition in North America Mos t of and EuraSia

their Old World counterparts however have long 100000 years ago Homo sapiens migrates out of Afnca

abandoned it In Eu rasia though some hunting 67000 years ago Homo sapiens in ASia 50000 years ago Homo sapiens colonizes Australia and New Guineacultures still cling to the old ways at th e eas tern

Homo sapiens reaches Europe end of Siberia the peoples on th e western Arctic 30000 years ago last Neanderthals vanishrim-the Sami (or Lapplanders) of Sca ndinavia

20000- World emerges from the Ice Age and their neighbors the Kardia Samoyeds and 15000 iICE Nenets-adopted re indee r herding over a th oushy 20000 BC pound Invent ion of the bow and arrow sand years ago The Ice- Age way oflife if not over 13000 BCpound Homo sapiens in the Americas is drawing to a close Hunting is now th ought of

28 I CHAP TE R 1

as a pri mitive way to get food long abandoned excep t as an aristoc ratic indulmiddot gellee in som e co untries or as a supposedJy manly sport in others

The disappearance of fo raging lifeways seems a rema rkable turn around for a predatorspecies such as Homo sapiells There was a time before hun ting when our ancestors were scavenge rs but for hundreds of thousands perhaps millions of years foraging was reliable and reward ing It fed people through every change of climate Its practitioners spread over th e world and adapted successfully to every kind of habitat Homo sapiens dominated every ecos)stem they became part of and competed successfully with most other species They achieved startling in shycreases in their numbers which we struggle to e(plain They founded more varied societ ies than any other species (though the differences among these societies were slight compared to later periods) They had art-rich cultures with traditions of learning and symbolic systems to record information They had their own so shycial elites polit ical customs) ambitious magic and practical methods to exploit their environ ment

Our next task is to ask why after the achievements recounted in this chapter did people abandon the foragi ng li fe Renouncing the hunt and pursuing new ways of life after the Ice Age are among the most far- reaching and mysterious transforshymations of the human past If the puzzle of hy Homo sapiens spread over the Earth is the first great questio n in our history the problem of wh) fo ragers became farmers is th e second

PROBLEMS AND PARALLELS 1 When does the story of humankind begm Is it possible to 5 Which stresses cou ld have caused early peoples to d iVide and

defme what it means to be huma n What characteristiCS do f ight eac h other Wh ich theories have been put forward for how we share with chimpanzees and other apes war started

2 How do Neandert hals and Homo floresiensis cha llenge 6 How did ma le domination come to be normal in human soc ishycommonly held definitions of Homo sapiens eties What impact did sexual econom ic specialiZa t ion have on

early SOC iet ies3 Why d id Homo sapiens migrate out of Afr ica How did migrashytion change peoples relationships with each other and wi th 7 Why was the Ice Age a time of affl uence What role did shamans thelf environment play in Ice-Age soc iety What insights Into Ice-Age societies ca n

we glean from its art and the rema ins of anc ient feasts4 What were the factors behind the rapid population growth of Homo sapiens 8 How did some SOCieties perpetuate the fOlaging li fe after the

Ice Age How has the foraging life persisted today

bull bullbull

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE A Case in Point Aboriginal Australians Preagricultural Settlements The Disadvantages of Fa rming

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS Herders Environments Tillers Environments

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE Europe Africa Asia The Pac ific Islands The Americas

SO WHY DID FARMING START Population Pressure The Outcome of Abundance The Power of Politics Cu lt Agriculture Climatic Instability Agriculture by Accident Production As an Outgrowth of Procurement

IN ERSP CT1VEmiddot Saskinamp Stability

n August 1770 the Bri tish navigator Captain James Cook reached the north

coast of Australia on the first of his spectacular voyages of exploration that

charted the lands and limits of the Pacific Ocean Ncar Cape York hc ___-~

paused at an island he named Possession Island For although his

stated purpose was scientific he was also an officer of the Royal Navy

with orders to extend the British Empire To Cooks mind the island

though inhabIted was wa iting to be grabbed The natives could not be

said to possess it because they had left no marks of possession on its soil

A wealth of plants that they could hae domesticated-fruits proper IQr

the support of mann-was growing wild Yet Cook wrote the people know nothshy

ing of cultivation It seems strange He was puzzling over one of the most pershy

plexing problems of history- the- diffe rence between forage rs and farmers food

procurers and food producers

Food is the most precious of resources Nothing Ill happen without it To most people in most societies for most of the time food is and always has been the most important thing in the world Change~ in how we get food and whether we get it arc among histors big changes During the global warming that fo ll owed the Ice Age hUSbandry-breeding animals and cultivating crops-began to replace hunting and gathering and introduced the biggest cha nge of all

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE

Husbandry happened in two distinct ways involving different tpes of environshyments and different levels of environmental intervention In some environments people could exploi t creatures that had a he rd instinct by managing the herds rather than by hunting them Breeding enhanced qualities that evolution did not necessa rily favor such as docility size and yield of meat m il k eggs and fat On the negative side close contact between humans and animals often allowed disease-bearing organisms to thrive th reatening human lives and health and sometimes unleashing plagues Otherwi se however animal husbHlIdry barely affectcd the environment Herds on the whole kept to their traditional patterns of migration and people continued to accompany them-driving the beasts now rather than follOving them Domest icated animals remained recognizably the hei rs of their wild ancestors and the landscapes through which they traveled did not change much except that the herds feeding and manure probably

32 I CHAPTER 2

encouraged the grasses they ate to flourish at the expense of othe r plant species

In other environments however plant husbandry involved massive human intervention In the long run

WHY ARE settled foragers better off than farmers tillage of the soil changed the world mo re than any previshyous innovation by Homo sapiens From postglacial m ud W HAT K INDS of environments are suited to herding people coaxed what we now call civilization-a way of

WHAT KINDS of environments were suited to early agricu lture life based on rad ically modifying the environment Inshy

W H ERE D ID farm ing start and what were t he fi rst crops stead of merely t rying to manage the landscape nature

GIVEN THE d isadvantages why did people iarm provided farmers recarved it with fields and boundaries

The rice fields of Bali in IndoneSia are among the most proo uct ive in the world usrng variet ies of rice and techniques for farming it thal are about 1000 years old Irrigation channels maintained and administered by farmers cooperatives distrrbute water everl ly among the terraces Though oflgirla l ly a lowlarld crop fa voring swampy conditions rice adapts perfec tly ro upland enVIronments and to terrace farmrng

di tches and irrigation ca nals They stamped the land with a new look a geometrical order Agric ul ture enabled humans to see the world in a new way-to imagine that magic and science had the power to change nature Such power in turn changed peoples sense of where they fit into the panorama of life on Earth Now they could become lords or in more modest moments or cultures stewards of creation

Together farm ing and herding revolutionized humans place in their ecosysshyterm Instead of merely dependi ng on other life forms to sustain us we forged a new relationship of interdependence with th ose species we eat We rely on them for food they rely on us for th eir reproduction Domesticated animals would not exist without humans Husbandr was the firs t human challenge to evolution Instead of evolvi ng species through natural selection) fa rming and herding proceed by what might be called unnatural selection-sorting and selecting by human hands for human needs according to human agendas In other words e breed livestock and cultivate plants

Herding and tilling also changed human societies By feeding people on a vastshyly greater scale agricu lture allowed societies to get hugely bigger than ever before We can only guess at the absolute figures but in areas where farming has replaced foraging in modern ti mes population has increased fifty- or even a hundredfol d Larger populations demanded new fo rms of cont rol of labor and food distribu shytion which Il1 turn nurtured strong states and powerful elites Society became more volatile and apparently less stable

In almost every case for reasons we still do not understand when people begin to practice agriculture th e pace of change quickens immeasurably and cu shymulat ively States an d civilizations do not seem to last for long Soc ieties that we think of as being most evo lved turn out to be least fitted for survival Compared with the relat ive stability of forager communities soci eties that depend on agr ishyculture are prone to lurch and coll apse History becomes a path picked amon g their ru ins

Still for Captain Cook and for most people who haye thought about it ever since it was indeed strange that people who had the opportunity to practice agrishyculture should not take advantage of it The advantages of agri culture seem so ob shyvious The farmer can select the best specimens of edible crops and creatures collect th em in the most co nvenient places and pastures crossbreed the livestock and hybridize the plants to improve size yi eld or flavo r By these methods sm all farming socie ties grow into comm unities and build up large populations Usually they go on to create ci ties and develop ever more complex technologies To Cook and his contemporaries in Europe who believed that progress was inevitable and that the same kind of changes are bound to happen everywhere peoples who dung to foraging seemed baffling

Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 33

A Case in Point Aborigina l Australians

Cook and others at the time saw only two explanations for why foragers sllch as the aborigines (AB-eh-rihj- ih-neez) in Australia would reject agriculture They were either stupid o r subhuman Indeed early European painters in Aust ralia depicted aborigines as apelike creatures grimaci ng oddl) and crawling in trees The colo nists s impl y ignored the nati es o r when they got in the way often hunted them downshyas they would beasts But not on ly did tbe native Aust ralians reject agriculture in some areas th ey appeared [0 shun every technical cO llvenience On the island o f Tasman ia in the extreme south of Australia where the natives became extinct soon after European settlement began they seemed to have forgotten every art of their ancestors bows boats even how to kindle fi rc In Arnhem Land in the extreme north they used boomerangs to make musi c but no longer as weapons for th e hunt Progress which the European discoverers of Australia believed in fervently seemed to have gone into reverse Australia was not only on the exact opposite side of the world from England it was a topsy-turvy place where everythi ng was upside down

We can hOever be certain that if aborigines rejected agriculture o r other practices Europeans considered progressive it must have been for good reasons TIle aborigines did not lack the knowledge necessary to switch from fo raging to farming had they so wished When they gathered wild yams or the root known as

James COO K from Captain Cooks Journal During his First Voyage Round the World

nardoo they ensured that enough of the plant remained in the ground to grow back In many regions too they used fire to control the grazi ng grounds of kangaroos and concentrate Ihem for hunting a common technique among herders to manage pasture and among tillers to renew the soil Along the Murray and Darling Rivers aborigines even watered and weeded wild cro ps and policed their boundaries against human and animal pred ators (sec Map 20

The abo rigi nal Australians could also have systematically planted and irrigated crops farmed the grubs they liked to eat pen ned kangashyroos and even tried to domestica te them (Kangaroos are can tankerous creatures but people do make pets o f them Breeding selected speci shymen s would probably produce a domestic strain in a few generations ) In the far no rth of Australia aboriginal communities traded with the farming cultures of New Guinea So even if they hadnt developed agrishyculture on th eir own they could have lea rned it fro m o utsi ders If the aborigines did not farm it must have been because they did not want to In short they were doing well without it Simil ar cases all over the world support this conclusion Where wild foods are abundant there is no in shycentive to do mesticate them Of course people o ften adopt p ractices that d o them no good We can concede this general principle but case by case we stiJI han t ( 0 know why

Preagricultura l Settlements

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Under some conditions people can settle in one place without the trouble of farmshying Archaeological evidence in the region we now ca ll the Middle East shows this After the Ice Age ended about 15000 lJCE a frontier zone between forest and grassland stretched across the eastern sho re of the Mediterranean and what are now Iran eastern Turkey and Iraq (see Map 22) The forests were full of acorns pistachios and almonds which gatherers ground into flour and paste The grassshylands bred vast quantjties of wild grass with edible seeds These foods could all he

34 I C H A P TER 2

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warehoused between harvests and had the additional advantage of maturing at di fferent times Dense herds of gazelle in the gra sslands prov ided more nutrition for hunters to bring home Food was so plentiful that foragers did not have to move around much to fi nd it

By abou t 14000 to 15000 years ago permanent sen lements a rose th roughout the region clusters of dwelli ngs with stone wa lls or those made of wood on stone foundations or cue from soft stone and roofed with reeds The foragers who lived in th ese sedentary communities apparently kept to themselves Villages had dis shytinctive iden tit ies and habits wh ich almost amounted to badges of identity Some favored gazelle toe bones for jewelry some preferred fox teeth and partridge legs These people married within their own communities (a practi ce known as en shydogamy) judging from th e evidence of inherited physical characteristics For ex shyample in some villages people were retatimiddotely short while in others they had d istinctive dental patterns These settlers cut what look like plans of their fields on limestone slabs which suggests that they were terri torial- that they had a sense of possession that Captain Cook would have recognized

Out of the Mud Far mIng and Herding A fter tne Ice Age 35

In sum the lives of preagricultural settlers were so much like the lives of the early fa rmers who succeeded them that when anhaeologists first found the forshyagers villages in the 1930s they assumed the inhabitants were farmers Bue the setshylied foragers were 3ctuaHy better off than farmers Their rema ins on the whole show better health and nourishme nt than the fa rming peoples who followed later in the sa me region A diet rich in seeds and nuts had ground down their teeth but- unl ike the farmers-they have none of the streaked tooth -enamel common among people who suffer from food shortages

Simi la r evidence of preagricultural settlements exists in other places Take a few conspicuous examples The Jomon (JOHM-mehn ) people of central Honshu Island in Japan hved in permanent vi llages 13000 years ago feeding themselves by fishing il nd gathering acorns and chestnuts They made pots fo r display in elaboshyrate shapes modeled on flames and serpents an d lacquered them with tree sap Their potters were in a sense magicians transforming clay into objects of prestige and ritua l In the Egyp tim Sahara lit Nabta Playa about forty plant species inclu shyding sorghum a type of cereal grass grew alongside hearths and pit oven~ evi shydence of settled life from about 10000 years ago In other pa rts of (en tral Sahara in the same period that had plenty of water and a cookr climate than now foragers fou nd sorghum and millet another cereal grass At Gobekli Tepe (goh- BEHK-lee TEH-pchl a hilltop site in so utheast Turkey co ntemporaries who lived mainly by gathering wild wheat he ed seven -ton pillars from li mestone They reerected them in a sunken chamber in their village and decorated them with carvings of snakes boar gazelles cra nes and symbols that look suspiciously like writing

What was life li ke in these earliest settl ements Small permanent houses sugshygest that nuclear families-parents and children-predominated though so me sites clearty have communal work areas for grinding seeds and nuts As for who did the work the most stunn ing find ing of recent archaeology in the Middle East sugshygests that work was probably shared behleen the sexes The way skeletons are musshycled suggests th at women did slightly more kneeling (and therefore slightly more gr inding) than men and men did more throwing (and therefore more hunting) than women But both sexes did both activit ies Male and female bodies began to reconverge after a long period during which they bad evolved to look differently As food product ion replaced hunting and gathering wa r and child rearing became the main sex-specific jobs in society The convergence between th e physical feashytures of men and women seems still to be in progress today Indeed it seems to be accelerating as men and women share more and morc tasks and the need for heavshyily muscled or big framed bod ies di minishes along wi th physica ll y demanding jobs in much of the world

The Disadvantages of Farming

Prernrming comm unities do not simply progress to fann ing If foraging produces abundance and sec urity it does not necessarily follow that farming can deliver more of the same The consequences of adopting agriculture are by no means all positive In the early stages of moving from foraging to fa rm ing the food supply actually becomes less reliable because people depend on a relatively small range of fa rmed foods or even on a si ngle species As a result a community becomes vulnerable to ecological disasters Famine becomes more likely as diet narrows Moreover when people have 0 plant and grow food as weDas gather it they have to use up more energy to get the sa me amount of nourishment (Although domesmiddot ticated food s once harvested tend to be easier to process for eating) The need to

lomon pottery Ten thousand years ago the Jomon potters of Japan produced the worlds earliest knOvn earthenware vessels Other pottel)-makmg peoples also practled farm ing but the Jomon people were sedentary foragers--l lvlng in permamiddot nent or long-term settlements but managing the environment in mInimal ways and relyIng on abunshydant wild foods including nuts seeds acorns some 70 marine animal Spec ies and land mamshymals---eatmg no just boar deer and hare but also wolves Wildcats f lYing squIrrel s and mon keys

Overuse deforms bones ArchaeolO8) can reconmiddot struc t how ancient peop le b(gthaved by measuring the deformities In their skeletons The woman hose toe th is was lived In a commuMy of eady sedentary foragers In what is now Syria She evIshydently spent much of her tIme kneeling presumshyably to grlFld the acorns and kernels of Wild wheat on whIch her people re lied for food

36 I C H A P T ER 2

Early Forager Settlements (All dales are approximate)

15000 yea rs ago 14000-15000

yea rs ago 13000 years ago 10000 years ago

l

World emerges from the Ice Age Permanent settlements appear In Middle East

Honshu Island Japan

Nabta Playa Egypt GObekh Tepe Turkey

organize labor encourages inequalities and explo itation Concentrashytions of domesticated animals spread disease such as smallpox measles rubella ch icken pox influenza and tuberculosis

So the problem is really the opposite of what Cook supposed It is fanners behavior not fo ragers that is strange Husba nd ry is not a step along a march of improvement because in some ways it makes life worse No one has PU l the problem better than the histo rian of agronomy Jack L Harlan

people who do not farm do about eveq1hing that farmers do but they do lot work as hard They understand thllifc cycles of plants kno the seashysons of the year and when and where the natural plant food resources can he

Jack Harlan from Crops and Man

Chukchi herder The choice between huntmg and herding otten depends on local and historical Clrmiddot cumstances Remdeermiddotherding is an anCient pracmiddot tlce In muc h of northern Euragtla whereas irl North America the can bou have remained wild In e~treme norlheast Asia close to America the Chukchi long resisted the example of neighboring peo ple and preferred hunting 10 herding In the last two or Illree cenlurles however they have adopted the herdsman s vocat ion shown here

hareswd in great abundance with the least eff() rt There is evidence that thl diet of g-athshyering peoples was better than that of cultivators that slarvation was rare that there was a lower incidence of chronic disease and not nearly so many cavities in their teeth

The question must be raised Whr furm Vhy work harder for food less nut rishytious md a supply more capricious Why invite famine plague ~poundtilcnce and crowded living conditions 1

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

Part of what is surprising about agriculture is that it is so common Not only has almost th e entire human world adopted 1t many peoples ca me to it indepenshydently of one anot her Scholars used to su ppose that it was so extraordinary it must have begun in some particular spo t and that diffusion spread it from there- carried by migrants or conquerors or transmitted by t rade o r im itated The last 40 years of research have shown on the contrary that the transition to

food product io n happened over and over agai n in a range of regions and a variety of environments with d ifferen t foodstuffs and di fferent techn iques The most obv ious co ntrast in environ ments is betwee n herders and tillers Herd ing develops where plan ts a re tOO spa rse or indigestible to sustain human life but a nim als can convert these pla nts into meat-an energy SO UTee tha t people can access by eating th e anim als Tilling deshyvelops where th e soil is suitable or enough ecologica l di shyversity ex ists to susta in plant husbandry o r mi xed farming of plants and animals

Herders Environments

[n three regions of the Earth-tundra the evergreen foresls of no rthern Eurasia and great grasslands- il is not possible to grow enough humanly d igest ible plant foods to keep large numbers of people alive [n the

tund ra and evergreen forests average temperatures arc too low the growing sea shyson too short the surface soil too vulnerable to frost and the subso il in some areas too froze n In these environments thert~ are only two options People can remain foragers- an d primari ly hu nters seeking the fa t-ri ch species rypical of stich zones The [nu it in the North American Arctic for example hunt seal and walrus Or people can become herders like the Sami and Samoyeds of north ern Europe and northwest Asia who live off rei ndeer

Out of the Mud Farming and H erding After the Ice Age I 37

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 FORAGERS AND FARMERS COMPARED

FORAGERS FARMERS

Food procurers Food producers

hUn and gather husbandry (breed animals cultivate crops)

Fit into nature Chanampe nature

little environmental impact herders some environmental impact tillers massive environment impact

Manaampethe landscape Nature remade and reimagined

Dependence on wild animals and plants Interdependence between humans plants and animals

animals and plants exploited and domeslicated

Stable food supply Unstable food supply

nomadic fOfltlgcrs move in response 10 environmental small range of farmed foods increases vulnerability change sedentary fo ragers vulnerable to changes of climate to ecological disasters

Stable popUlation

relatively little labor needed population COlltrol avalable mainly by managed lactatioll

Expandinamp population

breeding livestock and cultivating plants leads to increased food supply increased population concentrations of domesticated animals spread disease

Stable society

kinship and age fi x ind ividuals place in sodery sexes usually share labor by spedalidng in difterent economic tasks

Radically changed unstable society

need to control labor and food distribution leads to social inequalititS work shared between the sexes increased reliance on female labor ~trong nates dewlop with powerful elites complex technologies

Similarly the soils of the world s vast grassla nds- known as prairie in North America pampa in South America steppe in Eurasia and the Sahel (sah-HEHL) in Africa- have for most of history been unfavorable for tillage (sce Map 23) The sad is mostly too difficu lt to turn without a steel plow Except for patches of excepshytionally favorable soil herding has been the only possible fo rm of husbandry in these areas The peoples of the Eurasian and Africa n grasslands were probably herdi ng by about 5000 acE Native American grassland dwellers of the New World on the othe r hand retained a foraging way of life because available species-bison various types of antelope-were (or the lIlost part more abun shydant for the hunt and less suitable fo r herding

For those who choose it herding has three special consequences First it imposshyes a mobile way of life The proportion of the population ho follow the herdsshyand in som e cases it is the enri re popu lation-cannot seuJe into permanent

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38 I CHAP TER 2

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villages Herder peoples are not ul1iLling or unable to build permanently or on a large sca le The Scythians for instance people of the -estern Asian steppe who first domesticated the horse and invented th e wheel and axle about 6000 to 7OCX years ago built impressive stone structures Bul these wefe underground tombs dwellings fo r the dead while the living inhabited temporary camps Some herding societies in Asia and Africa have become rich enough to fou nd ci ties fo r elites OT for specialists working outside of food production such as craftsmen or miners Indeed as we shall see (Chap ter 13) in the thirteenth century CF a city of thi s type Karakorum in Mongolia was one of the most admired cities in the world On the whole howshyever herding does no t favo r the development of cities o r the kind of culture that cities nourish such as monumental buildings large-scale inst itutions fo r education and the arts and ind ustrial technology

Second since herde rs breed from animal s that naturally share their grassland habitats thei r herds consist of such creatures as cattl e sheep horses goats-milkshyyielding stock To get the fu ll benefit fro m their auimals herdin g peoples have to eat dai ry products To modern milk-fed Americans this may sound perfeclly no rshyma l But it required a modification of human evolution Most people in most part s of the world do not natural1 ) produce lactase the substance that enables them to d igest milk after infancy They respond to dairy products wit h distaste or even intol erance The Masai of Kenya in East Africa get 80 percent of their energy

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

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intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

2

3

4

The remains of Ice-Age people reveal that on average they were better nourished than most later populations Only modern industrialized societies surpass

20 I C HA PTE R 1

The FlinlSlones- the TI and movie modern stoneshyage family imagined by cartoonists Wil l iam Hanna and Joseph Barbera-inspired childish fan tasy and sl apstick comedy But the more we know of the humans of over 20000 years ago the more modern they seem with arts ambitions religions social forums poli t ica l pract rces and merlta l arid physical capacit ies recognizably like those of our own

Marshall Sahl ins The Origina l Aff luerlt Society f rom Stone-Age EconomiCs

their intake of 3000 calories a day In some lee-Age commushynities people ate about five pounds of food a day The nature of the plant foods they gathered-few starchy grains relativeshyly large amounts of fru it and wild tubers middot -and the high ascorbic acid content of animal organ meats provided five times the awrage intake of vitamin C of an American today Abundant game guaranteed Ice-Age affluence High levels of nutrition and long days of leisure unequalled in most subseshyquent societies meant people had time to observe nature and think abo ut what they saw The art of the era shows the subshylime res ults Like all good jokes The Flilt~rotJes-the popular television cartoon series about a modern Stone-Age famil yshycontains a kernel of truth Cave people really were like us with the same kinds of mi nds and many of the same kinds of tho ughts

Ice~Age Art

In the depths of the Ice Age a stunningly resourceful way of life took shape We know most about the period in Europe where extensive art has su rvived because it was made in deep caves evidently chosen because they were inaccessible Only now are the effects of tourism too many respiratoI)1 systems too many camera flashes damshyaging these works in their once-secret caverns Most preh istoric art has been found in northern Spain and southwest France (see Going to the Source Chauvet Cave pages 36-59) About fifty cave complexes contain thousands of paintings mostly of animals and hundreds of smaller works Examples of sculptures carvings and othe r art objects are also scattered across Europe from Britain and the Atlantic in the west to the Oder River and Carpathian Mountains in the east and beyond to Ukraine and the Ural Mountains wh ich divide Europe and Asia

What was the art fo r It surely told stories and had magical ritual uses Some an shyimal images are slashed or punctured many times over as if in symbolic sacrifice Where early artists used stenciling (tracing around a pattern) it seems believable that footprints and handprints inspired it A good case has been made for seeing the cave paintings as aids to track prey The shapes of hooves the tracks dung seasonal habits and favorite foods of the beasts are among the artists standard stock of images

The technology that made the cave art was simple a palette mLxed from three di ffe rent colors of the mineral ochre (OH-ker)- red brown yellow-and animal fat applied with wood bone and animal hair Yet eve n the earl iest works appeal inshystantly to modern sensibilities The looks and litheness of the animal portraits spring from the rock walls produc ts of practiced specialized hands and of learning accumulated over generations Carvings from the same period exhibit si mi lar elegance- ivory sculptures of 30000-year-old arched -necked horses from Vogdshyherd in south Germany female portraits from Brassempouy in France and Dolni Vestonice in tvloravia over 20000 years old Clay models of bears dogs and women were fired 27000 years ago at Dolnf Vestonice and at Maininskaya in what is now Russia

Outside Europe what little we know of the peoples of the time suggests that they created equally skillfu l work Four painted rock slabs from Namibia in southwest Africa are about 26000 years old almost as old as any art in Europe and bear similar

middotTubers plants with f leshy stems ofterl underground

animal images The earliest paintings that decorate the rocks of Arnhem La nd in northernmost Australia show faint traces of long4 extinct giant kangaroos and scary snakes A clue to the very idea of representing life in art fades today (wm a rock face in Ken niff Australia where stencils of human hands and tools were made 20000 years ago Aut most of the evidence has been lost weathered away on exposed rock faces perished with ule bod ies or hides on which it was painted or scattered by wind from the earth where it was scratched

Ice-Age Culture and Society

4The d iscovery of so much comparable art of comparable age in such widely separated parts of the world suggests an important and often overlooked fact The Ice Age as the last great era of what we would now call a kind of globalization That is key clements of culture were the same allover the inhabited worJd People practiced the same hunter-gatherer economy with similar kinds of technology ate similar kinds of food enjoyed similar levels of material cult ure and- as far as we can tell-had similar religiOUS practices

The material culture- concrete objects people create- that many archeologi shycal digs yield offers cl ues to what goes on in the mind A simple test establi shes that fact We ca n make in fo rmed inferences about peoples religion or politics or their attitudes toward natlLre and society or their values in general by looking at what they eat hOI they dress and how they decorate their homes For instan ce the peo 4

pIe who hunted mammot hs to e)tinction 20 000 years ago on the Ice-Age steppes of what is now southern Russia built dome- shaped dwellings of mammoth bones on a circula r plan twelve or fifteen feet in diameter that seem sublime triumphs of the imaginat ion They are reconstructions of mammoth nature humanly reimag4

[ned perhaps to acquire the beasts strength o r to magically assume power over the species In fact o rdinary everyday activities went on inside these eXlraord inary dwellings-sleeping eating and all the routines of fam ily life-in communities on aerage of fewer than a hundred people But no dwell ing is purely practical Your house refl ects your ideas about your place in the world

Thanks to the clues material culture yields we can make some confident asser4

t ions about other aspect s of lee-Age peoples lives their symbolic systems their magic and the kind of social and political units they lived in Although lee-Age people had nothing we recognize as writing they did have hig hly expressive symshybols which we ca n only struggle to translate Realistic drawings made 20000 to 30000 years ago show recurr ing gestures and postures Moreover they ofte n in shyclude what seem to be numbers sign ifi ed by dots and notches Ot her marks whi ch we can no long interpret are undeniab ly systematic One widely occurr ing mark that looks like a P may be a symbol for female because it resembles the curves of a womans body What looks as if it might be a calendar was made 30000 years ago in the Dordogne region in France It is a flat bone inscribed with crescen ts and cirshycles that may reco rd phases of the moon

Clues to lhe spiritual li fe of lhe ti me appear in traces of red ochre the earliest substance that seems to have had a role in ritual The oldest known ochre mi ne in the world about 42000 years old is at Lion Cave in what is now Lesotho in south 4

ern Africa The vivid lurid color was applied in burials perhaps as a precious

O ut of the Ice Peopling the Earth I 2 1

cave art Until they dIed out-Ylctfms of competition with and explOItation by settler commUnitles-m t he early twentieth century the Sout hern Bushmen of South Afnca made cave paintings similar 10 those Their ancestors made more than 20000 years ago On rock surfaces and cave walls sh amans painted thei r ~islons Of the creatures of the sPiri t-world glimpsed in stateli of ecstasy on imaginary journeys beyond the ord inarily accesshySible wor ld

offer ing perhaps to imitate blood and reinvest the dead w ith li fe The speculation that people m ight also have used ochre to paint their livi ng bod ies is hard to resist

Ice-Age people also used symbols and substances such as ochre in magic and those who controlled them ielded power In pain tin gs and ca rvings we can glimpse the Ice-Age elite people considered special and set apart fro m the group In fi gures wearing animal masks- antlered o r lionlike-the wearer is transformed From anthropological studies of the recent past we know such disguises are norshymally efforts to com m un icate with the dead o r with the gods Bringing messages from other worlds is the Tole of a shaman (SHAH-mehn) someone who acts as an intermedia ry between humans and spirits or gods The shaman may seck a sta te of ecstasy in duced by drugs or dan ci ng or drumming to see and hear realms normally inaccessible to the senses He becomes the medium through which spirits talk to th is world Among the Chukchi hu nters of northern Siberia whose way of life an d env ironment are simil ar to Icc-Age peoples the shltlillans experience is rep resented as a journey to co nsult the spirits in a realm that only the dead can norma lly enter The shaman may adopt an animal disguise to acquire the animals speed or strength or identify with an animal ancesto r The shamans role can be an awesome source o f authority Shamans can chaUenge alpha males Like other rd igions shamanism in shyvolves spiritual insight which people of both sexes various levels of intellect and a ll kinds of physique can acquire It can replace the strong with the seer and the stge By choosing el ites who had the gift o f commu nicating with sp irit s Ice-Age societies could escape the oppression of the physically powerful or those privileged by birth

Althou gh we cannot be SliTe about the nature of the Ice-Age power class we know it existed because of glaring inequalities in the way Ice-Age people were buried In a cemetery at Sunghir (SOON-geer) near Moscow dated about 24000 years ago the highest-status person seems at first glance to have been an el derly man His burshyial goods include a cap sewn with foxs teeth and about twenty ivory bracelets Nearshyby however two boys of aboll t eight or ten years old have even more spectacular ornaments As well as ivo ry bracelets and necklaces and fox-tooth buttons the boys have animal carvings and bcautifu U) wrought weapons including spea rs of mamshymoth ivo ry each over six fcct long About 3500 finely worked ivory beads had been drizzled over the head 10rso and limbs o f each boy Here was a society that marked leaders for greatness from boyhood and therefore perhaps from birth

In our attempt (0 undcrstand where power lay in lee-Age societies the ti nal bits of evidence are crumbs from ridl peoples tables fragments of feasts Archaeologists have found ashes from large-scale cooking and the calcified debris of food at sites in northern Spain perhaps from as long as 23000 years ago The tally sticks that survive from the s1me region in the same period may also have been records of expendirure on feasts Vlhat were such feasts for Dy analogy with modem hunting peoples the most likely reason was alliance-making between communities They were probably not male-bondshying occasions as some scholars think beca use they are close to major dwelling sites where women and child ren would be present Instead from the momen t of its emershygence the idea of th e feast had practical consequences to bu ild and strengthen societies and enhance the power o f those who organized the fcast~ and cont rolled the food (for more discussio n of feasting see Going to the Source feas ting pases 152-1 55)

Peopling the New World

The New World Jas the last part of the planet Homo sapiens peopled We can be sure of th at much but il is no t easy to say exactly when o r by whom According to the for merly dominant theo ry a gap opened benyeneen glaciers towa rd th e end of the Jee Age A race of hunters crossed the land lin k betvcen North America and

Out of t he Ice Peopling the Earth I 23

Shaman In many societies communication With the spirit-world remains the responSibility of the speCial ists whom anthropologists call shamans Typically they garb and paint or disguise themshyselves to resemble spirits or the animals deemed to have prIVI leged access to rulms beyond human sense The shamans then ~ JOurney to the spirits 01 ancesto~ In trances Induced by danCing drumshyming or drugs Shamans often aCQU ire SOCial mllumiddot ence and pol i tical authority as heale~ prophets and a rb l tra to~ _

Sunghir burial A prolUSion of beads distinguishes the graves of people Of high status at Sunghlr in RUSSia from about 24000 yea~ ago The dlstribushylion of signs of wealth In burials suggests that even m the Ice Age inequalities were fi fe and that status could be Inhell ted

24 1 CHAP T E R 1

(

The Peopling of the New World

A RCTI C O CEAN ~

~-J -

~ ~~ Greenland~ lt ampCgtEI~tk

-r-~ ~

PA CIFIC

ATL ANTIC

o C E A N

13000-8000 BC o C E A N

o exten t of ke over 20000 yur~ ~go shy

bull extent of ice cover 2000 yea ago

tundra

tundra and conife rous forests

bull

mm native peoples

pol~i bJe 1 1lt1 migriltion route

poSl ble ltoa~a l mlgratiOlU

early habitation ~Ite desulbed on pilge 2S

bull othe r eilrly habitation sites

~ forager settle ment desc ribed on pages 26-27

+ rrrIIRGfl7 mooern-day state

CHILE mooernmiddotd~y country

ancie nt coast lines

anc ie nt lake

Amazon Ba s i ii

50 U TH AMERICA

10000 Ke co II lu mogtI lttei 000 0 OOOO _rn~

liooo bull 000

I L III I I

Beagle middot Channel

11000 1 oft osoo OLL Mo 1000 Matlt -V wlpO

ny Il

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Asia where the Bering Strai t now flows to cilter a paradi se where no human hunter h ad ever trod before Thc abundance wa~ so great and the animals so unshywary that the invaders ate enormously and multiplied greatly The) spread rapi dly over the hemisphere hUllting th e great gam e to exti nction as they went Th e story 3ppealcd to an unsophisticated fo rm of US paTriot ism The Clov is people as these hunters were dubbed after an ea rly archaeological site in New Mexico seemed to resemb le modern American pioneers They exhibited quick-fire locomotion husshytl e and bustle technical prowess big appetit es irrepress ible strength enormous cultural reach and a talent for reforging th e environment

By comparison the truth about the peopling of the hemisphere is d isappo intingshyly undramatic T hese first great American superheroes-like most of their successhysors-did not really exist Although archeologists have excavated too few sites for a co mplete and reliable picture to emerge a new theory dominates We have evidence of early human settlement scanered from the Yukon to Uruguay and from near th e Bering Strait to the edge of the Beagle Channel- that is from the waterway that dishyvides North Am erica and Asia to the sou thern limjts of the South American mainshyland This evide nce is so widespread over so lo ng a period in so m any diffe rent geological layers and with such avast range of cultural diversity th at one conclusion is inescapable---ltolonists came at di fferent times br inging different cultures with them

No generally accepted evidence dates any inhabited sites iT) the American hem ishysphere earlier than abo ut 13000 BCE (see Map 13) T he first arrivals came du ring a time when glaciers covered much of North Am erica They stuck dose to the cold where th e game was fattest They followed corridors benleen walls of icc or alon g narrow shores away fro m glaciers Other arrivals came by sea and continued to come afrer the land bridge laS submerged Arou nd 10000 )ears ago a catastrop hic cluster ofexti nctio ns wiped o ut the manuno th mastodon ho rse gian t sloth sabershytoothed tiger and at least thirty-five other large species in the Americas New hunt shying techniques and perhaps new hunting peoples were probably partly responsible But we can only explain the even ts in the context of vast climatic changes that afshyfec ted habitats and the whole ecology on which these an imals depended

Many supposedJy early sites of human habitation have proved to be delusions of overenthusiastic archaeologists-false or at best unconvi ncing A few sites however offer strong evidence of the antiquity and range of settlemen t Most are in the eastern Uni led States- a long way from Asia It must have taken a lon g time for these peoplc to get there from the vicinity of th e modern Bering Strait [n the mid-1970s 15000shyyear-old baskcrwork and tools made with fine flints emerged fro m deep under the d isshycarded beer cans that topped a d ig at Meadowcroft on the Ohio River near the border of Pennsylvania and West Virginia Archaeologists are investigating similar sites beshytvmiddoteen the Ohio and Sava nnah Rivers Later in the 19705 excavations at Monte Verde (MON-teh VER-deh) in southern Chile revealed a twen ty-foot long wooden hideshycovered dwelling preserved in a peat bog fo r about 12500 years Nearby wCrt a big mastodon-butchery and a space devoted to making tools The inhabitants bro ught salt and seaweed from the coast forty miles away and medicinal herbs from mounshytains equally fa r in the opposite direction Halfmiddotchewed lum ps of seaweed show the eaters dental bites a boys footprints survive in the clay lining of a pit Tf Meadowcroft is a long way from the colonizers entry po illt n ear the Bering Strait southern Chile is a world away again-almosl as far as you can get in the Western Hemisphere How lo ng would it have taken the senlers of MOnle Verde to cross the hemisphere over vast distances and th rough many difte rent kinds of environments each dem anding new forms of adaptl1ian Most specialists think it must have taken thousands of years The quest ion of the date of the firs t peopling of the New Vorld therefore remains open

Out of the Ice Peop ling the Earth I 25

l Clovis Points

Monte Verde About 12000 years ago a younil permiddot son trod in fresh clay thai lined a hearth in Monte Verde Chile Peat sealed and preserved Ihe footmiddot pnnt to be rediscovered by archaeologiSts 111 the 1970s EllcavaMns at Monle Verde revealed II VIImiddot tage of mammoth hunters so old that it made previshyous theories about when people arflved in the Americas Questionable or even untenable

26 I C HA PTER 1

SURVIVAL OF THE FORAGERS M the ice cap retreated and the great herds shifted with it many human communishyties opted to follow them Archeology has unearthed traces of their routes Along fhe way in what is now northern Germa ny about 12000 years ago people sacrificed reindeer by deliberately weighting them with stones sewn into their stomachs and drowning them in a lake About 1000 years later hunters as far north as Yorkshire in England who left a weU-preserved camp at Starr Carr found an elwironmem as abundant as the cave artistss had been Not only was it fill ed with tundramiddotloving species such as red deer elk and aurochs (OW- roks)-huge shaggy wi ld catlleshybut also with wild boar in surroundings that were becoming patchily wooded

At Skateholm in Sweden about 8000 years ago hunters founded the largest known settlement of the era [t was a winter camp in an area where the eighty-seven different animal species roamed that the inhabitants ate trapping river-fi sh netting sea-birds harpooning seals and dolphin sticking pigs and driving deer into pits or pondlt In summer the people must have moved farther north They lie today in groves decorated with beads and ocll1e and filted with the spoils of their careers including antlers and boars tusks Their dogs are buried nearby These burly wolflike companshyions are sometimes interred with more signs of honor than humans were given Dogs were full members of societies where hunting prowess and skill in war determined stashytus Many of the human dead bear wounds from man-made weapons Here too is evshyidence of sexual specialization Women have only a third as many wounds as the men

TIle most persistentJy faithful followe rs of the ice were the Inuit (IN-yoo-it) of North America About 4000 )ears ago they invented the blubber-filled soapstone lamp Now they couJd follow big game beond the tundra and into the darkness of an arctic winter They could track the musk ox to the shore of the ocean and the caribou on its winter migrations when its fur is th ickest and its fat most plentiful This way of life persisted until the late twentieth century although the people who first practiced it have disappeared Migrants from the Arctic Ocean replaced them 1000 )ears ago

Climate change trapped other foraging peoples in envi ronments where they had to develop new ways of life Some of these environments offered new kinds of abundance Here were broad -leaved forests rich in acorns (which make nut ritious food for any humans who have enough time to fine-gr ind them)) and lakes and rivers funof aquatic life New World prairies held apparently inexha usti ble stocks of bison (though th e largest bison species was rapidly hunted to extinction) Beshytween the unstable per iods of climate change around 12000 years ago foragers even colonized dense tropical forests in southeast Asia and in th e New World at Pedra Pintada in Brazil where the Amazon River now flows This is a region where foragers today have to struggle to find foods they can di gest but it seems to have been more environmentally diverse toward the end of the Ice Age

Some societies perpetuated their foraging life in hot arid deserts as different from the best hunting grounds of the ree Age as it is possible to imagine This reshyqu ired two forms of adaptation First the thinly dispersed populations had to create collaborative networks Such interdependence explains why peoples who live in ecoshylogically shaky homelands often require people to marry outside the group (a pracshytice lolOwn as exogamy) and why they regard hospitality to strangers as a sacred obligation Second poor environments demanded that in habitants develop what we might caU orally tra nsmi tted science For a ni with accurate and extensive knowlshyedge of their habitat can people survive in harsh environments

The San or Bushmen of southern Africas Kalahari Desert illustrate the diffi shyculties and solutions Their domain has shrunk in the last fe w centuries as Bantu farmers Khoi herdsmen and white invaders have overrun much of their fonner

Out of t he Ice P eopling t he Eartn I 27

territo ry But their heart1and was already dr Yll the time of tne Sans firs t occupancy about 14000 years ago Tne increased rainfall that usually followed the retreaT of tbe icc hardly fell nere There are undergro und rivers but few permanent water holes The people watch fo r rare signs of rain and hurry to

gather the vegetation that accompa nies it The scrubland pla nt foods induding wa ter-bearing tubers and a kind of cact us su pply 30 percent of tnei r sustenance The rest comes from game which grazes on lough desert shrubs that humans can shynot digest

Laurens van der Post a South African adventurer who has written about the Bushmen once accompanied a band of San hunters in search of their favorite food eland a type of anteshylope O ne morning just after sunrise they found the tracks of a herd By three in the afternoon after nonstop pursuit at a tro t Bushmen Though now obliged to adopt a mixed th ey came on the herd and took aim To kill large game is almosl impossible with a oconomy su pported in part by farming and donamiddot

tions of food the San or Bushmen of southernBushmans bow He wounds the beast with a poisoned barb and fo llows it until it Africa have been among the most conservative of

drops from exhaustion and the effects of the drug before milking the kill On Ibis the worlds peoples They maintained their foragshyoCCllsion the hunters rail for twelve miles without stopping and the final mile was ing way 01 li fe essentially unchanged for millen shy

nla---desplte neighbors attempts to e~lermU1alean all-out sprint The next time they made contact with the herd one bull was seen them ThiS record of survival contrasts with the to be tiring It still took another fu ll hou r of pursuit until he fell Then wit hout rapid turnover of more ambitiOUS Civilizat ions that

pause or break for rest they were fresh enough at the end to plunge straight 3vay rad ically modify their en~lronments usually With

into the formidable task of skinning and cuning up the heavy animal l Bushm en disastrous results

who persist with thi s demanding way of life to this day are obviously pursui ng a commitment that has grown out of generations of invested emoti on As difficul t as it may be for us to understand the San would find it heart-wrenching to change a way of life for the mere sake of efficiency convenience or material ga in

In one sense the worlds food supply st ill depends o n fo raging The amount of food from hunti ng actually increased in the twentieth cen tury which may go down in history not only as the last age of hunring but as the greatest World-over today we practice a highly specialized mechanized and unu sual form of huntingshydeep-sea trawling Fish farming is likely to replace it in the future but in any case deep-sea fishing is a historical th rowback

IN PERSPECTIVE After the Ice

In the post~ke-Age world little by littl e ove r thousa nds of years rn ost societies aban doned for shy CHRONOLOGY aging and adopted fa rming or herding as the way (A N dates are apPfoximltlte-l

to get their food Among peoples who still li ve Over 3 million years ago Lucyd ose to the ice cap the Inuit remain faithfu l to 2-1 million years ago Homo erectus migrates from East Afnca 10 Afnea

their hunting tradition in North America Mos t of and EuraSia

their Old World counterparts however have long 100000 years ago Homo sapiens migrates out of Afnca

abandoned it In Eu rasia though some hunting 67000 years ago Homo sapiens in ASia 50000 years ago Homo sapiens colonizes Australia and New Guineacultures still cling to the old ways at th e eas tern

Homo sapiens reaches Europe end of Siberia the peoples on th e western Arctic 30000 years ago last Neanderthals vanishrim-the Sami (or Lapplanders) of Sca ndinavia

20000- World emerges from the Ice Age and their neighbors the Kardia Samoyeds and 15000 iICE Nenets-adopted re indee r herding over a th oushy 20000 BC pound Invent ion of the bow and arrow sand years ago The Ice- Age way oflife if not over 13000 BCpound Homo sapiens in the Americas is drawing to a close Hunting is now th ought of

28 I CHAP TE R 1

as a pri mitive way to get food long abandoned excep t as an aristoc ratic indulmiddot gellee in som e co untries or as a supposedJy manly sport in others

The disappearance of fo raging lifeways seems a rema rkable turn around for a predatorspecies such as Homo sapiells There was a time before hun ting when our ancestors were scavenge rs but for hundreds of thousands perhaps millions of years foraging was reliable and reward ing It fed people through every change of climate Its practitioners spread over th e world and adapted successfully to every kind of habitat Homo sapiens dominated every ecos)stem they became part of and competed successfully with most other species They achieved startling in shycreases in their numbers which we struggle to e(plain They founded more varied societ ies than any other species (though the differences among these societies were slight compared to later periods) They had art-rich cultures with traditions of learning and symbolic systems to record information They had their own so shycial elites polit ical customs) ambitious magic and practical methods to exploit their environ ment

Our next task is to ask why after the achievements recounted in this chapter did people abandon the foragi ng li fe Renouncing the hunt and pursuing new ways of life after the Ice Age are among the most far- reaching and mysterious transforshymations of the human past If the puzzle of hy Homo sapiens spread over the Earth is the first great questio n in our history the problem of wh) fo ragers became farmers is th e second

PROBLEMS AND PARALLELS 1 When does the story of humankind begm Is it possible to 5 Which stresses cou ld have caused early peoples to d iVide and

defme what it means to be huma n What characteristiCS do f ight eac h other Wh ich theories have been put forward for how we share with chimpanzees and other apes war started

2 How do Neandert hals and Homo floresiensis cha llenge 6 How did ma le domination come to be normal in human soc ishycommonly held definitions of Homo sapiens eties What impact did sexual econom ic specialiZa t ion have on

early SOC iet ies3 Why d id Homo sapiens migrate out of Afr ica How did migrashytion change peoples relationships with each other and wi th 7 Why was the Ice Age a time of affl uence What role did shamans thelf environment play in Ice-Age soc iety What insights Into Ice-Age societies ca n

we glean from its art and the rema ins of anc ient feasts4 What were the factors behind the rapid population growth of Homo sapiens 8 How did some SOCieties perpetuate the fOlaging li fe after the

Ice Age How has the foraging life persisted today

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THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE A Case in Point Aboriginal Australians Preagricultural Settlements The Disadvantages of Fa rming

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS Herders Environments Tillers Environments

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE Europe Africa Asia The Pac ific Islands The Americas

SO WHY DID FARMING START Population Pressure The Outcome of Abundance The Power of Politics Cu lt Agriculture Climatic Instability Agriculture by Accident Production As an Outgrowth of Procurement

IN ERSP CT1VEmiddot Saskinamp Stability

n August 1770 the Bri tish navigator Captain James Cook reached the north

coast of Australia on the first of his spectacular voyages of exploration that

charted the lands and limits of the Pacific Ocean Ncar Cape York hc ___-~

paused at an island he named Possession Island For although his

stated purpose was scientific he was also an officer of the Royal Navy

with orders to extend the British Empire To Cooks mind the island

though inhabIted was wa iting to be grabbed The natives could not be

said to possess it because they had left no marks of possession on its soil

A wealth of plants that they could hae domesticated-fruits proper IQr

the support of mann-was growing wild Yet Cook wrote the people know nothshy

ing of cultivation It seems strange He was puzzling over one of the most pershy

plexing problems of history- the- diffe rence between forage rs and farmers food

procurers and food producers

Food is the most precious of resources Nothing Ill happen without it To most people in most societies for most of the time food is and always has been the most important thing in the world Change~ in how we get food and whether we get it arc among histors big changes During the global warming that fo ll owed the Ice Age hUSbandry-breeding animals and cultivating crops-began to replace hunting and gathering and introduced the biggest cha nge of all

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE

Husbandry happened in two distinct ways involving different tpes of environshyments and different levels of environmental intervention In some environments people could exploi t creatures that had a he rd instinct by managing the herds rather than by hunting them Breeding enhanced qualities that evolution did not necessa rily favor such as docility size and yield of meat m il k eggs and fat On the negative side close contact between humans and animals often allowed disease-bearing organisms to thrive th reatening human lives and health and sometimes unleashing plagues Otherwi se however animal husbHlIdry barely affectcd the environment Herds on the whole kept to their traditional patterns of migration and people continued to accompany them-driving the beasts now rather than follOving them Domest icated animals remained recognizably the hei rs of their wild ancestors and the landscapes through which they traveled did not change much except that the herds feeding and manure probably

32 I CHAPTER 2

encouraged the grasses they ate to flourish at the expense of othe r plant species

In other environments however plant husbandry involved massive human intervention In the long run

WHY ARE settled foragers better off than farmers tillage of the soil changed the world mo re than any previshyous innovation by Homo sapiens From postglacial m ud W HAT K INDS of environments are suited to herding people coaxed what we now call civilization-a way of

WHAT KINDS of environments were suited to early agricu lture life based on rad ically modifying the environment Inshy

W H ERE D ID farm ing start and what were t he fi rst crops stead of merely t rying to manage the landscape nature

GIVEN THE d isadvantages why did people iarm provided farmers recarved it with fields and boundaries

The rice fields of Bali in IndoneSia are among the most proo uct ive in the world usrng variet ies of rice and techniques for farming it thal are about 1000 years old Irrigation channels maintained and administered by farmers cooperatives distrrbute water everl ly among the terraces Though oflgirla l ly a lowlarld crop fa voring swampy conditions rice adapts perfec tly ro upland enVIronments and to terrace farmrng

di tches and irrigation ca nals They stamped the land with a new look a geometrical order Agric ul ture enabled humans to see the world in a new way-to imagine that magic and science had the power to change nature Such power in turn changed peoples sense of where they fit into the panorama of life on Earth Now they could become lords or in more modest moments or cultures stewards of creation

Together farm ing and herding revolutionized humans place in their ecosysshyterm Instead of merely dependi ng on other life forms to sustain us we forged a new relationship of interdependence with th ose species we eat We rely on them for food they rely on us for th eir reproduction Domesticated animals would not exist without humans Husbandr was the firs t human challenge to evolution Instead of evolvi ng species through natural selection) fa rming and herding proceed by what might be called unnatural selection-sorting and selecting by human hands for human needs according to human agendas In other words e breed livestock and cultivate plants

Herding and tilling also changed human societies By feeding people on a vastshyly greater scale agricu lture allowed societies to get hugely bigger than ever before We can only guess at the absolute figures but in areas where farming has replaced foraging in modern ti mes population has increased fifty- or even a hundredfol d Larger populations demanded new fo rms of cont rol of labor and food distribu shytion which Il1 turn nurtured strong states and powerful elites Society became more volatile and apparently less stable

In almost every case for reasons we still do not understand when people begin to practice agriculture th e pace of change quickens immeasurably and cu shymulat ively States an d civilizations do not seem to last for long Soc ieties that we think of as being most evo lved turn out to be least fitted for survival Compared with the relat ive stability of forager communities soci eties that depend on agr ishyculture are prone to lurch and coll apse History becomes a path picked amon g their ru ins

Still for Captain Cook and for most people who haye thought about it ever since it was indeed strange that people who had the opportunity to practice agrishyculture should not take advantage of it The advantages of agri culture seem so ob shyvious The farmer can select the best specimens of edible crops and creatures collect th em in the most co nvenient places and pastures crossbreed the livestock and hybridize the plants to improve size yi eld or flavo r By these methods sm all farming socie ties grow into comm unities and build up large populations Usually they go on to create ci ties and develop ever more complex technologies To Cook and his contemporaries in Europe who believed that progress was inevitable and that the same kind of changes are bound to happen everywhere peoples who dung to foraging seemed baffling

Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 33

A Case in Point Aborigina l Australians

Cook and others at the time saw only two explanations for why foragers sllch as the aborigines (AB-eh-rihj- ih-neez) in Australia would reject agriculture They were either stupid o r subhuman Indeed early European painters in Aust ralia depicted aborigines as apelike creatures grimaci ng oddl) and crawling in trees The colo nists s impl y ignored the nati es o r when they got in the way often hunted them downshyas they would beasts But not on ly did tbe native Aust ralians reject agriculture in some areas th ey appeared [0 shun every technical cO llvenience On the island o f Tasman ia in the extreme south of Australia where the natives became extinct soon after European settlement began they seemed to have forgotten every art of their ancestors bows boats even how to kindle fi rc In Arnhem Land in the extreme north they used boomerangs to make musi c but no longer as weapons for th e hunt Progress which the European discoverers of Australia believed in fervently seemed to have gone into reverse Australia was not only on the exact opposite side of the world from England it was a topsy-turvy place where everythi ng was upside down

We can hOever be certain that if aborigines rejected agriculture o r other practices Europeans considered progressive it must have been for good reasons TIle aborigines did not lack the knowledge necessary to switch from fo raging to farming had they so wished When they gathered wild yams or the root known as

James COO K from Captain Cooks Journal During his First Voyage Round the World

nardoo they ensured that enough of the plant remained in the ground to grow back In many regions too they used fire to control the grazi ng grounds of kangaroos and concentrate Ihem for hunting a common technique among herders to manage pasture and among tillers to renew the soil Along the Murray and Darling Rivers aborigines even watered and weeded wild cro ps and policed their boundaries against human and animal pred ators (sec Map 20

The abo rigi nal Australians could also have systematically planted and irrigated crops farmed the grubs they liked to eat pen ned kangashyroos and even tried to domestica te them (Kangaroos are can tankerous creatures but people do make pets o f them Breeding selected speci shymen s would probably produce a domestic strain in a few generations ) In the far no rth of Australia aboriginal communities traded with the farming cultures of New Guinea So even if they hadnt developed agrishyculture on th eir own they could have lea rned it fro m o utsi ders If the aborigines did not farm it must have been because they did not want to In short they were doing well without it Simil ar cases all over the world support this conclusion Where wild foods are abundant there is no in shycentive to do mesticate them Of course people o ften adopt p ractices that d o them no good We can concede this general principle but case by case we stiJI han t ( 0 know why

Preagricultura l Settlements

PA C IF IC

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Australia

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Under some conditions people can settle in one place without the trouble of farmshying Archaeological evidence in the region we now ca ll the Middle East shows this After the Ice Age ended about 15000 lJCE a frontier zone between forest and grassland stretched across the eastern sho re of the Mediterranean and what are now Iran eastern Turkey and Iraq (see Map 22) The forests were full of acorns pistachios and almonds which gatherers ground into flour and paste The grassshylands bred vast quantjties of wild grass with edible seeds These foods could all he

34 I C H A P TER 2

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Preagricultural Settlements in the Middle East

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lit O1he r prea9r icu ltural l ~n l ~men t l

a rlcierlt coast lines

warehoused between harvests and had the additional advantage of maturing at di fferent times Dense herds of gazelle in the gra sslands prov ided more nutrition for hunters to bring home Food was so plentiful that foragers did not have to move around much to fi nd it

By abou t 14000 to 15000 years ago permanent sen lements a rose th roughout the region clusters of dwelli ngs with stone wa lls or those made of wood on stone foundations or cue from soft stone and roofed with reeds The foragers who lived in th ese sedentary communities apparently kept to themselves Villages had dis shytinctive iden tit ies and habits wh ich almost amounted to badges of identity Some favored gazelle toe bones for jewelry some preferred fox teeth and partridge legs These people married within their own communities (a practi ce known as en shydogamy) judging from th e evidence of inherited physical characteristics For ex shyample in some villages people were retatimiddotely short while in others they had d istinctive dental patterns These settlers cut what look like plans of their fields on limestone slabs which suggests that they were terri torial- that they had a sense of possession that Captain Cook would have recognized

Out of the Mud Far mIng and Herding A fter tne Ice Age 35

In sum the lives of preagricultural settlers were so much like the lives of the early fa rmers who succeeded them that when anhaeologists first found the forshyagers villages in the 1930s they assumed the inhabitants were farmers Bue the setshylied foragers were 3ctuaHy better off than farmers Their rema ins on the whole show better health and nourishme nt than the fa rming peoples who followed later in the sa me region A diet rich in seeds and nuts had ground down their teeth but- unl ike the farmers-they have none of the streaked tooth -enamel common among people who suffer from food shortages

Simi la r evidence of preagricultural settlements exists in other places Take a few conspicuous examples The Jomon (JOHM-mehn ) people of central Honshu Island in Japan hved in permanent vi llages 13000 years ago feeding themselves by fishing il nd gathering acorns and chestnuts They made pots fo r display in elaboshyrate shapes modeled on flames and serpents an d lacquered them with tree sap Their potters were in a sense magicians transforming clay into objects of prestige and ritua l In the Egyp tim Sahara lit Nabta Playa about forty plant species inclu shyding sorghum a type of cereal grass grew alongside hearths and pit oven~ evi shydence of settled life from about 10000 years ago In other pa rts of (en tral Sahara in the same period that had plenty of water and a cookr climate than now foragers fou nd sorghum and millet another cereal grass At Gobekli Tepe (goh- BEHK-lee TEH-pchl a hilltop site in so utheast Turkey co ntemporaries who lived mainly by gathering wild wheat he ed seven -ton pillars from li mestone They reerected them in a sunken chamber in their village and decorated them with carvings of snakes boar gazelles cra nes and symbols that look suspiciously like writing

What was life li ke in these earliest settl ements Small permanent houses sugshygest that nuclear families-parents and children-predominated though so me sites clearty have communal work areas for grinding seeds and nuts As for who did the work the most stunn ing find ing of recent archaeology in the Middle East sugshygests that work was probably shared behleen the sexes The way skeletons are musshycled suggests th at women did slightly more kneeling (and therefore slightly more gr inding) than men and men did more throwing (and therefore more hunting) than women But both sexes did both activit ies Male and female bodies began to reconverge after a long period during which they bad evolved to look differently As food product ion replaced hunting and gathering wa r and child rearing became the main sex-specific jobs in society The convergence between th e physical feashytures of men and women seems still to be in progress today Indeed it seems to be accelerating as men and women share more and morc tasks and the need for heavshyily muscled or big framed bod ies di minishes along wi th physica ll y demanding jobs in much of the world

The Disadvantages of Farming

Prernrming comm unities do not simply progress to fann ing If foraging produces abundance and sec urity it does not necessarily follow that farming can deliver more of the same The consequences of adopting agriculture are by no means all positive In the early stages of moving from foraging to fa rm ing the food supply actually becomes less reliable because people depend on a relatively small range of fa rmed foods or even on a si ngle species As a result a community becomes vulnerable to ecological disasters Famine becomes more likely as diet narrows Moreover when people have 0 plant and grow food as weDas gather it they have to use up more energy to get the sa me amount of nourishment (Although domesmiddot ticated food s once harvested tend to be easier to process for eating) The need to

lomon pottery Ten thousand years ago the Jomon potters of Japan produced the worlds earliest knOvn earthenware vessels Other pottel)-makmg peoples also practled farm ing but the Jomon people were sedentary foragers--l lvlng in permamiddot nent or long-term settlements but managing the environment in mInimal ways and relyIng on abunshydant wild foods including nuts seeds acorns some 70 marine animal Spec ies and land mamshymals---eatmg no just boar deer and hare but also wolves Wildcats f lYing squIrrel s and mon keys

Overuse deforms bones ArchaeolO8) can reconmiddot struc t how ancient peop le b(gthaved by measuring the deformities In their skeletons The woman hose toe th is was lived In a commuMy of eady sedentary foragers In what is now Syria She evIshydently spent much of her tIme kneeling presumshyably to grlFld the acorns and kernels of Wild wheat on whIch her people re lied for food

36 I C H A P T ER 2

Early Forager Settlements (All dales are approximate)

15000 yea rs ago 14000-15000

yea rs ago 13000 years ago 10000 years ago

l

World emerges from the Ice Age Permanent settlements appear In Middle East

Honshu Island Japan

Nabta Playa Egypt GObekh Tepe Turkey

organize labor encourages inequalities and explo itation Concentrashytions of domesticated animals spread disease such as smallpox measles rubella ch icken pox influenza and tuberculosis

So the problem is really the opposite of what Cook supposed It is fanners behavior not fo ragers that is strange Husba nd ry is not a step along a march of improvement because in some ways it makes life worse No one has PU l the problem better than the histo rian of agronomy Jack L Harlan

people who do not farm do about eveq1hing that farmers do but they do lot work as hard They understand thllifc cycles of plants kno the seashysons of the year and when and where the natural plant food resources can he

Jack Harlan from Crops and Man

Chukchi herder The choice between huntmg and herding otten depends on local and historical Clrmiddot cumstances Remdeermiddotherding is an anCient pracmiddot tlce In muc h of northern Euragtla whereas irl North America the can bou have remained wild In e~treme norlheast Asia close to America the Chukchi long resisted the example of neighboring peo ple and preferred hunting 10 herding In the last two or Illree cenlurles however they have adopted the herdsman s vocat ion shown here

hareswd in great abundance with the least eff() rt There is evidence that thl diet of g-athshyering peoples was better than that of cultivators that slarvation was rare that there was a lower incidence of chronic disease and not nearly so many cavities in their teeth

The question must be raised Whr furm Vhy work harder for food less nut rishytious md a supply more capricious Why invite famine plague ~poundtilcnce and crowded living conditions 1

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

Part of what is surprising about agriculture is that it is so common Not only has almost th e entire human world adopted 1t many peoples ca me to it indepenshydently of one anot her Scholars used to su ppose that it was so extraordinary it must have begun in some particular spo t and that diffusion spread it from there- carried by migrants or conquerors or transmitted by t rade o r im itated The last 40 years of research have shown on the contrary that the transition to

food product io n happened over and over agai n in a range of regions and a variety of environments with d ifferen t foodstuffs and di fferent techn iques The most obv ious co ntrast in environ ments is betwee n herders and tillers Herd ing develops where plan ts a re tOO spa rse or indigestible to sustain human life but a nim als can convert these pla nts into meat-an energy SO UTee tha t people can access by eating th e anim als Tilling deshyvelops where th e soil is suitable or enough ecologica l di shyversity ex ists to susta in plant husbandry o r mi xed farming of plants and animals

Herders Environments

[n three regions of the Earth-tundra the evergreen foresls of no rthern Eurasia and great grasslands- il is not possible to grow enough humanly d igest ible plant foods to keep large numbers of people alive [n the

tund ra and evergreen forests average temperatures arc too low the growing sea shyson too short the surface soil too vulnerable to frost and the subso il in some areas too froze n In these environments thert~ are only two options People can remain foragers- an d primari ly hu nters seeking the fa t-ri ch species rypical of stich zones The [nu it in the North American Arctic for example hunt seal and walrus Or people can become herders like the Sami and Samoyeds of north ern Europe and northwest Asia who live off rei ndeer

Out of the Mud Farming and H erding After the Ice Age I 37

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 FORAGERS AND FARMERS COMPARED

FORAGERS FARMERS

Food procurers Food producers

hUn and gather husbandry (breed animals cultivate crops)

Fit into nature Chanampe nature

little environmental impact herders some environmental impact tillers massive environment impact

Manaampethe landscape Nature remade and reimagined

Dependence on wild animals and plants Interdependence between humans plants and animals

animals and plants exploited and domeslicated

Stable food supply Unstable food supply

nomadic fOfltlgcrs move in response 10 environmental small range of farmed foods increases vulnerability change sedentary fo ragers vulnerable to changes of climate to ecological disasters

Stable popUlation

relatively little labor needed population COlltrol avalable mainly by managed lactatioll

Expandinamp population

breeding livestock and cultivating plants leads to increased food supply increased population concentrations of domesticated animals spread disease

Stable society

kinship and age fi x ind ividuals place in sodery sexes usually share labor by spedalidng in difterent economic tasks

Radically changed unstable society

need to control labor and food distribution leads to social inequalititS work shared between the sexes increased reliance on female labor ~trong nates dewlop with powerful elites complex technologies

Similarly the soils of the world s vast grassla nds- known as prairie in North America pampa in South America steppe in Eurasia and the Sahel (sah-HEHL) in Africa- have for most of history been unfavorable for tillage (sce Map 23) The sad is mostly too difficu lt to turn without a steel plow Except for patches of excepshytionally favorable soil herding has been the only possible fo rm of husbandry in these areas The peoples of the Eurasian and Africa n grasslands were probably herdi ng by about 5000 acE Native American grassland dwellers of the New World on the othe r hand retained a foraging way of life because available species-bison various types of antelope-were (or the lIlost part more abun shydant for the hunt and less suitable fo r herding

For those who choose it herding has three special consequences First it imposshyes a mobile way of life The proportion of the population ho follow the herdsshyand in som e cases it is the enri re popu lation-cannot seuJe into permanent

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38 I CHAP TER 2

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SOU AMER I CA

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villages Herder peoples are not ul1iLling or unable to build permanently or on a large sca le The Scythians for instance people of the -estern Asian steppe who first domesticated the horse and invented th e wheel and axle about 6000 to 7OCX years ago built impressive stone structures Bul these wefe underground tombs dwellings fo r the dead while the living inhabited temporary camps Some herding societies in Asia and Africa have become rich enough to fou nd ci ties fo r elites OT for specialists working outside of food production such as craftsmen or miners Indeed as we shall see (Chap ter 13) in the thirteenth century CF a city of thi s type Karakorum in Mongolia was one of the most admired cities in the world On the whole howshyever herding does no t favo r the development of cities o r the kind of culture that cities nourish such as monumental buildings large-scale inst itutions fo r education and the arts and ind ustrial technology

Second since herde rs breed from animal s that naturally share their grassland habitats thei r herds consist of such creatures as cattl e sheep horses goats-milkshyyielding stock To get the fu ll benefit fro m their auimals herdin g peoples have to eat dai ry products To modern milk-fed Americans this may sound perfeclly no rshyma l But it required a modification of human evolution Most people in most part s of the world do not natural1 ) produce lactase the substance that enables them to d igest milk after infancy They respond to dairy products wit h distaste or even intol erance The Masai of Kenya in East Africa get 80 percent of their energy

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

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4NT ARCTI CA

intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

3

4

The remains of Ice-Age people reveal that on average they were better nourished than most later populations Only modern industrialized societies surpass

20 I C HA PTE R 1

The FlinlSlones- the TI and movie modern stoneshyage family imagined by cartoonists Wil l iam Hanna and Joseph Barbera-inspired childish fan tasy and sl apstick comedy But the more we know of the humans of over 20000 years ago the more modern they seem with arts ambitions religions social forums poli t ica l pract rces and merlta l arid physical capacit ies recognizably like those of our own

Marshall Sahl ins The Origina l Aff luerlt Society f rom Stone-Age EconomiCs

their intake of 3000 calories a day In some lee-Age commushynities people ate about five pounds of food a day The nature of the plant foods they gathered-few starchy grains relativeshyly large amounts of fru it and wild tubers middot -and the high ascorbic acid content of animal organ meats provided five times the awrage intake of vitamin C of an American today Abundant game guaranteed Ice-Age affluence High levels of nutrition and long days of leisure unequalled in most subseshyquent societies meant people had time to observe nature and think abo ut what they saw The art of the era shows the subshylime res ults Like all good jokes The Flilt~rotJes-the popular television cartoon series about a modern Stone-Age famil yshycontains a kernel of truth Cave people really were like us with the same kinds of mi nds and many of the same kinds of tho ughts

Ice~Age Art

In the depths of the Ice Age a stunningly resourceful way of life took shape We know most about the period in Europe where extensive art has su rvived because it was made in deep caves evidently chosen because they were inaccessible Only now are the effects of tourism too many respiratoI)1 systems too many camera flashes damshyaging these works in their once-secret caverns Most preh istoric art has been found in northern Spain and southwest France (see Going to the Source Chauvet Cave pages 36-59) About fifty cave complexes contain thousands of paintings mostly of animals and hundreds of smaller works Examples of sculptures carvings and othe r art objects are also scattered across Europe from Britain and the Atlantic in the west to the Oder River and Carpathian Mountains in the east and beyond to Ukraine and the Ural Mountains wh ich divide Europe and Asia

What was the art fo r It surely told stories and had magical ritual uses Some an shyimal images are slashed or punctured many times over as if in symbolic sacrifice Where early artists used stenciling (tracing around a pattern) it seems believable that footprints and handprints inspired it A good case has been made for seeing the cave paintings as aids to track prey The shapes of hooves the tracks dung seasonal habits and favorite foods of the beasts are among the artists standard stock of images

The technology that made the cave art was simple a palette mLxed from three di ffe rent colors of the mineral ochre (OH-ker)- red brown yellow-and animal fat applied with wood bone and animal hair Yet eve n the earl iest works appeal inshystantly to modern sensibilities The looks and litheness of the animal portraits spring from the rock walls produc ts of practiced specialized hands and of learning accumulated over generations Carvings from the same period exhibit si mi lar elegance- ivory sculptures of 30000-year-old arched -necked horses from Vogdshyherd in south Germany female portraits from Brassempouy in France and Dolni Vestonice in tvloravia over 20000 years old Clay models of bears dogs and women were fired 27000 years ago at Dolnf Vestonice and at Maininskaya in what is now Russia

Outside Europe what little we know of the peoples of the time suggests that they created equally skillfu l work Four painted rock slabs from Namibia in southwest Africa are about 26000 years old almost as old as any art in Europe and bear similar

middotTubers plants with f leshy stems ofterl underground

animal images The earliest paintings that decorate the rocks of Arnhem La nd in northernmost Australia show faint traces of long4 extinct giant kangaroos and scary snakes A clue to the very idea of representing life in art fades today (wm a rock face in Ken niff Australia where stencils of human hands and tools were made 20000 years ago Aut most of the evidence has been lost weathered away on exposed rock faces perished with ule bod ies or hides on which it was painted or scattered by wind from the earth where it was scratched

Ice-Age Culture and Society

4The d iscovery of so much comparable art of comparable age in such widely separated parts of the world suggests an important and often overlooked fact The Ice Age as the last great era of what we would now call a kind of globalization That is key clements of culture were the same allover the inhabited worJd People practiced the same hunter-gatherer economy with similar kinds of technology ate similar kinds of food enjoyed similar levels of material cult ure and- as far as we can tell-had similar religiOUS practices

The material culture- concrete objects people create- that many archeologi shycal digs yield offers cl ues to what goes on in the mind A simple test establi shes that fact We ca n make in fo rmed inferences about peoples religion or politics or their attitudes toward natlLre and society or their values in general by looking at what they eat hOI they dress and how they decorate their homes For instan ce the peo 4

pIe who hunted mammot hs to e)tinction 20 000 years ago on the Ice-Age steppes of what is now southern Russia built dome- shaped dwellings of mammoth bones on a circula r plan twelve or fifteen feet in diameter that seem sublime triumphs of the imaginat ion They are reconstructions of mammoth nature humanly reimag4

[ned perhaps to acquire the beasts strength o r to magically assume power over the species In fact o rdinary everyday activities went on inside these eXlraord inary dwellings-sleeping eating and all the routines of fam ily life-in communities on aerage of fewer than a hundred people But no dwell ing is purely practical Your house refl ects your ideas about your place in the world

Thanks to the clues material culture yields we can make some confident asser4

t ions about other aspect s of lee-Age peoples lives their symbolic systems their magic and the kind of social and political units they lived in Although lee-Age people had nothing we recognize as writing they did have hig hly expressive symshybols which we ca n only struggle to translate Realistic drawings made 20000 to 30000 years ago show recurr ing gestures and postures Moreover they ofte n in shyclude what seem to be numbers sign ifi ed by dots and notches Ot her marks whi ch we can no long interpret are undeniab ly systematic One widely occurr ing mark that looks like a P may be a symbol for female because it resembles the curves of a womans body What looks as if it might be a calendar was made 30000 years ago in the Dordogne region in France It is a flat bone inscribed with crescen ts and cirshycles that may reco rd phases of the moon

Clues to lhe spiritual li fe of lhe ti me appear in traces of red ochre the earliest substance that seems to have had a role in ritual The oldest known ochre mi ne in the world about 42000 years old is at Lion Cave in what is now Lesotho in south 4

ern Africa The vivid lurid color was applied in burials perhaps as a precious

O ut of the Ice Peopling the Earth I 2 1

cave art Until they dIed out-Ylctfms of competition with and explOItation by settler commUnitles-m t he early twentieth century the Sout hern Bushmen of South Afnca made cave paintings similar 10 those Their ancestors made more than 20000 years ago On rock surfaces and cave walls sh amans painted thei r ~islons Of the creatures of the sPiri t-world glimpsed in stateli of ecstasy on imaginary journeys beyond the ord inarily accesshySible wor ld

offer ing perhaps to imitate blood and reinvest the dead w ith li fe The speculation that people m ight also have used ochre to paint their livi ng bod ies is hard to resist

Ice-Age people also used symbols and substances such as ochre in magic and those who controlled them ielded power In pain tin gs and ca rvings we can glimpse the Ice-Age elite people considered special and set apart fro m the group In fi gures wearing animal masks- antlered o r lionlike-the wearer is transformed From anthropological studies of the recent past we know such disguises are norshymally efforts to com m un icate with the dead o r with the gods Bringing messages from other worlds is the Tole of a shaman (SHAH-mehn) someone who acts as an intermedia ry between humans and spirits or gods The shaman may seck a sta te of ecstasy in duced by drugs or dan ci ng or drumming to see and hear realms normally inaccessible to the senses He becomes the medium through which spirits talk to th is world Among the Chukchi hu nters of northern Siberia whose way of life an d env ironment are simil ar to Icc-Age peoples the shltlillans experience is rep resented as a journey to co nsult the spirits in a realm that only the dead can norma lly enter The shaman may adopt an animal disguise to acquire the animals speed or strength or identify with an animal ancesto r The shamans role can be an awesome source o f authority Shamans can chaUenge alpha males Like other rd igions shamanism in shyvolves spiritual insight which people of both sexes various levels of intellect and a ll kinds of physique can acquire It can replace the strong with the seer and the stge By choosing el ites who had the gift o f commu nicating with sp irit s Ice-Age societies could escape the oppression of the physically powerful or those privileged by birth

Althou gh we cannot be SliTe about the nature of the Ice-Age power class we know it existed because of glaring inequalities in the way Ice-Age people were buried In a cemetery at Sunghir (SOON-geer) near Moscow dated about 24000 years ago the highest-status person seems at first glance to have been an el derly man His burshyial goods include a cap sewn with foxs teeth and about twenty ivory bracelets Nearshyby however two boys of aboll t eight or ten years old have even more spectacular ornaments As well as ivo ry bracelets and necklaces and fox-tooth buttons the boys have animal carvings and bcautifu U) wrought weapons including spea rs of mamshymoth ivo ry each over six fcct long About 3500 finely worked ivory beads had been drizzled over the head 10rso and limbs o f each boy Here was a society that marked leaders for greatness from boyhood and therefore perhaps from birth

In our attempt (0 undcrstand where power lay in lee-Age societies the ti nal bits of evidence are crumbs from ridl peoples tables fragments of feasts Archaeologists have found ashes from large-scale cooking and the calcified debris of food at sites in northern Spain perhaps from as long as 23000 years ago The tally sticks that survive from the s1me region in the same period may also have been records of expendirure on feasts Vlhat were such feasts for Dy analogy with modem hunting peoples the most likely reason was alliance-making between communities They were probably not male-bondshying occasions as some scholars think beca use they are close to major dwelling sites where women and child ren would be present Instead from the momen t of its emershygence the idea of th e feast had practical consequences to bu ild and strengthen societies and enhance the power o f those who organized the fcast~ and cont rolled the food (for more discussio n of feasting see Going to the Source feas ting pases 152-1 55)

Peopling the New World

The New World Jas the last part of the planet Homo sapiens peopled We can be sure of th at much but il is no t easy to say exactly when o r by whom According to the for merly dominant theo ry a gap opened benyeneen glaciers towa rd th e end of the Jee Age A race of hunters crossed the land lin k betvcen North America and

Out of t he Ice Peopling the Earth I 23

Shaman In many societies communication With the spirit-world remains the responSibility of the speCial ists whom anthropologists call shamans Typically they garb and paint or disguise themshyselves to resemble spirits or the animals deemed to have prIVI leged access to rulms beyond human sense The shamans then ~ JOurney to the spirits 01 ancesto~ In trances Induced by danCing drumshyming or drugs Shamans often aCQU ire SOCial mllumiddot ence and pol i tical authority as heale~ prophets and a rb l tra to~ _

Sunghir burial A prolUSion of beads distinguishes the graves of people Of high status at Sunghlr in RUSSia from about 24000 yea~ ago The dlstribushylion of signs of wealth In burials suggests that even m the Ice Age inequalities were fi fe and that status could be Inhell ted

24 1 CHAP T E R 1

(

The Peopling of the New World

A RCTI C O CEAN ~

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PA CIFIC

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o C E A N

13000-8000 BC o C E A N

o exten t of ke over 20000 yur~ ~go shy

bull extent of ice cover 2000 yea ago

tundra

tundra and conife rous forests

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mm native peoples

pol~i bJe 1 1lt1 migriltion route

poSl ble ltoa~a l mlgratiOlU

early habitation ~Ite desulbed on pilge 2S

bull othe r eilrly habitation sites

~ forager settle ment desc ribed on pages 26-27

+ rrrIIRGfl7 mooern-day state

CHILE mooernmiddotd~y country

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Amazon Ba s i ii

50 U TH AMERICA

10000 Ke co II lu mogtI lttei 000 0 OOOO _rn~

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Asia where the Bering Strai t now flows to cilter a paradi se where no human hunter h ad ever trod before Thc abundance wa~ so great and the animals so unshywary that the invaders ate enormously and multiplied greatly The) spread rapi dly over the hemisphere hUllting th e great gam e to exti nction as they went Th e story 3ppealcd to an unsophisticated fo rm of US paTriot ism The Clov is people as these hunters were dubbed after an ea rly archaeological site in New Mexico seemed to resemb le modern American pioneers They exhibited quick-fire locomotion husshytl e and bustle technical prowess big appetit es irrepress ible strength enormous cultural reach and a talent for reforging th e environment

By comparison the truth about the peopling of the hemisphere is d isappo intingshyly undramatic T hese first great American superheroes-like most of their successhysors-did not really exist Although archeologists have excavated too few sites for a co mplete and reliable picture to emerge a new theory dominates We have evidence of early human settlement scanered from the Yukon to Uruguay and from near th e Bering Strait to the edge of the Beagle Channel- that is from the waterway that dishyvides North Am erica and Asia to the sou thern limjts of the South American mainshyland This evide nce is so widespread over so lo ng a period in so m any diffe rent geological layers and with such avast range of cultural diversity th at one conclusion is inescapable---ltolonists came at di fferent times br inging different cultures with them

No generally accepted evidence dates any inhabited sites iT) the American hem ishysphere earlier than abo ut 13000 BCE (see Map 13) T he first arrivals came du ring a time when glaciers covered much of North Am erica They stuck dose to the cold where th e game was fattest They followed corridors benleen walls of icc or alon g narrow shores away fro m glaciers Other arrivals came by sea and continued to come afrer the land bridge laS submerged Arou nd 10000 )ears ago a catastrop hic cluster ofexti nctio ns wiped o ut the manuno th mastodon ho rse gian t sloth sabershytoothed tiger and at least thirty-five other large species in the Americas New hunt shying techniques and perhaps new hunting peoples were probably partly responsible But we can only explain the even ts in the context of vast climatic changes that afshyfec ted habitats and the whole ecology on which these an imals depended

Many supposedJy early sites of human habitation have proved to be delusions of overenthusiastic archaeologists-false or at best unconvi ncing A few sites however offer strong evidence of the antiquity and range of settlemen t Most are in the eastern Uni led States- a long way from Asia It must have taken a lon g time for these peoplc to get there from the vicinity of th e modern Bering Strait [n the mid-1970s 15000shyyear-old baskcrwork and tools made with fine flints emerged fro m deep under the d isshycarded beer cans that topped a d ig at Meadowcroft on the Ohio River near the border of Pennsylvania and West Virginia Archaeologists are investigating similar sites beshytvmiddoteen the Ohio and Sava nnah Rivers Later in the 19705 excavations at Monte Verde (MON-teh VER-deh) in southern Chile revealed a twen ty-foot long wooden hideshycovered dwelling preserved in a peat bog fo r about 12500 years Nearby wCrt a big mastodon-butchery and a space devoted to making tools The inhabitants bro ught salt and seaweed from the coast forty miles away and medicinal herbs from mounshytains equally fa r in the opposite direction Halfmiddotchewed lum ps of seaweed show the eaters dental bites a boys footprints survive in the clay lining of a pit Tf Meadowcroft is a long way from the colonizers entry po illt n ear the Bering Strait southern Chile is a world away again-almosl as far as you can get in the Western Hemisphere How lo ng would it have taken the senlers of MOnle Verde to cross the hemisphere over vast distances and th rough many difte rent kinds of environments each dem anding new forms of adaptl1ian Most specialists think it must have taken thousands of years The quest ion of the date of the firs t peopling of the New Vorld therefore remains open

Out of the Ice Peop ling the Earth I 25

l Clovis Points

Monte Verde About 12000 years ago a younil permiddot son trod in fresh clay thai lined a hearth in Monte Verde Chile Peat sealed and preserved Ihe footmiddot pnnt to be rediscovered by archaeologiSts 111 the 1970s EllcavaMns at Monle Verde revealed II VIImiddot tage of mammoth hunters so old that it made previshyous theories about when people arflved in the Americas Questionable or even untenable

26 I C HA PTER 1

SURVIVAL OF THE FORAGERS M the ice cap retreated and the great herds shifted with it many human communishyties opted to follow them Archeology has unearthed traces of their routes Along fhe way in what is now northern Germa ny about 12000 years ago people sacrificed reindeer by deliberately weighting them with stones sewn into their stomachs and drowning them in a lake About 1000 years later hunters as far north as Yorkshire in England who left a weU-preserved camp at Starr Carr found an elwironmem as abundant as the cave artistss had been Not only was it fill ed with tundramiddotloving species such as red deer elk and aurochs (OW- roks)-huge shaggy wi ld catlleshybut also with wild boar in surroundings that were becoming patchily wooded

At Skateholm in Sweden about 8000 years ago hunters founded the largest known settlement of the era [t was a winter camp in an area where the eighty-seven different animal species roamed that the inhabitants ate trapping river-fi sh netting sea-birds harpooning seals and dolphin sticking pigs and driving deer into pits or pondlt In summer the people must have moved farther north They lie today in groves decorated with beads and ocll1e and filted with the spoils of their careers including antlers and boars tusks Their dogs are buried nearby These burly wolflike companshyions are sometimes interred with more signs of honor than humans were given Dogs were full members of societies where hunting prowess and skill in war determined stashytus Many of the human dead bear wounds from man-made weapons Here too is evshyidence of sexual specialization Women have only a third as many wounds as the men

TIle most persistentJy faithful followe rs of the ice were the Inuit (IN-yoo-it) of North America About 4000 )ears ago they invented the blubber-filled soapstone lamp Now they couJd follow big game beond the tundra and into the darkness of an arctic winter They could track the musk ox to the shore of the ocean and the caribou on its winter migrations when its fur is th ickest and its fat most plentiful This way of life persisted until the late twentieth century although the people who first practiced it have disappeared Migrants from the Arctic Ocean replaced them 1000 )ears ago

Climate change trapped other foraging peoples in envi ronments where they had to develop new ways of life Some of these environments offered new kinds of abundance Here were broad -leaved forests rich in acorns (which make nut ritious food for any humans who have enough time to fine-gr ind them)) and lakes and rivers funof aquatic life New World prairies held apparently inexha usti ble stocks of bison (though th e largest bison species was rapidly hunted to extinction) Beshytween the unstable per iods of climate change around 12000 years ago foragers even colonized dense tropical forests in southeast Asia and in th e New World at Pedra Pintada in Brazil where the Amazon River now flows This is a region where foragers today have to struggle to find foods they can di gest but it seems to have been more environmentally diverse toward the end of the Ice Age

Some societies perpetuated their foraging life in hot arid deserts as different from the best hunting grounds of the ree Age as it is possible to imagine This reshyqu ired two forms of adaptation First the thinly dispersed populations had to create collaborative networks Such interdependence explains why peoples who live in ecoshylogically shaky homelands often require people to marry outside the group (a pracshytice lolOwn as exogamy) and why they regard hospitality to strangers as a sacred obligation Second poor environments demanded that in habitants develop what we might caU orally tra nsmi tted science For a ni with accurate and extensive knowlshyedge of their habitat can people survive in harsh environments

The San or Bushmen of southern Africas Kalahari Desert illustrate the diffi shyculties and solutions Their domain has shrunk in the last fe w centuries as Bantu farmers Khoi herdsmen and white invaders have overrun much of their fonner

Out of t he Ice P eopling t he Eartn I 27

territo ry But their heart1and was already dr Yll the time of tne Sans firs t occupancy about 14000 years ago Tne increased rainfall that usually followed the retreaT of tbe icc hardly fell nere There are undergro und rivers but few permanent water holes The people watch fo r rare signs of rain and hurry to

gather the vegetation that accompa nies it The scrubland pla nt foods induding wa ter-bearing tubers and a kind of cact us su pply 30 percent of tnei r sustenance The rest comes from game which grazes on lough desert shrubs that humans can shynot digest

Laurens van der Post a South African adventurer who has written about the Bushmen once accompanied a band of San hunters in search of their favorite food eland a type of anteshylope O ne morning just after sunrise they found the tracks of a herd By three in the afternoon after nonstop pursuit at a tro t Bushmen Though now obliged to adopt a mixed th ey came on the herd and took aim To kill large game is almosl impossible with a oconomy su pported in part by farming and donamiddot

tions of food the San or Bushmen of southernBushmans bow He wounds the beast with a poisoned barb and fo llows it until it Africa have been among the most conservative of

drops from exhaustion and the effects of the drug before milking the kill On Ibis the worlds peoples They maintained their foragshyoCCllsion the hunters rail for twelve miles without stopping and the final mile was ing way 01 li fe essentially unchanged for millen shy

nla---desplte neighbors attempts to e~lermU1alean all-out sprint The next time they made contact with the herd one bull was seen them ThiS record of survival contrasts with the to be tiring It still took another fu ll hou r of pursuit until he fell Then wit hout rapid turnover of more ambitiOUS Civilizat ions that

pause or break for rest they were fresh enough at the end to plunge straight 3vay rad ically modify their en~lronments usually With

into the formidable task of skinning and cuning up the heavy animal l Bushm en disastrous results

who persist with thi s demanding way of life to this day are obviously pursui ng a commitment that has grown out of generations of invested emoti on As difficul t as it may be for us to understand the San would find it heart-wrenching to change a way of life for the mere sake of efficiency convenience or material ga in

In one sense the worlds food supply st ill depends o n fo raging The amount of food from hunti ng actually increased in the twentieth cen tury which may go down in history not only as the last age of hunring but as the greatest World-over today we practice a highly specialized mechanized and unu sual form of huntingshydeep-sea trawling Fish farming is likely to replace it in the future but in any case deep-sea fishing is a historical th rowback

IN PERSPECTIVE After the Ice

In the post~ke-Age world little by littl e ove r thousa nds of years rn ost societies aban doned for shy CHRONOLOGY aging and adopted fa rming or herding as the way (A N dates are apPfoximltlte-l

to get their food Among peoples who still li ve Over 3 million years ago Lucyd ose to the ice cap the Inuit remain faithfu l to 2-1 million years ago Homo erectus migrates from East Afnca 10 Afnea

their hunting tradition in North America Mos t of and EuraSia

their Old World counterparts however have long 100000 years ago Homo sapiens migrates out of Afnca

abandoned it In Eu rasia though some hunting 67000 years ago Homo sapiens in ASia 50000 years ago Homo sapiens colonizes Australia and New Guineacultures still cling to the old ways at th e eas tern

Homo sapiens reaches Europe end of Siberia the peoples on th e western Arctic 30000 years ago last Neanderthals vanishrim-the Sami (or Lapplanders) of Sca ndinavia

20000- World emerges from the Ice Age and their neighbors the Kardia Samoyeds and 15000 iICE Nenets-adopted re indee r herding over a th oushy 20000 BC pound Invent ion of the bow and arrow sand years ago The Ice- Age way oflife if not over 13000 BCpound Homo sapiens in the Americas is drawing to a close Hunting is now th ought of

28 I CHAP TE R 1

as a pri mitive way to get food long abandoned excep t as an aristoc ratic indulmiddot gellee in som e co untries or as a supposedJy manly sport in others

The disappearance of fo raging lifeways seems a rema rkable turn around for a predatorspecies such as Homo sapiells There was a time before hun ting when our ancestors were scavenge rs but for hundreds of thousands perhaps millions of years foraging was reliable and reward ing It fed people through every change of climate Its practitioners spread over th e world and adapted successfully to every kind of habitat Homo sapiens dominated every ecos)stem they became part of and competed successfully with most other species They achieved startling in shycreases in their numbers which we struggle to e(plain They founded more varied societ ies than any other species (though the differences among these societies were slight compared to later periods) They had art-rich cultures with traditions of learning and symbolic systems to record information They had their own so shycial elites polit ical customs) ambitious magic and practical methods to exploit their environ ment

Our next task is to ask why after the achievements recounted in this chapter did people abandon the foragi ng li fe Renouncing the hunt and pursuing new ways of life after the Ice Age are among the most far- reaching and mysterious transforshymations of the human past If the puzzle of hy Homo sapiens spread over the Earth is the first great questio n in our history the problem of wh) fo ragers became farmers is th e second

PROBLEMS AND PARALLELS 1 When does the story of humankind begm Is it possible to 5 Which stresses cou ld have caused early peoples to d iVide and

defme what it means to be huma n What characteristiCS do f ight eac h other Wh ich theories have been put forward for how we share with chimpanzees and other apes war started

2 How do Neandert hals and Homo floresiensis cha llenge 6 How did ma le domination come to be normal in human soc ishycommonly held definitions of Homo sapiens eties What impact did sexual econom ic specialiZa t ion have on

early SOC iet ies3 Why d id Homo sapiens migrate out of Afr ica How did migrashytion change peoples relationships with each other and wi th 7 Why was the Ice Age a time of affl uence What role did shamans thelf environment play in Ice-Age soc iety What insights Into Ice-Age societies ca n

we glean from its art and the rema ins of anc ient feasts4 What were the factors behind the rapid population growth of Homo sapiens 8 How did some SOCieties perpetuate the fOlaging li fe after the

Ice Age How has the foraging life persisted today

bull bullbull

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE A Case in Point Aboriginal Australians Preagricultural Settlements The Disadvantages of Fa rming

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS Herders Environments Tillers Environments

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE Europe Africa Asia The Pac ific Islands The Americas

SO WHY DID FARMING START Population Pressure The Outcome of Abundance The Power of Politics Cu lt Agriculture Climatic Instability Agriculture by Accident Production As an Outgrowth of Procurement

IN ERSP CT1VEmiddot Saskinamp Stability

n August 1770 the Bri tish navigator Captain James Cook reached the north

coast of Australia on the first of his spectacular voyages of exploration that

charted the lands and limits of the Pacific Ocean Ncar Cape York hc ___-~

paused at an island he named Possession Island For although his

stated purpose was scientific he was also an officer of the Royal Navy

with orders to extend the British Empire To Cooks mind the island

though inhabIted was wa iting to be grabbed The natives could not be

said to possess it because they had left no marks of possession on its soil

A wealth of plants that they could hae domesticated-fruits proper IQr

the support of mann-was growing wild Yet Cook wrote the people know nothshy

ing of cultivation It seems strange He was puzzling over one of the most pershy

plexing problems of history- the- diffe rence between forage rs and farmers food

procurers and food producers

Food is the most precious of resources Nothing Ill happen without it To most people in most societies for most of the time food is and always has been the most important thing in the world Change~ in how we get food and whether we get it arc among histors big changes During the global warming that fo ll owed the Ice Age hUSbandry-breeding animals and cultivating crops-began to replace hunting and gathering and introduced the biggest cha nge of all

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE

Husbandry happened in two distinct ways involving different tpes of environshyments and different levels of environmental intervention In some environments people could exploi t creatures that had a he rd instinct by managing the herds rather than by hunting them Breeding enhanced qualities that evolution did not necessa rily favor such as docility size and yield of meat m il k eggs and fat On the negative side close contact between humans and animals often allowed disease-bearing organisms to thrive th reatening human lives and health and sometimes unleashing plagues Otherwi se however animal husbHlIdry barely affectcd the environment Herds on the whole kept to their traditional patterns of migration and people continued to accompany them-driving the beasts now rather than follOving them Domest icated animals remained recognizably the hei rs of their wild ancestors and the landscapes through which they traveled did not change much except that the herds feeding and manure probably

32 I CHAPTER 2

encouraged the grasses they ate to flourish at the expense of othe r plant species

In other environments however plant husbandry involved massive human intervention In the long run

WHY ARE settled foragers better off than farmers tillage of the soil changed the world mo re than any previshyous innovation by Homo sapiens From postglacial m ud W HAT K INDS of environments are suited to herding people coaxed what we now call civilization-a way of

WHAT KINDS of environments were suited to early agricu lture life based on rad ically modifying the environment Inshy

W H ERE D ID farm ing start and what were t he fi rst crops stead of merely t rying to manage the landscape nature

GIVEN THE d isadvantages why did people iarm provided farmers recarved it with fields and boundaries

The rice fields of Bali in IndoneSia are among the most proo uct ive in the world usrng variet ies of rice and techniques for farming it thal are about 1000 years old Irrigation channels maintained and administered by farmers cooperatives distrrbute water everl ly among the terraces Though oflgirla l ly a lowlarld crop fa voring swampy conditions rice adapts perfec tly ro upland enVIronments and to terrace farmrng

di tches and irrigation ca nals They stamped the land with a new look a geometrical order Agric ul ture enabled humans to see the world in a new way-to imagine that magic and science had the power to change nature Such power in turn changed peoples sense of where they fit into the panorama of life on Earth Now they could become lords or in more modest moments or cultures stewards of creation

Together farm ing and herding revolutionized humans place in their ecosysshyterm Instead of merely dependi ng on other life forms to sustain us we forged a new relationship of interdependence with th ose species we eat We rely on them for food they rely on us for th eir reproduction Domesticated animals would not exist without humans Husbandr was the firs t human challenge to evolution Instead of evolvi ng species through natural selection) fa rming and herding proceed by what might be called unnatural selection-sorting and selecting by human hands for human needs according to human agendas In other words e breed livestock and cultivate plants

Herding and tilling also changed human societies By feeding people on a vastshyly greater scale agricu lture allowed societies to get hugely bigger than ever before We can only guess at the absolute figures but in areas where farming has replaced foraging in modern ti mes population has increased fifty- or even a hundredfol d Larger populations demanded new fo rms of cont rol of labor and food distribu shytion which Il1 turn nurtured strong states and powerful elites Society became more volatile and apparently less stable

In almost every case for reasons we still do not understand when people begin to practice agriculture th e pace of change quickens immeasurably and cu shymulat ively States an d civilizations do not seem to last for long Soc ieties that we think of as being most evo lved turn out to be least fitted for survival Compared with the relat ive stability of forager communities soci eties that depend on agr ishyculture are prone to lurch and coll apse History becomes a path picked amon g their ru ins

Still for Captain Cook and for most people who haye thought about it ever since it was indeed strange that people who had the opportunity to practice agrishyculture should not take advantage of it The advantages of agri culture seem so ob shyvious The farmer can select the best specimens of edible crops and creatures collect th em in the most co nvenient places and pastures crossbreed the livestock and hybridize the plants to improve size yi eld or flavo r By these methods sm all farming socie ties grow into comm unities and build up large populations Usually they go on to create ci ties and develop ever more complex technologies To Cook and his contemporaries in Europe who believed that progress was inevitable and that the same kind of changes are bound to happen everywhere peoples who dung to foraging seemed baffling

Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 33

A Case in Point Aborigina l Australians

Cook and others at the time saw only two explanations for why foragers sllch as the aborigines (AB-eh-rihj- ih-neez) in Australia would reject agriculture They were either stupid o r subhuman Indeed early European painters in Aust ralia depicted aborigines as apelike creatures grimaci ng oddl) and crawling in trees The colo nists s impl y ignored the nati es o r when they got in the way often hunted them downshyas they would beasts But not on ly did tbe native Aust ralians reject agriculture in some areas th ey appeared [0 shun every technical cO llvenience On the island o f Tasman ia in the extreme south of Australia where the natives became extinct soon after European settlement began they seemed to have forgotten every art of their ancestors bows boats even how to kindle fi rc In Arnhem Land in the extreme north they used boomerangs to make musi c but no longer as weapons for th e hunt Progress which the European discoverers of Australia believed in fervently seemed to have gone into reverse Australia was not only on the exact opposite side of the world from England it was a topsy-turvy place where everythi ng was upside down

We can hOever be certain that if aborigines rejected agriculture o r other practices Europeans considered progressive it must have been for good reasons TIle aborigines did not lack the knowledge necessary to switch from fo raging to farming had they so wished When they gathered wild yams or the root known as

James COO K from Captain Cooks Journal During his First Voyage Round the World

nardoo they ensured that enough of the plant remained in the ground to grow back In many regions too they used fire to control the grazi ng grounds of kangaroos and concentrate Ihem for hunting a common technique among herders to manage pasture and among tillers to renew the soil Along the Murray and Darling Rivers aborigines even watered and weeded wild cro ps and policed their boundaries against human and animal pred ators (sec Map 20

The abo rigi nal Australians could also have systematically planted and irrigated crops farmed the grubs they liked to eat pen ned kangashyroos and even tried to domestica te them (Kangaroos are can tankerous creatures but people do make pets o f them Breeding selected speci shymen s would probably produce a domestic strain in a few generations ) In the far no rth of Australia aboriginal communities traded with the farming cultures of New Guinea So even if they hadnt developed agrishyculture on th eir own they could have lea rned it fro m o utsi ders If the aborigines did not farm it must have been because they did not want to In short they were doing well without it Simil ar cases all over the world support this conclusion Where wild foods are abundant there is no in shycentive to do mesticate them Of course people o ften adopt p ractices that d o them no good We can concede this general principle but case by case we stiJI han t ( 0 know why

Preagricultura l Settlements

PA C IF IC

o C E A N

IN 0 IA N o C E AN

Australia

+ - Zwland

AustraliaMgtmiddot

Under some conditions people can settle in one place without the trouble of farmshying Archaeological evidence in the region we now ca ll the Middle East shows this After the Ice Age ended about 15000 lJCE a frontier zone between forest and grassland stretched across the eastern sho re of the Mediterranean and what are now Iran eastern Turkey and Iraq (see Map 22) The forests were full of acorns pistachios and almonds which gatherers ground into flour and paste The grassshylands bred vast quantjties of wild grass with edible seeds These foods could all he

34 I C H A P TER 2

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Preagricultural Settlements in the Middle East

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warehoused between harvests and had the additional advantage of maturing at di fferent times Dense herds of gazelle in the gra sslands prov ided more nutrition for hunters to bring home Food was so plentiful that foragers did not have to move around much to fi nd it

By abou t 14000 to 15000 years ago permanent sen lements a rose th roughout the region clusters of dwelli ngs with stone wa lls or those made of wood on stone foundations or cue from soft stone and roofed with reeds The foragers who lived in th ese sedentary communities apparently kept to themselves Villages had dis shytinctive iden tit ies and habits wh ich almost amounted to badges of identity Some favored gazelle toe bones for jewelry some preferred fox teeth and partridge legs These people married within their own communities (a practi ce known as en shydogamy) judging from th e evidence of inherited physical characteristics For ex shyample in some villages people were retatimiddotely short while in others they had d istinctive dental patterns These settlers cut what look like plans of their fields on limestone slabs which suggests that they were terri torial- that they had a sense of possession that Captain Cook would have recognized

Out of the Mud Far mIng and Herding A fter tne Ice Age 35

In sum the lives of preagricultural settlers were so much like the lives of the early fa rmers who succeeded them that when anhaeologists first found the forshyagers villages in the 1930s they assumed the inhabitants were farmers Bue the setshylied foragers were 3ctuaHy better off than farmers Their rema ins on the whole show better health and nourishme nt than the fa rming peoples who followed later in the sa me region A diet rich in seeds and nuts had ground down their teeth but- unl ike the farmers-they have none of the streaked tooth -enamel common among people who suffer from food shortages

Simi la r evidence of preagricultural settlements exists in other places Take a few conspicuous examples The Jomon (JOHM-mehn ) people of central Honshu Island in Japan hved in permanent vi llages 13000 years ago feeding themselves by fishing il nd gathering acorns and chestnuts They made pots fo r display in elaboshyrate shapes modeled on flames and serpents an d lacquered them with tree sap Their potters were in a sense magicians transforming clay into objects of prestige and ritua l In the Egyp tim Sahara lit Nabta Playa about forty plant species inclu shyding sorghum a type of cereal grass grew alongside hearths and pit oven~ evi shydence of settled life from about 10000 years ago In other pa rts of (en tral Sahara in the same period that had plenty of water and a cookr climate than now foragers fou nd sorghum and millet another cereal grass At Gobekli Tepe (goh- BEHK-lee TEH-pchl a hilltop site in so utheast Turkey co ntemporaries who lived mainly by gathering wild wheat he ed seven -ton pillars from li mestone They reerected them in a sunken chamber in their village and decorated them with carvings of snakes boar gazelles cra nes and symbols that look suspiciously like writing

What was life li ke in these earliest settl ements Small permanent houses sugshygest that nuclear families-parents and children-predominated though so me sites clearty have communal work areas for grinding seeds and nuts As for who did the work the most stunn ing find ing of recent archaeology in the Middle East sugshygests that work was probably shared behleen the sexes The way skeletons are musshycled suggests th at women did slightly more kneeling (and therefore slightly more gr inding) than men and men did more throwing (and therefore more hunting) than women But both sexes did both activit ies Male and female bodies began to reconverge after a long period during which they bad evolved to look differently As food product ion replaced hunting and gathering wa r and child rearing became the main sex-specific jobs in society The convergence between th e physical feashytures of men and women seems still to be in progress today Indeed it seems to be accelerating as men and women share more and morc tasks and the need for heavshyily muscled or big framed bod ies di minishes along wi th physica ll y demanding jobs in much of the world

The Disadvantages of Farming

Prernrming comm unities do not simply progress to fann ing If foraging produces abundance and sec urity it does not necessarily follow that farming can deliver more of the same The consequences of adopting agriculture are by no means all positive In the early stages of moving from foraging to fa rm ing the food supply actually becomes less reliable because people depend on a relatively small range of fa rmed foods or even on a si ngle species As a result a community becomes vulnerable to ecological disasters Famine becomes more likely as diet narrows Moreover when people have 0 plant and grow food as weDas gather it they have to use up more energy to get the sa me amount of nourishment (Although domesmiddot ticated food s once harvested tend to be easier to process for eating) The need to

lomon pottery Ten thousand years ago the Jomon potters of Japan produced the worlds earliest knOvn earthenware vessels Other pottel)-makmg peoples also practled farm ing but the Jomon people were sedentary foragers--l lvlng in permamiddot nent or long-term settlements but managing the environment in mInimal ways and relyIng on abunshydant wild foods including nuts seeds acorns some 70 marine animal Spec ies and land mamshymals---eatmg no just boar deer and hare but also wolves Wildcats f lYing squIrrel s and mon keys

Overuse deforms bones ArchaeolO8) can reconmiddot struc t how ancient peop le b(gthaved by measuring the deformities In their skeletons The woman hose toe th is was lived In a commuMy of eady sedentary foragers In what is now Syria She evIshydently spent much of her tIme kneeling presumshyably to grlFld the acorns and kernels of Wild wheat on whIch her people re lied for food

36 I C H A P T ER 2

Early Forager Settlements (All dales are approximate)

15000 yea rs ago 14000-15000

yea rs ago 13000 years ago 10000 years ago

l

World emerges from the Ice Age Permanent settlements appear In Middle East

Honshu Island Japan

Nabta Playa Egypt GObekh Tepe Turkey

organize labor encourages inequalities and explo itation Concentrashytions of domesticated animals spread disease such as smallpox measles rubella ch icken pox influenza and tuberculosis

So the problem is really the opposite of what Cook supposed It is fanners behavior not fo ragers that is strange Husba nd ry is not a step along a march of improvement because in some ways it makes life worse No one has PU l the problem better than the histo rian of agronomy Jack L Harlan

people who do not farm do about eveq1hing that farmers do but they do lot work as hard They understand thllifc cycles of plants kno the seashysons of the year and when and where the natural plant food resources can he

Jack Harlan from Crops and Man

Chukchi herder The choice between huntmg and herding otten depends on local and historical Clrmiddot cumstances Remdeermiddotherding is an anCient pracmiddot tlce In muc h of northern Euragtla whereas irl North America the can bou have remained wild In e~treme norlheast Asia close to America the Chukchi long resisted the example of neighboring peo ple and preferred hunting 10 herding In the last two or Illree cenlurles however they have adopted the herdsman s vocat ion shown here

hareswd in great abundance with the least eff() rt There is evidence that thl diet of g-athshyering peoples was better than that of cultivators that slarvation was rare that there was a lower incidence of chronic disease and not nearly so many cavities in their teeth

The question must be raised Whr furm Vhy work harder for food less nut rishytious md a supply more capricious Why invite famine plague ~poundtilcnce and crowded living conditions 1

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

Part of what is surprising about agriculture is that it is so common Not only has almost th e entire human world adopted 1t many peoples ca me to it indepenshydently of one anot her Scholars used to su ppose that it was so extraordinary it must have begun in some particular spo t and that diffusion spread it from there- carried by migrants or conquerors or transmitted by t rade o r im itated The last 40 years of research have shown on the contrary that the transition to

food product io n happened over and over agai n in a range of regions and a variety of environments with d ifferen t foodstuffs and di fferent techn iques The most obv ious co ntrast in environ ments is betwee n herders and tillers Herd ing develops where plan ts a re tOO spa rse or indigestible to sustain human life but a nim als can convert these pla nts into meat-an energy SO UTee tha t people can access by eating th e anim als Tilling deshyvelops where th e soil is suitable or enough ecologica l di shyversity ex ists to susta in plant husbandry o r mi xed farming of plants and animals

Herders Environments

[n three regions of the Earth-tundra the evergreen foresls of no rthern Eurasia and great grasslands- il is not possible to grow enough humanly d igest ible plant foods to keep large numbers of people alive [n the

tund ra and evergreen forests average temperatures arc too low the growing sea shyson too short the surface soil too vulnerable to frost and the subso il in some areas too froze n In these environments thert~ are only two options People can remain foragers- an d primari ly hu nters seeking the fa t-ri ch species rypical of stich zones The [nu it in the North American Arctic for example hunt seal and walrus Or people can become herders like the Sami and Samoyeds of north ern Europe and northwest Asia who live off rei ndeer

Out of the Mud Farming and H erding After the Ice Age I 37

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 FORAGERS AND FARMERS COMPARED

FORAGERS FARMERS

Food procurers Food producers

hUn and gather husbandry (breed animals cultivate crops)

Fit into nature Chanampe nature

little environmental impact herders some environmental impact tillers massive environment impact

Manaampethe landscape Nature remade and reimagined

Dependence on wild animals and plants Interdependence between humans plants and animals

animals and plants exploited and domeslicated

Stable food supply Unstable food supply

nomadic fOfltlgcrs move in response 10 environmental small range of farmed foods increases vulnerability change sedentary fo ragers vulnerable to changes of climate to ecological disasters

Stable popUlation

relatively little labor needed population COlltrol avalable mainly by managed lactatioll

Expandinamp population

breeding livestock and cultivating plants leads to increased food supply increased population concentrations of domesticated animals spread disease

Stable society

kinship and age fi x ind ividuals place in sodery sexes usually share labor by spedalidng in difterent economic tasks

Radically changed unstable society

need to control labor and food distribution leads to social inequalititS work shared between the sexes increased reliance on female labor ~trong nates dewlop with powerful elites complex technologies

Similarly the soils of the world s vast grassla nds- known as prairie in North America pampa in South America steppe in Eurasia and the Sahel (sah-HEHL) in Africa- have for most of history been unfavorable for tillage (sce Map 23) The sad is mostly too difficu lt to turn without a steel plow Except for patches of excepshytionally favorable soil herding has been the only possible fo rm of husbandry in these areas The peoples of the Eurasian and Africa n grasslands were probably herdi ng by about 5000 acE Native American grassland dwellers of the New World on the othe r hand retained a foraging way of life because available species-bison various types of antelope-were (or the lIlost part more abun shydant for the hunt and less suitable fo r herding

For those who choose it herding has three special consequences First it imposshyes a mobile way of life The proportion of the population ho follow the herdsshyand in som e cases it is the enri re popu lation-cannot seuJe into permanent

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38 I CHAP TER 2

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villages Herder peoples are not ul1iLling or unable to build permanently or on a large sca le The Scythians for instance people of the -estern Asian steppe who first domesticated the horse and invented th e wheel and axle about 6000 to 7OCX years ago built impressive stone structures Bul these wefe underground tombs dwellings fo r the dead while the living inhabited temporary camps Some herding societies in Asia and Africa have become rich enough to fou nd ci ties fo r elites OT for specialists working outside of food production such as craftsmen or miners Indeed as we shall see (Chap ter 13) in the thirteenth century CF a city of thi s type Karakorum in Mongolia was one of the most admired cities in the world On the whole howshyever herding does no t favo r the development of cities o r the kind of culture that cities nourish such as monumental buildings large-scale inst itutions fo r education and the arts and ind ustrial technology

Second since herde rs breed from animal s that naturally share their grassland habitats thei r herds consist of such creatures as cattl e sheep horses goats-milkshyyielding stock To get the fu ll benefit fro m their auimals herdin g peoples have to eat dai ry products To modern milk-fed Americans this may sound perfeclly no rshyma l But it required a modification of human evolution Most people in most part s of the world do not natural1 ) produce lactase the substance that enables them to d igest milk after infancy They respond to dairy products wit h distaste or even intol erance The Masai of Kenya in East Africa get 80 percent of their energy

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

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intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

4

The remains of Ice-Age people reveal that on average they were better nourished than most later populations Only modern industrialized societies surpass

20 I C HA PTE R 1

The FlinlSlones- the TI and movie modern stoneshyage family imagined by cartoonists Wil l iam Hanna and Joseph Barbera-inspired childish fan tasy and sl apstick comedy But the more we know of the humans of over 20000 years ago the more modern they seem with arts ambitions religions social forums poli t ica l pract rces and merlta l arid physical capacit ies recognizably like those of our own

Marshall Sahl ins The Origina l Aff luerlt Society f rom Stone-Age EconomiCs

their intake of 3000 calories a day In some lee-Age commushynities people ate about five pounds of food a day The nature of the plant foods they gathered-few starchy grains relativeshyly large amounts of fru it and wild tubers middot -and the high ascorbic acid content of animal organ meats provided five times the awrage intake of vitamin C of an American today Abundant game guaranteed Ice-Age affluence High levels of nutrition and long days of leisure unequalled in most subseshyquent societies meant people had time to observe nature and think abo ut what they saw The art of the era shows the subshylime res ults Like all good jokes The Flilt~rotJes-the popular television cartoon series about a modern Stone-Age famil yshycontains a kernel of truth Cave people really were like us with the same kinds of mi nds and many of the same kinds of tho ughts

Ice~Age Art

In the depths of the Ice Age a stunningly resourceful way of life took shape We know most about the period in Europe where extensive art has su rvived because it was made in deep caves evidently chosen because they were inaccessible Only now are the effects of tourism too many respiratoI)1 systems too many camera flashes damshyaging these works in their once-secret caverns Most preh istoric art has been found in northern Spain and southwest France (see Going to the Source Chauvet Cave pages 36-59) About fifty cave complexes contain thousands of paintings mostly of animals and hundreds of smaller works Examples of sculptures carvings and othe r art objects are also scattered across Europe from Britain and the Atlantic in the west to the Oder River and Carpathian Mountains in the east and beyond to Ukraine and the Ural Mountains wh ich divide Europe and Asia

What was the art fo r It surely told stories and had magical ritual uses Some an shyimal images are slashed or punctured many times over as if in symbolic sacrifice Where early artists used stenciling (tracing around a pattern) it seems believable that footprints and handprints inspired it A good case has been made for seeing the cave paintings as aids to track prey The shapes of hooves the tracks dung seasonal habits and favorite foods of the beasts are among the artists standard stock of images

The technology that made the cave art was simple a palette mLxed from three di ffe rent colors of the mineral ochre (OH-ker)- red brown yellow-and animal fat applied with wood bone and animal hair Yet eve n the earl iest works appeal inshystantly to modern sensibilities The looks and litheness of the animal portraits spring from the rock walls produc ts of practiced specialized hands and of learning accumulated over generations Carvings from the same period exhibit si mi lar elegance- ivory sculptures of 30000-year-old arched -necked horses from Vogdshyherd in south Germany female portraits from Brassempouy in France and Dolni Vestonice in tvloravia over 20000 years old Clay models of bears dogs and women were fired 27000 years ago at Dolnf Vestonice and at Maininskaya in what is now Russia

Outside Europe what little we know of the peoples of the time suggests that they created equally skillfu l work Four painted rock slabs from Namibia in southwest Africa are about 26000 years old almost as old as any art in Europe and bear similar

middotTubers plants with f leshy stems ofterl underground

animal images The earliest paintings that decorate the rocks of Arnhem La nd in northernmost Australia show faint traces of long4 extinct giant kangaroos and scary snakes A clue to the very idea of representing life in art fades today (wm a rock face in Ken niff Australia where stencils of human hands and tools were made 20000 years ago Aut most of the evidence has been lost weathered away on exposed rock faces perished with ule bod ies or hides on which it was painted or scattered by wind from the earth where it was scratched

Ice-Age Culture and Society

4The d iscovery of so much comparable art of comparable age in such widely separated parts of the world suggests an important and often overlooked fact The Ice Age as the last great era of what we would now call a kind of globalization That is key clements of culture were the same allover the inhabited worJd People practiced the same hunter-gatherer economy with similar kinds of technology ate similar kinds of food enjoyed similar levels of material cult ure and- as far as we can tell-had similar religiOUS practices

The material culture- concrete objects people create- that many archeologi shycal digs yield offers cl ues to what goes on in the mind A simple test establi shes that fact We ca n make in fo rmed inferences about peoples religion or politics or their attitudes toward natlLre and society or their values in general by looking at what they eat hOI they dress and how they decorate their homes For instan ce the peo 4

pIe who hunted mammot hs to e)tinction 20 000 years ago on the Ice-Age steppes of what is now southern Russia built dome- shaped dwellings of mammoth bones on a circula r plan twelve or fifteen feet in diameter that seem sublime triumphs of the imaginat ion They are reconstructions of mammoth nature humanly reimag4

[ned perhaps to acquire the beasts strength o r to magically assume power over the species In fact o rdinary everyday activities went on inside these eXlraord inary dwellings-sleeping eating and all the routines of fam ily life-in communities on aerage of fewer than a hundred people But no dwell ing is purely practical Your house refl ects your ideas about your place in the world

Thanks to the clues material culture yields we can make some confident asser4

t ions about other aspect s of lee-Age peoples lives their symbolic systems their magic and the kind of social and political units they lived in Although lee-Age people had nothing we recognize as writing they did have hig hly expressive symshybols which we ca n only struggle to translate Realistic drawings made 20000 to 30000 years ago show recurr ing gestures and postures Moreover they ofte n in shyclude what seem to be numbers sign ifi ed by dots and notches Ot her marks whi ch we can no long interpret are undeniab ly systematic One widely occurr ing mark that looks like a P may be a symbol for female because it resembles the curves of a womans body What looks as if it might be a calendar was made 30000 years ago in the Dordogne region in France It is a flat bone inscribed with crescen ts and cirshycles that may reco rd phases of the moon

Clues to lhe spiritual li fe of lhe ti me appear in traces of red ochre the earliest substance that seems to have had a role in ritual The oldest known ochre mi ne in the world about 42000 years old is at Lion Cave in what is now Lesotho in south 4

ern Africa The vivid lurid color was applied in burials perhaps as a precious

O ut of the Ice Peopling the Earth I 2 1

cave art Until they dIed out-Ylctfms of competition with and explOItation by settler commUnitles-m t he early twentieth century the Sout hern Bushmen of South Afnca made cave paintings similar 10 those Their ancestors made more than 20000 years ago On rock surfaces and cave walls sh amans painted thei r ~islons Of the creatures of the sPiri t-world glimpsed in stateli of ecstasy on imaginary journeys beyond the ord inarily accesshySible wor ld

offer ing perhaps to imitate blood and reinvest the dead w ith li fe The speculation that people m ight also have used ochre to paint their livi ng bod ies is hard to resist

Ice-Age people also used symbols and substances such as ochre in magic and those who controlled them ielded power In pain tin gs and ca rvings we can glimpse the Ice-Age elite people considered special and set apart fro m the group In fi gures wearing animal masks- antlered o r lionlike-the wearer is transformed From anthropological studies of the recent past we know such disguises are norshymally efforts to com m un icate with the dead o r with the gods Bringing messages from other worlds is the Tole of a shaman (SHAH-mehn) someone who acts as an intermedia ry between humans and spirits or gods The shaman may seck a sta te of ecstasy in duced by drugs or dan ci ng or drumming to see and hear realms normally inaccessible to the senses He becomes the medium through which spirits talk to th is world Among the Chukchi hu nters of northern Siberia whose way of life an d env ironment are simil ar to Icc-Age peoples the shltlillans experience is rep resented as a journey to co nsult the spirits in a realm that only the dead can norma lly enter The shaman may adopt an animal disguise to acquire the animals speed or strength or identify with an animal ancesto r The shamans role can be an awesome source o f authority Shamans can chaUenge alpha males Like other rd igions shamanism in shyvolves spiritual insight which people of both sexes various levels of intellect and a ll kinds of physique can acquire It can replace the strong with the seer and the stge By choosing el ites who had the gift o f commu nicating with sp irit s Ice-Age societies could escape the oppression of the physically powerful or those privileged by birth

Althou gh we cannot be SliTe about the nature of the Ice-Age power class we know it existed because of glaring inequalities in the way Ice-Age people were buried In a cemetery at Sunghir (SOON-geer) near Moscow dated about 24000 years ago the highest-status person seems at first glance to have been an el derly man His burshyial goods include a cap sewn with foxs teeth and about twenty ivory bracelets Nearshyby however two boys of aboll t eight or ten years old have even more spectacular ornaments As well as ivo ry bracelets and necklaces and fox-tooth buttons the boys have animal carvings and bcautifu U) wrought weapons including spea rs of mamshymoth ivo ry each over six fcct long About 3500 finely worked ivory beads had been drizzled over the head 10rso and limbs o f each boy Here was a society that marked leaders for greatness from boyhood and therefore perhaps from birth

In our attempt (0 undcrstand where power lay in lee-Age societies the ti nal bits of evidence are crumbs from ridl peoples tables fragments of feasts Archaeologists have found ashes from large-scale cooking and the calcified debris of food at sites in northern Spain perhaps from as long as 23000 years ago The tally sticks that survive from the s1me region in the same period may also have been records of expendirure on feasts Vlhat were such feasts for Dy analogy with modem hunting peoples the most likely reason was alliance-making between communities They were probably not male-bondshying occasions as some scholars think beca use they are close to major dwelling sites where women and child ren would be present Instead from the momen t of its emershygence the idea of th e feast had practical consequences to bu ild and strengthen societies and enhance the power o f those who organized the fcast~ and cont rolled the food (for more discussio n of feasting see Going to the Source feas ting pases 152-1 55)

Peopling the New World

The New World Jas the last part of the planet Homo sapiens peopled We can be sure of th at much but il is no t easy to say exactly when o r by whom According to the for merly dominant theo ry a gap opened benyeneen glaciers towa rd th e end of the Jee Age A race of hunters crossed the land lin k betvcen North America and

Out of t he Ice Peopling the Earth I 23

Shaman In many societies communication With the spirit-world remains the responSibility of the speCial ists whom anthropologists call shamans Typically they garb and paint or disguise themshyselves to resemble spirits or the animals deemed to have prIVI leged access to rulms beyond human sense The shamans then ~ JOurney to the spirits 01 ancesto~ In trances Induced by danCing drumshyming or drugs Shamans often aCQU ire SOCial mllumiddot ence and pol i tical authority as heale~ prophets and a rb l tra to~ _

Sunghir burial A prolUSion of beads distinguishes the graves of people Of high status at Sunghlr in RUSSia from about 24000 yea~ ago The dlstribushylion of signs of wealth In burials suggests that even m the Ice Age inequalities were fi fe and that status could be Inhell ted

24 1 CHAP T E R 1

(

The Peopling of the New World

A RCTI C O CEAN ~

~-J -

~ ~~ Greenland~ lt ampCgtEI~tk

-r-~ ~

PA CIFIC

ATL ANTIC

o C E A N

13000-8000 BC o C E A N

o exten t of ke over 20000 yur~ ~go shy

bull extent of ice cover 2000 yea ago

tundra

tundra and conife rous forests

bull

mm native peoples

pol~i bJe 1 1lt1 migriltion route

poSl ble ltoa~a l mlgratiOlU

early habitation ~Ite desulbed on pilge 2S

bull othe r eilrly habitation sites

~ forager settle ment desc ribed on pages 26-27

+ rrrIIRGfl7 mooern-day state

CHILE mooernmiddotd~y country

ancie nt coast lines

anc ie nt lake

Amazon Ba s i ii

50 U TH AMERICA

10000 Ke co II lu mogtI lttei 000 0 OOOO _rn~

liooo bull 000

I L III I I

Beagle middot Channel

11000 1 oft osoo OLL Mo 1000 Matlt -V wlpO

ny Il

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Asia where the Bering Strai t now flows to cilter a paradi se where no human hunter h ad ever trod before Thc abundance wa~ so great and the animals so unshywary that the invaders ate enormously and multiplied greatly The) spread rapi dly over the hemisphere hUllting th e great gam e to exti nction as they went Th e story 3ppealcd to an unsophisticated fo rm of US paTriot ism The Clov is people as these hunters were dubbed after an ea rly archaeological site in New Mexico seemed to resemb le modern American pioneers They exhibited quick-fire locomotion husshytl e and bustle technical prowess big appetit es irrepress ible strength enormous cultural reach and a talent for reforging th e environment

By comparison the truth about the peopling of the hemisphere is d isappo intingshyly undramatic T hese first great American superheroes-like most of their successhysors-did not really exist Although archeologists have excavated too few sites for a co mplete and reliable picture to emerge a new theory dominates We have evidence of early human settlement scanered from the Yukon to Uruguay and from near th e Bering Strait to the edge of the Beagle Channel- that is from the waterway that dishyvides North Am erica and Asia to the sou thern limjts of the South American mainshyland This evide nce is so widespread over so lo ng a period in so m any diffe rent geological layers and with such avast range of cultural diversity th at one conclusion is inescapable---ltolonists came at di fferent times br inging different cultures with them

No generally accepted evidence dates any inhabited sites iT) the American hem ishysphere earlier than abo ut 13000 BCE (see Map 13) T he first arrivals came du ring a time when glaciers covered much of North Am erica They stuck dose to the cold where th e game was fattest They followed corridors benleen walls of icc or alon g narrow shores away fro m glaciers Other arrivals came by sea and continued to come afrer the land bridge laS submerged Arou nd 10000 )ears ago a catastrop hic cluster ofexti nctio ns wiped o ut the manuno th mastodon ho rse gian t sloth sabershytoothed tiger and at least thirty-five other large species in the Americas New hunt shying techniques and perhaps new hunting peoples were probably partly responsible But we can only explain the even ts in the context of vast climatic changes that afshyfec ted habitats and the whole ecology on which these an imals depended

Many supposedJy early sites of human habitation have proved to be delusions of overenthusiastic archaeologists-false or at best unconvi ncing A few sites however offer strong evidence of the antiquity and range of settlemen t Most are in the eastern Uni led States- a long way from Asia It must have taken a lon g time for these peoplc to get there from the vicinity of th e modern Bering Strait [n the mid-1970s 15000shyyear-old baskcrwork and tools made with fine flints emerged fro m deep under the d isshycarded beer cans that topped a d ig at Meadowcroft on the Ohio River near the border of Pennsylvania and West Virginia Archaeologists are investigating similar sites beshytvmiddoteen the Ohio and Sava nnah Rivers Later in the 19705 excavations at Monte Verde (MON-teh VER-deh) in southern Chile revealed a twen ty-foot long wooden hideshycovered dwelling preserved in a peat bog fo r about 12500 years Nearby wCrt a big mastodon-butchery and a space devoted to making tools The inhabitants bro ught salt and seaweed from the coast forty miles away and medicinal herbs from mounshytains equally fa r in the opposite direction Halfmiddotchewed lum ps of seaweed show the eaters dental bites a boys footprints survive in the clay lining of a pit Tf Meadowcroft is a long way from the colonizers entry po illt n ear the Bering Strait southern Chile is a world away again-almosl as far as you can get in the Western Hemisphere How lo ng would it have taken the senlers of MOnle Verde to cross the hemisphere over vast distances and th rough many difte rent kinds of environments each dem anding new forms of adaptl1ian Most specialists think it must have taken thousands of years The quest ion of the date of the firs t peopling of the New Vorld therefore remains open

Out of the Ice Peop ling the Earth I 25

l Clovis Points

Monte Verde About 12000 years ago a younil permiddot son trod in fresh clay thai lined a hearth in Monte Verde Chile Peat sealed and preserved Ihe footmiddot pnnt to be rediscovered by archaeologiSts 111 the 1970s EllcavaMns at Monle Verde revealed II VIImiddot tage of mammoth hunters so old that it made previshyous theories about when people arflved in the Americas Questionable or even untenable

26 I C HA PTER 1

SURVIVAL OF THE FORAGERS M the ice cap retreated and the great herds shifted with it many human communishyties opted to follow them Archeology has unearthed traces of their routes Along fhe way in what is now northern Germa ny about 12000 years ago people sacrificed reindeer by deliberately weighting them with stones sewn into their stomachs and drowning them in a lake About 1000 years later hunters as far north as Yorkshire in England who left a weU-preserved camp at Starr Carr found an elwironmem as abundant as the cave artistss had been Not only was it fill ed with tundramiddotloving species such as red deer elk and aurochs (OW- roks)-huge shaggy wi ld catlleshybut also with wild boar in surroundings that were becoming patchily wooded

At Skateholm in Sweden about 8000 years ago hunters founded the largest known settlement of the era [t was a winter camp in an area where the eighty-seven different animal species roamed that the inhabitants ate trapping river-fi sh netting sea-birds harpooning seals and dolphin sticking pigs and driving deer into pits or pondlt In summer the people must have moved farther north They lie today in groves decorated with beads and ocll1e and filted with the spoils of their careers including antlers and boars tusks Their dogs are buried nearby These burly wolflike companshyions are sometimes interred with more signs of honor than humans were given Dogs were full members of societies where hunting prowess and skill in war determined stashytus Many of the human dead bear wounds from man-made weapons Here too is evshyidence of sexual specialization Women have only a third as many wounds as the men

TIle most persistentJy faithful followe rs of the ice were the Inuit (IN-yoo-it) of North America About 4000 )ears ago they invented the blubber-filled soapstone lamp Now they couJd follow big game beond the tundra and into the darkness of an arctic winter They could track the musk ox to the shore of the ocean and the caribou on its winter migrations when its fur is th ickest and its fat most plentiful This way of life persisted until the late twentieth century although the people who first practiced it have disappeared Migrants from the Arctic Ocean replaced them 1000 )ears ago

Climate change trapped other foraging peoples in envi ronments where they had to develop new ways of life Some of these environments offered new kinds of abundance Here were broad -leaved forests rich in acorns (which make nut ritious food for any humans who have enough time to fine-gr ind them)) and lakes and rivers funof aquatic life New World prairies held apparently inexha usti ble stocks of bison (though th e largest bison species was rapidly hunted to extinction) Beshytween the unstable per iods of climate change around 12000 years ago foragers even colonized dense tropical forests in southeast Asia and in th e New World at Pedra Pintada in Brazil where the Amazon River now flows This is a region where foragers today have to struggle to find foods they can di gest but it seems to have been more environmentally diverse toward the end of the Ice Age

Some societies perpetuated their foraging life in hot arid deserts as different from the best hunting grounds of the ree Age as it is possible to imagine This reshyqu ired two forms of adaptation First the thinly dispersed populations had to create collaborative networks Such interdependence explains why peoples who live in ecoshylogically shaky homelands often require people to marry outside the group (a pracshytice lolOwn as exogamy) and why they regard hospitality to strangers as a sacred obligation Second poor environments demanded that in habitants develop what we might caU orally tra nsmi tted science For a ni with accurate and extensive knowlshyedge of their habitat can people survive in harsh environments

The San or Bushmen of southern Africas Kalahari Desert illustrate the diffi shyculties and solutions Their domain has shrunk in the last fe w centuries as Bantu farmers Khoi herdsmen and white invaders have overrun much of their fonner

Out of t he Ice P eopling t he Eartn I 27

territo ry But their heart1and was already dr Yll the time of tne Sans firs t occupancy about 14000 years ago Tne increased rainfall that usually followed the retreaT of tbe icc hardly fell nere There are undergro und rivers but few permanent water holes The people watch fo r rare signs of rain and hurry to

gather the vegetation that accompa nies it The scrubland pla nt foods induding wa ter-bearing tubers and a kind of cact us su pply 30 percent of tnei r sustenance The rest comes from game which grazes on lough desert shrubs that humans can shynot digest

Laurens van der Post a South African adventurer who has written about the Bushmen once accompanied a band of San hunters in search of their favorite food eland a type of anteshylope O ne morning just after sunrise they found the tracks of a herd By three in the afternoon after nonstop pursuit at a tro t Bushmen Though now obliged to adopt a mixed th ey came on the herd and took aim To kill large game is almosl impossible with a oconomy su pported in part by farming and donamiddot

tions of food the San or Bushmen of southernBushmans bow He wounds the beast with a poisoned barb and fo llows it until it Africa have been among the most conservative of

drops from exhaustion and the effects of the drug before milking the kill On Ibis the worlds peoples They maintained their foragshyoCCllsion the hunters rail for twelve miles without stopping and the final mile was ing way 01 li fe essentially unchanged for millen shy

nla---desplte neighbors attempts to e~lermU1alean all-out sprint The next time they made contact with the herd one bull was seen them ThiS record of survival contrasts with the to be tiring It still took another fu ll hou r of pursuit until he fell Then wit hout rapid turnover of more ambitiOUS Civilizat ions that

pause or break for rest they were fresh enough at the end to plunge straight 3vay rad ically modify their en~lronments usually With

into the formidable task of skinning and cuning up the heavy animal l Bushm en disastrous results

who persist with thi s demanding way of life to this day are obviously pursui ng a commitment that has grown out of generations of invested emoti on As difficul t as it may be for us to understand the San would find it heart-wrenching to change a way of life for the mere sake of efficiency convenience or material ga in

In one sense the worlds food supply st ill depends o n fo raging The amount of food from hunti ng actually increased in the twentieth cen tury which may go down in history not only as the last age of hunring but as the greatest World-over today we practice a highly specialized mechanized and unu sual form of huntingshydeep-sea trawling Fish farming is likely to replace it in the future but in any case deep-sea fishing is a historical th rowback

IN PERSPECTIVE After the Ice

In the post~ke-Age world little by littl e ove r thousa nds of years rn ost societies aban doned for shy CHRONOLOGY aging and adopted fa rming or herding as the way (A N dates are apPfoximltlte-l

to get their food Among peoples who still li ve Over 3 million years ago Lucyd ose to the ice cap the Inuit remain faithfu l to 2-1 million years ago Homo erectus migrates from East Afnca 10 Afnea

their hunting tradition in North America Mos t of and EuraSia

their Old World counterparts however have long 100000 years ago Homo sapiens migrates out of Afnca

abandoned it In Eu rasia though some hunting 67000 years ago Homo sapiens in ASia 50000 years ago Homo sapiens colonizes Australia and New Guineacultures still cling to the old ways at th e eas tern

Homo sapiens reaches Europe end of Siberia the peoples on th e western Arctic 30000 years ago last Neanderthals vanishrim-the Sami (or Lapplanders) of Sca ndinavia

20000- World emerges from the Ice Age and their neighbors the Kardia Samoyeds and 15000 iICE Nenets-adopted re indee r herding over a th oushy 20000 BC pound Invent ion of the bow and arrow sand years ago The Ice- Age way oflife if not over 13000 BCpound Homo sapiens in the Americas is drawing to a close Hunting is now th ought of

28 I CHAP TE R 1

as a pri mitive way to get food long abandoned excep t as an aristoc ratic indulmiddot gellee in som e co untries or as a supposedJy manly sport in others

The disappearance of fo raging lifeways seems a rema rkable turn around for a predatorspecies such as Homo sapiells There was a time before hun ting when our ancestors were scavenge rs but for hundreds of thousands perhaps millions of years foraging was reliable and reward ing It fed people through every change of climate Its practitioners spread over th e world and adapted successfully to every kind of habitat Homo sapiens dominated every ecos)stem they became part of and competed successfully with most other species They achieved startling in shycreases in their numbers which we struggle to e(plain They founded more varied societ ies than any other species (though the differences among these societies were slight compared to later periods) They had art-rich cultures with traditions of learning and symbolic systems to record information They had their own so shycial elites polit ical customs) ambitious magic and practical methods to exploit their environ ment

Our next task is to ask why after the achievements recounted in this chapter did people abandon the foragi ng li fe Renouncing the hunt and pursuing new ways of life after the Ice Age are among the most far- reaching and mysterious transforshymations of the human past If the puzzle of hy Homo sapiens spread over the Earth is the first great questio n in our history the problem of wh) fo ragers became farmers is th e second

PROBLEMS AND PARALLELS 1 When does the story of humankind begm Is it possible to 5 Which stresses cou ld have caused early peoples to d iVide and

defme what it means to be huma n What characteristiCS do f ight eac h other Wh ich theories have been put forward for how we share with chimpanzees and other apes war started

2 How do Neandert hals and Homo floresiensis cha llenge 6 How did ma le domination come to be normal in human soc ishycommonly held definitions of Homo sapiens eties What impact did sexual econom ic specialiZa t ion have on

early SOC iet ies3 Why d id Homo sapiens migrate out of Afr ica How did migrashytion change peoples relationships with each other and wi th 7 Why was the Ice Age a time of affl uence What role did shamans thelf environment play in Ice-Age soc iety What insights Into Ice-Age societies ca n

we glean from its art and the rema ins of anc ient feasts4 What were the factors behind the rapid population growth of Homo sapiens 8 How did some SOCieties perpetuate the fOlaging li fe after the

Ice Age How has the foraging life persisted today

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THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE A Case in Point Aboriginal Australians Preagricultural Settlements The Disadvantages of Fa rming

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS Herders Environments Tillers Environments

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE Europe Africa Asia The Pac ific Islands The Americas

SO WHY DID FARMING START Population Pressure The Outcome of Abundance The Power of Politics Cu lt Agriculture Climatic Instability Agriculture by Accident Production As an Outgrowth of Procurement

IN ERSP CT1VEmiddot Saskinamp Stability

n August 1770 the Bri tish navigator Captain James Cook reached the north

coast of Australia on the first of his spectacular voyages of exploration that

charted the lands and limits of the Pacific Ocean Ncar Cape York hc ___-~

paused at an island he named Possession Island For although his

stated purpose was scientific he was also an officer of the Royal Navy

with orders to extend the British Empire To Cooks mind the island

though inhabIted was wa iting to be grabbed The natives could not be

said to possess it because they had left no marks of possession on its soil

A wealth of plants that they could hae domesticated-fruits proper IQr

the support of mann-was growing wild Yet Cook wrote the people know nothshy

ing of cultivation It seems strange He was puzzling over one of the most pershy

plexing problems of history- the- diffe rence between forage rs and farmers food

procurers and food producers

Food is the most precious of resources Nothing Ill happen without it To most people in most societies for most of the time food is and always has been the most important thing in the world Change~ in how we get food and whether we get it arc among histors big changes During the global warming that fo ll owed the Ice Age hUSbandry-breeding animals and cultivating crops-began to replace hunting and gathering and introduced the biggest cha nge of all

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE

Husbandry happened in two distinct ways involving different tpes of environshyments and different levels of environmental intervention In some environments people could exploi t creatures that had a he rd instinct by managing the herds rather than by hunting them Breeding enhanced qualities that evolution did not necessa rily favor such as docility size and yield of meat m il k eggs and fat On the negative side close contact between humans and animals often allowed disease-bearing organisms to thrive th reatening human lives and health and sometimes unleashing plagues Otherwi se however animal husbHlIdry barely affectcd the environment Herds on the whole kept to their traditional patterns of migration and people continued to accompany them-driving the beasts now rather than follOving them Domest icated animals remained recognizably the hei rs of their wild ancestors and the landscapes through which they traveled did not change much except that the herds feeding and manure probably

32 I CHAPTER 2

encouraged the grasses they ate to flourish at the expense of othe r plant species

In other environments however plant husbandry involved massive human intervention In the long run

WHY ARE settled foragers better off than farmers tillage of the soil changed the world mo re than any previshyous innovation by Homo sapiens From postglacial m ud W HAT K INDS of environments are suited to herding people coaxed what we now call civilization-a way of

WHAT KINDS of environments were suited to early agricu lture life based on rad ically modifying the environment Inshy

W H ERE D ID farm ing start and what were t he fi rst crops stead of merely t rying to manage the landscape nature

GIVEN THE d isadvantages why did people iarm provided farmers recarved it with fields and boundaries

The rice fields of Bali in IndoneSia are among the most proo uct ive in the world usrng variet ies of rice and techniques for farming it thal are about 1000 years old Irrigation channels maintained and administered by farmers cooperatives distrrbute water everl ly among the terraces Though oflgirla l ly a lowlarld crop fa voring swampy conditions rice adapts perfec tly ro upland enVIronments and to terrace farmrng

di tches and irrigation ca nals They stamped the land with a new look a geometrical order Agric ul ture enabled humans to see the world in a new way-to imagine that magic and science had the power to change nature Such power in turn changed peoples sense of where they fit into the panorama of life on Earth Now they could become lords or in more modest moments or cultures stewards of creation

Together farm ing and herding revolutionized humans place in their ecosysshyterm Instead of merely dependi ng on other life forms to sustain us we forged a new relationship of interdependence with th ose species we eat We rely on them for food they rely on us for th eir reproduction Domesticated animals would not exist without humans Husbandr was the firs t human challenge to evolution Instead of evolvi ng species through natural selection) fa rming and herding proceed by what might be called unnatural selection-sorting and selecting by human hands for human needs according to human agendas In other words e breed livestock and cultivate plants

Herding and tilling also changed human societies By feeding people on a vastshyly greater scale agricu lture allowed societies to get hugely bigger than ever before We can only guess at the absolute figures but in areas where farming has replaced foraging in modern ti mes population has increased fifty- or even a hundredfol d Larger populations demanded new fo rms of cont rol of labor and food distribu shytion which Il1 turn nurtured strong states and powerful elites Society became more volatile and apparently less stable

In almost every case for reasons we still do not understand when people begin to practice agriculture th e pace of change quickens immeasurably and cu shymulat ively States an d civilizations do not seem to last for long Soc ieties that we think of as being most evo lved turn out to be least fitted for survival Compared with the relat ive stability of forager communities soci eties that depend on agr ishyculture are prone to lurch and coll apse History becomes a path picked amon g their ru ins

Still for Captain Cook and for most people who haye thought about it ever since it was indeed strange that people who had the opportunity to practice agrishyculture should not take advantage of it The advantages of agri culture seem so ob shyvious The farmer can select the best specimens of edible crops and creatures collect th em in the most co nvenient places and pastures crossbreed the livestock and hybridize the plants to improve size yi eld or flavo r By these methods sm all farming socie ties grow into comm unities and build up large populations Usually they go on to create ci ties and develop ever more complex technologies To Cook and his contemporaries in Europe who believed that progress was inevitable and that the same kind of changes are bound to happen everywhere peoples who dung to foraging seemed baffling

Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 33

A Case in Point Aborigina l Australians

Cook and others at the time saw only two explanations for why foragers sllch as the aborigines (AB-eh-rihj- ih-neez) in Australia would reject agriculture They were either stupid o r subhuman Indeed early European painters in Aust ralia depicted aborigines as apelike creatures grimaci ng oddl) and crawling in trees The colo nists s impl y ignored the nati es o r when they got in the way often hunted them downshyas they would beasts But not on ly did tbe native Aust ralians reject agriculture in some areas th ey appeared [0 shun every technical cO llvenience On the island o f Tasman ia in the extreme south of Australia where the natives became extinct soon after European settlement began they seemed to have forgotten every art of their ancestors bows boats even how to kindle fi rc In Arnhem Land in the extreme north they used boomerangs to make musi c but no longer as weapons for th e hunt Progress which the European discoverers of Australia believed in fervently seemed to have gone into reverse Australia was not only on the exact opposite side of the world from England it was a topsy-turvy place where everythi ng was upside down

We can hOever be certain that if aborigines rejected agriculture o r other practices Europeans considered progressive it must have been for good reasons TIle aborigines did not lack the knowledge necessary to switch from fo raging to farming had they so wished When they gathered wild yams or the root known as

James COO K from Captain Cooks Journal During his First Voyage Round the World

nardoo they ensured that enough of the plant remained in the ground to grow back In many regions too they used fire to control the grazi ng grounds of kangaroos and concentrate Ihem for hunting a common technique among herders to manage pasture and among tillers to renew the soil Along the Murray and Darling Rivers aborigines even watered and weeded wild cro ps and policed their boundaries against human and animal pred ators (sec Map 20

The abo rigi nal Australians could also have systematically planted and irrigated crops farmed the grubs they liked to eat pen ned kangashyroos and even tried to domestica te them (Kangaroos are can tankerous creatures but people do make pets o f them Breeding selected speci shymen s would probably produce a domestic strain in a few generations ) In the far no rth of Australia aboriginal communities traded with the farming cultures of New Guinea So even if they hadnt developed agrishyculture on th eir own they could have lea rned it fro m o utsi ders If the aborigines did not farm it must have been because they did not want to In short they were doing well without it Simil ar cases all over the world support this conclusion Where wild foods are abundant there is no in shycentive to do mesticate them Of course people o ften adopt p ractices that d o them no good We can concede this general principle but case by case we stiJI han t ( 0 know why

Preagricultura l Settlements

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Under some conditions people can settle in one place without the trouble of farmshying Archaeological evidence in the region we now ca ll the Middle East shows this After the Ice Age ended about 15000 lJCE a frontier zone between forest and grassland stretched across the eastern sho re of the Mediterranean and what are now Iran eastern Turkey and Iraq (see Map 22) The forests were full of acorns pistachios and almonds which gatherers ground into flour and paste The grassshylands bred vast quantjties of wild grass with edible seeds These foods could all he

34 I C H A P TER 2

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Preagricultural Settlements in the Middle East

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warehoused between harvests and had the additional advantage of maturing at di fferent times Dense herds of gazelle in the gra sslands prov ided more nutrition for hunters to bring home Food was so plentiful that foragers did not have to move around much to fi nd it

By abou t 14000 to 15000 years ago permanent sen lements a rose th roughout the region clusters of dwelli ngs with stone wa lls or those made of wood on stone foundations or cue from soft stone and roofed with reeds The foragers who lived in th ese sedentary communities apparently kept to themselves Villages had dis shytinctive iden tit ies and habits wh ich almost amounted to badges of identity Some favored gazelle toe bones for jewelry some preferred fox teeth and partridge legs These people married within their own communities (a practi ce known as en shydogamy) judging from th e evidence of inherited physical characteristics For ex shyample in some villages people were retatimiddotely short while in others they had d istinctive dental patterns These settlers cut what look like plans of their fields on limestone slabs which suggests that they were terri torial- that they had a sense of possession that Captain Cook would have recognized

Out of the Mud Far mIng and Herding A fter tne Ice Age 35

In sum the lives of preagricultural settlers were so much like the lives of the early fa rmers who succeeded them that when anhaeologists first found the forshyagers villages in the 1930s they assumed the inhabitants were farmers Bue the setshylied foragers were 3ctuaHy better off than farmers Their rema ins on the whole show better health and nourishme nt than the fa rming peoples who followed later in the sa me region A diet rich in seeds and nuts had ground down their teeth but- unl ike the farmers-they have none of the streaked tooth -enamel common among people who suffer from food shortages

Simi la r evidence of preagricultural settlements exists in other places Take a few conspicuous examples The Jomon (JOHM-mehn ) people of central Honshu Island in Japan hved in permanent vi llages 13000 years ago feeding themselves by fishing il nd gathering acorns and chestnuts They made pots fo r display in elaboshyrate shapes modeled on flames and serpents an d lacquered them with tree sap Their potters were in a sense magicians transforming clay into objects of prestige and ritua l In the Egyp tim Sahara lit Nabta Playa about forty plant species inclu shyding sorghum a type of cereal grass grew alongside hearths and pit oven~ evi shydence of settled life from about 10000 years ago In other pa rts of (en tral Sahara in the same period that had plenty of water and a cookr climate than now foragers fou nd sorghum and millet another cereal grass At Gobekli Tepe (goh- BEHK-lee TEH-pchl a hilltop site in so utheast Turkey co ntemporaries who lived mainly by gathering wild wheat he ed seven -ton pillars from li mestone They reerected them in a sunken chamber in their village and decorated them with carvings of snakes boar gazelles cra nes and symbols that look suspiciously like writing

What was life li ke in these earliest settl ements Small permanent houses sugshygest that nuclear families-parents and children-predominated though so me sites clearty have communal work areas for grinding seeds and nuts As for who did the work the most stunn ing find ing of recent archaeology in the Middle East sugshygests that work was probably shared behleen the sexes The way skeletons are musshycled suggests th at women did slightly more kneeling (and therefore slightly more gr inding) than men and men did more throwing (and therefore more hunting) than women But both sexes did both activit ies Male and female bodies began to reconverge after a long period during which they bad evolved to look differently As food product ion replaced hunting and gathering wa r and child rearing became the main sex-specific jobs in society The convergence between th e physical feashytures of men and women seems still to be in progress today Indeed it seems to be accelerating as men and women share more and morc tasks and the need for heavshyily muscled or big framed bod ies di minishes along wi th physica ll y demanding jobs in much of the world

The Disadvantages of Farming

Prernrming comm unities do not simply progress to fann ing If foraging produces abundance and sec urity it does not necessarily follow that farming can deliver more of the same The consequences of adopting agriculture are by no means all positive In the early stages of moving from foraging to fa rm ing the food supply actually becomes less reliable because people depend on a relatively small range of fa rmed foods or even on a si ngle species As a result a community becomes vulnerable to ecological disasters Famine becomes more likely as diet narrows Moreover when people have 0 plant and grow food as weDas gather it they have to use up more energy to get the sa me amount of nourishment (Although domesmiddot ticated food s once harvested tend to be easier to process for eating) The need to

lomon pottery Ten thousand years ago the Jomon potters of Japan produced the worlds earliest knOvn earthenware vessels Other pottel)-makmg peoples also practled farm ing but the Jomon people were sedentary foragers--l lvlng in permamiddot nent or long-term settlements but managing the environment in mInimal ways and relyIng on abunshydant wild foods including nuts seeds acorns some 70 marine animal Spec ies and land mamshymals---eatmg no just boar deer and hare but also wolves Wildcats f lYing squIrrel s and mon keys

Overuse deforms bones ArchaeolO8) can reconmiddot struc t how ancient peop le b(gthaved by measuring the deformities In their skeletons The woman hose toe th is was lived In a commuMy of eady sedentary foragers In what is now Syria She evIshydently spent much of her tIme kneeling presumshyably to grlFld the acorns and kernels of Wild wheat on whIch her people re lied for food

36 I C H A P T ER 2

Early Forager Settlements (All dales are approximate)

15000 yea rs ago 14000-15000

yea rs ago 13000 years ago 10000 years ago

l

World emerges from the Ice Age Permanent settlements appear In Middle East

Honshu Island Japan

Nabta Playa Egypt GObekh Tepe Turkey

organize labor encourages inequalities and explo itation Concentrashytions of domesticated animals spread disease such as smallpox measles rubella ch icken pox influenza and tuberculosis

So the problem is really the opposite of what Cook supposed It is fanners behavior not fo ragers that is strange Husba nd ry is not a step along a march of improvement because in some ways it makes life worse No one has PU l the problem better than the histo rian of agronomy Jack L Harlan

people who do not farm do about eveq1hing that farmers do but they do lot work as hard They understand thllifc cycles of plants kno the seashysons of the year and when and where the natural plant food resources can he

Jack Harlan from Crops and Man

Chukchi herder The choice between huntmg and herding otten depends on local and historical Clrmiddot cumstances Remdeermiddotherding is an anCient pracmiddot tlce In muc h of northern Euragtla whereas irl North America the can bou have remained wild In e~treme norlheast Asia close to America the Chukchi long resisted the example of neighboring peo ple and preferred hunting 10 herding In the last two or Illree cenlurles however they have adopted the herdsman s vocat ion shown here

hareswd in great abundance with the least eff() rt There is evidence that thl diet of g-athshyering peoples was better than that of cultivators that slarvation was rare that there was a lower incidence of chronic disease and not nearly so many cavities in their teeth

The question must be raised Whr furm Vhy work harder for food less nut rishytious md a supply more capricious Why invite famine plague ~poundtilcnce and crowded living conditions 1

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

Part of what is surprising about agriculture is that it is so common Not only has almost th e entire human world adopted 1t many peoples ca me to it indepenshydently of one anot her Scholars used to su ppose that it was so extraordinary it must have begun in some particular spo t and that diffusion spread it from there- carried by migrants or conquerors or transmitted by t rade o r im itated The last 40 years of research have shown on the contrary that the transition to

food product io n happened over and over agai n in a range of regions and a variety of environments with d ifferen t foodstuffs and di fferent techn iques The most obv ious co ntrast in environ ments is betwee n herders and tillers Herd ing develops where plan ts a re tOO spa rse or indigestible to sustain human life but a nim als can convert these pla nts into meat-an energy SO UTee tha t people can access by eating th e anim als Tilling deshyvelops where th e soil is suitable or enough ecologica l di shyversity ex ists to susta in plant husbandry o r mi xed farming of plants and animals

Herders Environments

[n three regions of the Earth-tundra the evergreen foresls of no rthern Eurasia and great grasslands- il is not possible to grow enough humanly d igest ible plant foods to keep large numbers of people alive [n the

tund ra and evergreen forests average temperatures arc too low the growing sea shyson too short the surface soil too vulnerable to frost and the subso il in some areas too froze n In these environments thert~ are only two options People can remain foragers- an d primari ly hu nters seeking the fa t-ri ch species rypical of stich zones The [nu it in the North American Arctic for example hunt seal and walrus Or people can become herders like the Sami and Samoyeds of north ern Europe and northwest Asia who live off rei ndeer

Out of the Mud Farming and H erding After the Ice Age I 37

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 FORAGERS AND FARMERS COMPARED

FORAGERS FARMERS

Food procurers Food producers

hUn and gather husbandry (breed animals cultivate crops)

Fit into nature Chanampe nature

little environmental impact herders some environmental impact tillers massive environment impact

Manaampethe landscape Nature remade and reimagined

Dependence on wild animals and plants Interdependence between humans plants and animals

animals and plants exploited and domeslicated

Stable food supply Unstable food supply

nomadic fOfltlgcrs move in response 10 environmental small range of farmed foods increases vulnerability change sedentary fo ragers vulnerable to changes of climate to ecological disasters

Stable popUlation

relatively little labor needed population COlltrol avalable mainly by managed lactatioll

Expandinamp population

breeding livestock and cultivating plants leads to increased food supply increased population concentrations of domesticated animals spread disease

Stable society

kinship and age fi x ind ividuals place in sodery sexes usually share labor by spedalidng in difterent economic tasks

Radically changed unstable society

need to control labor and food distribution leads to social inequalititS work shared between the sexes increased reliance on female labor ~trong nates dewlop with powerful elites complex technologies

Similarly the soils of the world s vast grassla nds- known as prairie in North America pampa in South America steppe in Eurasia and the Sahel (sah-HEHL) in Africa- have for most of history been unfavorable for tillage (sce Map 23) The sad is mostly too difficu lt to turn without a steel plow Except for patches of excepshytionally favorable soil herding has been the only possible fo rm of husbandry in these areas The peoples of the Eurasian and Africa n grasslands were probably herdi ng by about 5000 acE Native American grassland dwellers of the New World on the othe r hand retained a foraging way of life because available species-bison various types of antelope-were (or the lIlost part more abun shydant for the hunt and less suitable fo r herding

For those who choose it herding has three special consequences First it imposshyes a mobile way of life The proportion of the population ho follow the herdsshyand in som e cases it is the enri re popu lation-cannot seuJe into permanent

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38 I CHAP TER 2

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villages Herder peoples are not ul1iLling or unable to build permanently or on a large sca le The Scythians for instance people of the -estern Asian steppe who first domesticated the horse and invented th e wheel and axle about 6000 to 7OCX years ago built impressive stone structures Bul these wefe underground tombs dwellings fo r the dead while the living inhabited temporary camps Some herding societies in Asia and Africa have become rich enough to fou nd ci ties fo r elites OT for specialists working outside of food production such as craftsmen or miners Indeed as we shall see (Chap ter 13) in the thirteenth century CF a city of thi s type Karakorum in Mongolia was one of the most admired cities in the world On the whole howshyever herding does no t favo r the development of cities o r the kind of culture that cities nourish such as monumental buildings large-scale inst itutions fo r education and the arts and ind ustrial technology

Second since herde rs breed from animal s that naturally share their grassland habitats thei r herds consist of such creatures as cattl e sheep horses goats-milkshyyielding stock To get the fu ll benefit fro m their auimals herdin g peoples have to eat dai ry products To modern milk-fed Americans this may sound perfeclly no rshyma l But it required a modification of human evolution Most people in most part s of the world do not natural1 ) produce lactase the substance that enables them to d igest milk after infancy They respond to dairy products wit h distaste or even intol erance The Masai of Kenya in East Africa get 80 percent of their energy

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

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intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

20 I C HA PTE R 1

The FlinlSlones- the TI and movie modern stoneshyage family imagined by cartoonists Wil l iam Hanna and Joseph Barbera-inspired childish fan tasy and sl apstick comedy But the more we know of the humans of over 20000 years ago the more modern they seem with arts ambitions religions social forums poli t ica l pract rces and merlta l arid physical capacit ies recognizably like those of our own

Marshall Sahl ins The Origina l Aff luerlt Society f rom Stone-Age EconomiCs

their intake of 3000 calories a day In some lee-Age commushynities people ate about five pounds of food a day The nature of the plant foods they gathered-few starchy grains relativeshyly large amounts of fru it and wild tubers middot -and the high ascorbic acid content of animal organ meats provided five times the awrage intake of vitamin C of an American today Abundant game guaranteed Ice-Age affluence High levels of nutrition and long days of leisure unequalled in most subseshyquent societies meant people had time to observe nature and think abo ut what they saw The art of the era shows the subshylime res ults Like all good jokes The Flilt~rotJes-the popular television cartoon series about a modern Stone-Age famil yshycontains a kernel of truth Cave people really were like us with the same kinds of mi nds and many of the same kinds of tho ughts

Ice~Age Art

In the depths of the Ice Age a stunningly resourceful way of life took shape We know most about the period in Europe where extensive art has su rvived because it was made in deep caves evidently chosen because they were inaccessible Only now are the effects of tourism too many respiratoI)1 systems too many camera flashes damshyaging these works in their once-secret caverns Most preh istoric art has been found in northern Spain and southwest France (see Going to the Source Chauvet Cave pages 36-59) About fifty cave complexes contain thousands of paintings mostly of animals and hundreds of smaller works Examples of sculptures carvings and othe r art objects are also scattered across Europe from Britain and the Atlantic in the west to the Oder River and Carpathian Mountains in the east and beyond to Ukraine and the Ural Mountains wh ich divide Europe and Asia

What was the art fo r It surely told stories and had magical ritual uses Some an shyimal images are slashed or punctured many times over as if in symbolic sacrifice Where early artists used stenciling (tracing around a pattern) it seems believable that footprints and handprints inspired it A good case has been made for seeing the cave paintings as aids to track prey The shapes of hooves the tracks dung seasonal habits and favorite foods of the beasts are among the artists standard stock of images

The technology that made the cave art was simple a palette mLxed from three di ffe rent colors of the mineral ochre (OH-ker)- red brown yellow-and animal fat applied with wood bone and animal hair Yet eve n the earl iest works appeal inshystantly to modern sensibilities The looks and litheness of the animal portraits spring from the rock walls produc ts of practiced specialized hands and of learning accumulated over generations Carvings from the same period exhibit si mi lar elegance- ivory sculptures of 30000-year-old arched -necked horses from Vogdshyherd in south Germany female portraits from Brassempouy in France and Dolni Vestonice in tvloravia over 20000 years old Clay models of bears dogs and women were fired 27000 years ago at Dolnf Vestonice and at Maininskaya in what is now Russia

Outside Europe what little we know of the peoples of the time suggests that they created equally skillfu l work Four painted rock slabs from Namibia in southwest Africa are about 26000 years old almost as old as any art in Europe and bear similar

middotTubers plants with f leshy stems ofterl underground

animal images The earliest paintings that decorate the rocks of Arnhem La nd in northernmost Australia show faint traces of long4 extinct giant kangaroos and scary snakes A clue to the very idea of representing life in art fades today (wm a rock face in Ken niff Australia where stencils of human hands and tools were made 20000 years ago Aut most of the evidence has been lost weathered away on exposed rock faces perished with ule bod ies or hides on which it was painted or scattered by wind from the earth where it was scratched

Ice-Age Culture and Society

4The d iscovery of so much comparable art of comparable age in such widely separated parts of the world suggests an important and often overlooked fact The Ice Age as the last great era of what we would now call a kind of globalization That is key clements of culture were the same allover the inhabited worJd People practiced the same hunter-gatherer economy with similar kinds of technology ate similar kinds of food enjoyed similar levels of material cult ure and- as far as we can tell-had similar religiOUS practices

The material culture- concrete objects people create- that many archeologi shycal digs yield offers cl ues to what goes on in the mind A simple test establi shes that fact We ca n make in fo rmed inferences about peoples religion or politics or their attitudes toward natlLre and society or their values in general by looking at what they eat hOI they dress and how they decorate their homes For instan ce the peo 4

pIe who hunted mammot hs to e)tinction 20 000 years ago on the Ice-Age steppes of what is now southern Russia built dome- shaped dwellings of mammoth bones on a circula r plan twelve or fifteen feet in diameter that seem sublime triumphs of the imaginat ion They are reconstructions of mammoth nature humanly reimag4

[ned perhaps to acquire the beasts strength o r to magically assume power over the species In fact o rdinary everyday activities went on inside these eXlraord inary dwellings-sleeping eating and all the routines of fam ily life-in communities on aerage of fewer than a hundred people But no dwell ing is purely practical Your house refl ects your ideas about your place in the world

Thanks to the clues material culture yields we can make some confident asser4

t ions about other aspect s of lee-Age peoples lives their symbolic systems their magic and the kind of social and political units they lived in Although lee-Age people had nothing we recognize as writing they did have hig hly expressive symshybols which we ca n only struggle to translate Realistic drawings made 20000 to 30000 years ago show recurr ing gestures and postures Moreover they ofte n in shyclude what seem to be numbers sign ifi ed by dots and notches Ot her marks whi ch we can no long interpret are undeniab ly systematic One widely occurr ing mark that looks like a P may be a symbol for female because it resembles the curves of a womans body What looks as if it might be a calendar was made 30000 years ago in the Dordogne region in France It is a flat bone inscribed with crescen ts and cirshycles that may reco rd phases of the moon

Clues to lhe spiritual li fe of lhe ti me appear in traces of red ochre the earliest substance that seems to have had a role in ritual The oldest known ochre mi ne in the world about 42000 years old is at Lion Cave in what is now Lesotho in south 4

ern Africa The vivid lurid color was applied in burials perhaps as a precious

O ut of the Ice Peopling the Earth I 2 1

cave art Until they dIed out-Ylctfms of competition with and explOItation by settler commUnitles-m t he early twentieth century the Sout hern Bushmen of South Afnca made cave paintings similar 10 those Their ancestors made more than 20000 years ago On rock surfaces and cave walls sh amans painted thei r ~islons Of the creatures of the sPiri t-world glimpsed in stateli of ecstasy on imaginary journeys beyond the ord inarily accesshySible wor ld

offer ing perhaps to imitate blood and reinvest the dead w ith li fe The speculation that people m ight also have used ochre to paint their livi ng bod ies is hard to resist

Ice-Age people also used symbols and substances such as ochre in magic and those who controlled them ielded power In pain tin gs and ca rvings we can glimpse the Ice-Age elite people considered special and set apart fro m the group In fi gures wearing animal masks- antlered o r lionlike-the wearer is transformed From anthropological studies of the recent past we know such disguises are norshymally efforts to com m un icate with the dead o r with the gods Bringing messages from other worlds is the Tole of a shaman (SHAH-mehn) someone who acts as an intermedia ry between humans and spirits or gods The shaman may seck a sta te of ecstasy in duced by drugs or dan ci ng or drumming to see and hear realms normally inaccessible to the senses He becomes the medium through which spirits talk to th is world Among the Chukchi hu nters of northern Siberia whose way of life an d env ironment are simil ar to Icc-Age peoples the shltlillans experience is rep resented as a journey to co nsult the spirits in a realm that only the dead can norma lly enter The shaman may adopt an animal disguise to acquire the animals speed or strength or identify with an animal ancesto r The shamans role can be an awesome source o f authority Shamans can chaUenge alpha males Like other rd igions shamanism in shyvolves spiritual insight which people of both sexes various levels of intellect and a ll kinds of physique can acquire It can replace the strong with the seer and the stge By choosing el ites who had the gift o f commu nicating with sp irit s Ice-Age societies could escape the oppression of the physically powerful or those privileged by birth

Althou gh we cannot be SliTe about the nature of the Ice-Age power class we know it existed because of glaring inequalities in the way Ice-Age people were buried In a cemetery at Sunghir (SOON-geer) near Moscow dated about 24000 years ago the highest-status person seems at first glance to have been an el derly man His burshyial goods include a cap sewn with foxs teeth and about twenty ivory bracelets Nearshyby however two boys of aboll t eight or ten years old have even more spectacular ornaments As well as ivo ry bracelets and necklaces and fox-tooth buttons the boys have animal carvings and bcautifu U) wrought weapons including spea rs of mamshymoth ivo ry each over six fcct long About 3500 finely worked ivory beads had been drizzled over the head 10rso and limbs o f each boy Here was a society that marked leaders for greatness from boyhood and therefore perhaps from birth

In our attempt (0 undcrstand where power lay in lee-Age societies the ti nal bits of evidence are crumbs from ridl peoples tables fragments of feasts Archaeologists have found ashes from large-scale cooking and the calcified debris of food at sites in northern Spain perhaps from as long as 23000 years ago The tally sticks that survive from the s1me region in the same period may also have been records of expendirure on feasts Vlhat were such feasts for Dy analogy with modem hunting peoples the most likely reason was alliance-making between communities They were probably not male-bondshying occasions as some scholars think beca use they are close to major dwelling sites where women and child ren would be present Instead from the momen t of its emershygence the idea of th e feast had practical consequences to bu ild and strengthen societies and enhance the power o f those who organized the fcast~ and cont rolled the food (for more discussio n of feasting see Going to the Source feas ting pases 152-1 55)

Peopling the New World

The New World Jas the last part of the planet Homo sapiens peopled We can be sure of th at much but il is no t easy to say exactly when o r by whom According to the for merly dominant theo ry a gap opened benyeneen glaciers towa rd th e end of the Jee Age A race of hunters crossed the land lin k betvcen North America and

Out of t he Ice Peopling the Earth I 23

Shaman In many societies communication With the spirit-world remains the responSibility of the speCial ists whom anthropologists call shamans Typically they garb and paint or disguise themshyselves to resemble spirits or the animals deemed to have prIVI leged access to rulms beyond human sense The shamans then ~ JOurney to the spirits 01 ancesto~ In trances Induced by danCing drumshyming or drugs Shamans often aCQU ire SOCial mllumiddot ence and pol i tical authority as heale~ prophets and a rb l tra to~ _

Sunghir burial A prolUSion of beads distinguishes the graves of people Of high status at Sunghlr in RUSSia from about 24000 yea~ ago The dlstribushylion of signs of wealth In burials suggests that even m the Ice Age inequalities were fi fe and that status could be Inhell ted

24 1 CHAP T E R 1

(

The Peopling of the New World

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Asia where the Bering Strai t now flows to cilter a paradi se where no human hunter h ad ever trod before Thc abundance wa~ so great and the animals so unshywary that the invaders ate enormously and multiplied greatly The) spread rapi dly over the hemisphere hUllting th e great gam e to exti nction as they went Th e story 3ppealcd to an unsophisticated fo rm of US paTriot ism The Clov is people as these hunters were dubbed after an ea rly archaeological site in New Mexico seemed to resemb le modern American pioneers They exhibited quick-fire locomotion husshytl e and bustle technical prowess big appetit es irrepress ible strength enormous cultural reach and a talent for reforging th e environment

By comparison the truth about the peopling of the hemisphere is d isappo intingshyly undramatic T hese first great American superheroes-like most of their successhysors-did not really exist Although archeologists have excavated too few sites for a co mplete and reliable picture to emerge a new theory dominates We have evidence of early human settlement scanered from the Yukon to Uruguay and from near th e Bering Strait to the edge of the Beagle Channel- that is from the waterway that dishyvides North Am erica and Asia to the sou thern limjts of the South American mainshyland This evide nce is so widespread over so lo ng a period in so m any diffe rent geological layers and with such avast range of cultural diversity th at one conclusion is inescapable---ltolonists came at di fferent times br inging different cultures with them

No generally accepted evidence dates any inhabited sites iT) the American hem ishysphere earlier than abo ut 13000 BCE (see Map 13) T he first arrivals came du ring a time when glaciers covered much of North Am erica They stuck dose to the cold where th e game was fattest They followed corridors benleen walls of icc or alon g narrow shores away fro m glaciers Other arrivals came by sea and continued to come afrer the land bridge laS submerged Arou nd 10000 )ears ago a catastrop hic cluster ofexti nctio ns wiped o ut the manuno th mastodon ho rse gian t sloth sabershytoothed tiger and at least thirty-five other large species in the Americas New hunt shying techniques and perhaps new hunting peoples were probably partly responsible But we can only explain the even ts in the context of vast climatic changes that afshyfec ted habitats and the whole ecology on which these an imals depended

Many supposedJy early sites of human habitation have proved to be delusions of overenthusiastic archaeologists-false or at best unconvi ncing A few sites however offer strong evidence of the antiquity and range of settlemen t Most are in the eastern Uni led States- a long way from Asia It must have taken a lon g time for these peoplc to get there from the vicinity of th e modern Bering Strait [n the mid-1970s 15000shyyear-old baskcrwork and tools made with fine flints emerged fro m deep under the d isshycarded beer cans that topped a d ig at Meadowcroft on the Ohio River near the border of Pennsylvania and West Virginia Archaeologists are investigating similar sites beshytvmiddoteen the Ohio and Sava nnah Rivers Later in the 19705 excavations at Monte Verde (MON-teh VER-deh) in southern Chile revealed a twen ty-foot long wooden hideshycovered dwelling preserved in a peat bog fo r about 12500 years Nearby wCrt a big mastodon-butchery and a space devoted to making tools The inhabitants bro ught salt and seaweed from the coast forty miles away and medicinal herbs from mounshytains equally fa r in the opposite direction Halfmiddotchewed lum ps of seaweed show the eaters dental bites a boys footprints survive in the clay lining of a pit Tf Meadowcroft is a long way from the colonizers entry po illt n ear the Bering Strait southern Chile is a world away again-almosl as far as you can get in the Western Hemisphere How lo ng would it have taken the senlers of MOnle Verde to cross the hemisphere over vast distances and th rough many difte rent kinds of environments each dem anding new forms of adaptl1ian Most specialists think it must have taken thousands of years The quest ion of the date of the firs t peopling of the New Vorld therefore remains open

Out of the Ice Peop ling the Earth I 25

l Clovis Points

Monte Verde About 12000 years ago a younil permiddot son trod in fresh clay thai lined a hearth in Monte Verde Chile Peat sealed and preserved Ihe footmiddot pnnt to be rediscovered by archaeologiSts 111 the 1970s EllcavaMns at Monle Verde revealed II VIImiddot tage of mammoth hunters so old that it made previshyous theories about when people arflved in the Americas Questionable or even untenable

26 I C HA PTER 1

SURVIVAL OF THE FORAGERS M the ice cap retreated and the great herds shifted with it many human communishyties opted to follow them Archeology has unearthed traces of their routes Along fhe way in what is now northern Germa ny about 12000 years ago people sacrificed reindeer by deliberately weighting them with stones sewn into their stomachs and drowning them in a lake About 1000 years later hunters as far north as Yorkshire in England who left a weU-preserved camp at Starr Carr found an elwironmem as abundant as the cave artistss had been Not only was it fill ed with tundramiddotloving species such as red deer elk and aurochs (OW- roks)-huge shaggy wi ld catlleshybut also with wild boar in surroundings that were becoming patchily wooded

At Skateholm in Sweden about 8000 years ago hunters founded the largest known settlement of the era [t was a winter camp in an area where the eighty-seven different animal species roamed that the inhabitants ate trapping river-fi sh netting sea-birds harpooning seals and dolphin sticking pigs and driving deer into pits or pondlt In summer the people must have moved farther north They lie today in groves decorated with beads and ocll1e and filted with the spoils of their careers including antlers and boars tusks Their dogs are buried nearby These burly wolflike companshyions are sometimes interred with more signs of honor than humans were given Dogs were full members of societies where hunting prowess and skill in war determined stashytus Many of the human dead bear wounds from man-made weapons Here too is evshyidence of sexual specialization Women have only a third as many wounds as the men

TIle most persistentJy faithful followe rs of the ice were the Inuit (IN-yoo-it) of North America About 4000 )ears ago they invented the blubber-filled soapstone lamp Now they couJd follow big game beond the tundra and into the darkness of an arctic winter They could track the musk ox to the shore of the ocean and the caribou on its winter migrations when its fur is th ickest and its fat most plentiful This way of life persisted until the late twentieth century although the people who first practiced it have disappeared Migrants from the Arctic Ocean replaced them 1000 )ears ago

Climate change trapped other foraging peoples in envi ronments where they had to develop new ways of life Some of these environments offered new kinds of abundance Here were broad -leaved forests rich in acorns (which make nut ritious food for any humans who have enough time to fine-gr ind them)) and lakes and rivers funof aquatic life New World prairies held apparently inexha usti ble stocks of bison (though th e largest bison species was rapidly hunted to extinction) Beshytween the unstable per iods of climate change around 12000 years ago foragers even colonized dense tropical forests in southeast Asia and in th e New World at Pedra Pintada in Brazil where the Amazon River now flows This is a region where foragers today have to struggle to find foods they can di gest but it seems to have been more environmentally diverse toward the end of the Ice Age

Some societies perpetuated their foraging life in hot arid deserts as different from the best hunting grounds of the ree Age as it is possible to imagine This reshyqu ired two forms of adaptation First the thinly dispersed populations had to create collaborative networks Such interdependence explains why peoples who live in ecoshylogically shaky homelands often require people to marry outside the group (a pracshytice lolOwn as exogamy) and why they regard hospitality to strangers as a sacred obligation Second poor environments demanded that in habitants develop what we might caU orally tra nsmi tted science For a ni with accurate and extensive knowlshyedge of their habitat can people survive in harsh environments

The San or Bushmen of southern Africas Kalahari Desert illustrate the diffi shyculties and solutions Their domain has shrunk in the last fe w centuries as Bantu farmers Khoi herdsmen and white invaders have overrun much of their fonner

Out of t he Ice P eopling t he Eartn I 27

territo ry But their heart1and was already dr Yll the time of tne Sans firs t occupancy about 14000 years ago Tne increased rainfall that usually followed the retreaT of tbe icc hardly fell nere There are undergro und rivers but few permanent water holes The people watch fo r rare signs of rain and hurry to

gather the vegetation that accompa nies it The scrubland pla nt foods induding wa ter-bearing tubers and a kind of cact us su pply 30 percent of tnei r sustenance The rest comes from game which grazes on lough desert shrubs that humans can shynot digest

Laurens van der Post a South African adventurer who has written about the Bushmen once accompanied a band of San hunters in search of their favorite food eland a type of anteshylope O ne morning just after sunrise they found the tracks of a herd By three in the afternoon after nonstop pursuit at a tro t Bushmen Though now obliged to adopt a mixed th ey came on the herd and took aim To kill large game is almosl impossible with a oconomy su pported in part by farming and donamiddot

tions of food the San or Bushmen of southernBushmans bow He wounds the beast with a poisoned barb and fo llows it until it Africa have been among the most conservative of

drops from exhaustion and the effects of the drug before milking the kill On Ibis the worlds peoples They maintained their foragshyoCCllsion the hunters rail for twelve miles without stopping and the final mile was ing way 01 li fe essentially unchanged for millen shy

nla---desplte neighbors attempts to e~lermU1alean all-out sprint The next time they made contact with the herd one bull was seen them ThiS record of survival contrasts with the to be tiring It still took another fu ll hou r of pursuit until he fell Then wit hout rapid turnover of more ambitiOUS Civilizat ions that

pause or break for rest they were fresh enough at the end to plunge straight 3vay rad ically modify their en~lronments usually With

into the formidable task of skinning and cuning up the heavy animal l Bushm en disastrous results

who persist with thi s demanding way of life to this day are obviously pursui ng a commitment that has grown out of generations of invested emoti on As difficul t as it may be for us to understand the San would find it heart-wrenching to change a way of life for the mere sake of efficiency convenience or material ga in

In one sense the worlds food supply st ill depends o n fo raging The amount of food from hunti ng actually increased in the twentieth cen tury which may go down in history not only as the last age of hunring but as the greatest World-over today we practice a highly specialized mechanized and unu sual form of huntingshydeep-sea trawling Fish farming is likely to replace it in the future but in any case deep-sea fishing is a historical th rowback

IN PERSPECTIVE After the Ice

In the post~ke-Age world little by littl e ove r thousa nds of years rn ost societies aban doned for shy CHRONOLOGY aging and adopted fa rming or herding as the way (A N dates are apPfoximltlte-l

to get their food Among peoples who still li ve Over 3 million years ago Lucyd ose to the ice cap the Inuit remain faithfu l to 2-1 million years ago Homo erectus migrates from East Afnca 10 Afnea

their hunting tradition in North America Mos t of and EuraSia

their Old World counterparts however have long 100000 years ago Homo sapiens migrates out of Afnca

abandoned it In Eu rasia though some hunting 67000 years ago Homo sapiens in ASia 50000 years ago Homo sapiens colonizes Australia and New Guineacultures still cling to the old ways at th e eas tern

Homo sapiens reaches Europe end of Siberia the peoples on th e western Arctic 30000 years ago last Neanderthals vanishrim-the Sami (or Lapplanders) of Sca ndinavia

20000- World emerges from the Ice Age and their neighbors the Kardia Samoyeds and 15000 iICE Nenets-adopted re indee r herding over a th oushy 20000 BC pound Invent ion of the bow and arrow sand years ago The Ice- Age way oflife if not over 13000 BCpound Homo sapiens in the Americas is drawing to a close Hunting is now th ought of

28 I CHAP TE R 1

as a pri mitive way to get food long abandoned excep t as an aristoc ratic indulmiddot gellee in som e co untries or as a supposedJy manly sport in others

The disappearance of fo raging lifeways seems a rema rkable turn around for a predatorspecies such as Homo sapiells There was a time before hun ting when our ancestors were scavenge rs but for hundreds of thousands perhaps millions of years foraging was reliable and reward ing It fed people through every change of climate Its practitioners spread over th e world and adapted successfully to every kind of habitat Homo sapiens dominated every ecos)stem they became part of and competed successfully with most other species They achieved startling in shycreases in their numbers which we struggle to e(plain They founded more varied societ ies than any other species (though the differences among these societies were slight compared to later periods) They had art-rich cultures with traditions of learning and symbolic systems to record information They had their own so shycial elites polit ical customs) ambitious magic and practical methods to exploit their environ ment

Our next task is to ask why after the achievements recounted in this chapter did people abandon the foragi ng li fe Renouncing the hunt and pursuing new ways of life after the Ice Age are among the most far- reaching and mysterious transforshymations of the human past If the puzzle of hy Homo sapiens spread over the Earth is the first great questio n in our history the problem of wh) fo ragers became farmers is th e second

PROBLEMS AND PARALLELS 1 When does the story of humankind begm Is it possible to 5 Which stresses cou ld have caused early peoples to d iVide and

defme what it means to be huma n What characteristiCS do f ight eac h other Wh ich theories have been put forward for how we share with chimpanzees and other apes war started

2 How do Neandert hals and Homo floresiensis cha llenge 6 How did ma le domination come to be normal in human soc ishycommonly held definitions of Homo sapiens eties What impact did sexual econom ic specialiZa t ion have on

early SOC iet ies3 Why d id Homo sapiens migrate out of Afr ica How did migrashytion change peoples relationships with each other and wi th 7 Why was the Ice Age a time of affl uence What role did shamans thelf environment play in Ice-Age soc iety What insights Into Ice-Age societies ca n

we glean from its art and the rema ins of anc ient feasts4 What were the factors behind the rapid population growth of Homo sapiens 8 How did some SOCieties perpetuate the fOlaging li fe after the

Ice Age How has the foraging life persisted today

bull bullbull

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE A Case in Point Aboriginal Australians Preagricultural Settlements The Disadvantages of Fa rming

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS Herders Environments Tillers Environments

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE Europe Africa Asia The Pac ific Islands The Americas

SO WHY DID FARMING START Population Pressure The Outcome of Abundance The Power of Politics Cu lt Agriculture Climatic Instability Agriculture by Accident Production As an Outgrowth of Procurement

IN ERSP CT1VEmiddot Saskinamp Stability

n August 1770 the Bri tish navigator Captain James Cook reached the north

coast of Australia on the first of his spectacular voyages of exploration that

charted the lands and limits of the Pacific Ocean Ncar Cape York hc ___-~

paused at an island he named Possession Island For although his

stated purpose was scientific he was also an officer of the Royal Navy

with orders to extend the British Empire To Cooks mind the island

though inhabIted was wa iting to be grabbed The natives could not be

said to possess it because they had left no marks of possession on its soil

A wealth of plants that they could hae domesticated-fruits proper IQr

the support of mann-was growing wild Yet Cook wrote the people know nothshy

ing of cultivation It seems strange He was puzzling over one of the most pershy

plexing problems of history- the- diffe rence between forage rs and farmers food

procurers and food producers

Food is the most precious of resources Nothing Ill happen without it To most people in most societies for most of the time food is and always has been the most important thing in the world Change~ in how we get food and whether we get it arc among histors big changes During the global warming that fo ll owed the Ice Age hUSbandry-breeding animals and cultivating crops-began to replace hunting and gathering and introduced the biggest cha nge of all

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE

Husbandry happened in two distinct ways involving different tpes of environshyments and different levels of environmental intervention In some environments people could exploi t creatures that had a he rd instinct by managing the herds rather than by hunting them Breeding enhanced qualities that evolution did not necessa rily favor such as docility size and yield of meat m il k eggs and fat On the negative side close contact between humans and animals often allowed disease-bearing organisms to thrive th reatening human lives and health and sometimes unleashing plagues Otherwi se however animal husbHlIdry barely affectcd the environment Herds on the whole kept to their traditional patterns of migration and people continued to accompany them-driving the beasts now rather than follOving them Domest icated animals remained recognizably the hei rs of their wild ancestors and the landscapes through which they traveled did not change much except that the herds feeding and manure probably

32 I CHAPTER 2

encouraged the grasses they ate to flourish at the expense of othe r plant species

In other environments however plant husbandry involved massive human intervention In the long run

WHY ARE settled foragers better off than farmers tillage of the soil changed the world mo re than any previshyous innovation by Homo sapiens From postglacial m ud W HAT K INDS of environments are suited to herding people coaxed what we now call civilization-a way of

WHAT KINDS of environments were suited to early agricu lture life based on rad ically modifying the environment Inshy

W H ERE D ID farm ing start and what were t he fi rst crops stead of merely t rying to manage the landscape nature

GIVEN THE d isadvantages why did people iarm provided farmers recarved it with fields and boundaries

The rice fields of Bali in IndoneSia are among the most proo uct ive in the world usrng variet ies of rice and techniques for farming it thal are about 1000 years old Irrigation channels maintained and administered by farmers cooperatives distrrbute water everl ly among the terraces Though oflgirla l ly a lowlarld crop fa voring swampy conditions rice adapts perfec tly ro upland enVIronments and to terrace farmrng

di tches and irrigation ca nals They stamped the land with a new look a geometrical order Agric ul ture enabled humans to see the world in a new way-to imagine that magic and science had the power to change nature Such power in turn changed peoples sense of where they fit into the panorama of life on Earth Now they could become lords or in more modest moments or cultures stewards of creation

Together farm ing and herding revolutionized humans place in their ecosysshyterm Instead of merely dependi ng on other life forms to sustain us we forged a new relationship of interdependence with th ose species we eat We rely on them for food they rely on us for th eir reproduction Domesticated animals would not exist without humans Husbandr was the firs t human challenge to evolution Instead of evolvi ng species through natural selection) fa rming and herding proceed by what might be called unnatural selection-sorting and selecting by human hands for human needs according to human agendas In other words e breed livestock and cultivate plants

Herding and tilling also changed human societies By feeding people on a vastshyly greater scale agricu lture allowed societies to get hugely bigger than ever before We can only guess at the absolute figures but in areas where farming has replaced foraging in modern ti mes population has increased fifty- or even a hundredfol d Larger populations demanded new fo rms of cont rol of labor and food distribu shytion which Il1 turn nurtured strong states and powerful elites Society became more volatile and apparently less stable

In almost every case for reasons we still do not understand when people begin to practice agriculture th e pace of change quickens immeasurably and cu shymulat ively States an d civilizations do not seem to last for long Soc ieties that we think of as being most evo lved turn out to be least fitted for survival Compared with the relat ive stability of forager communities soci eties that depend on agr ishyculture are prone to lurch and coll apse History becomes a path picked amon g their ru ins

Still for Captain Cook and for most people who haye thought about it ever since it was indeed strange that people who had the opportunity to practice agrishyculture should not take advantage of it The advantages of agri culture seem so ob shyvious The farmer can select the best specimens of edible crops and creatures collect th em in the most co nvenient places and pastures crossbreed the livestock and hybridize the plants to improve size yi eld or flavo r By these methods sm all farming socie ties grow into comm unities and build up large populations Usually they go on to create ci ties and develop ever more complex technologies To Cook and his contemporaries in Europe who believed that progress was inevitable and that the same kind of changes are bound to happen everywhere peoples who dung to foraging seemed baffling

Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 33

A Case in Point Aborigina l Australians

Cook and others at the time saw only two explanations for why foragers sllch as the aborigines (AB-eh-rihj- ih-neez) in Australia would reject agriculture They were either stupid o r subhuman Indeed early European painters in Aust ralia depicted aborigines as apelike creatures grimaci ng oddl) and crawling in trees The colo nists s impl y ignored the nati es o r when they got in the way often hunted them downshyas they would beasts But not on ly did tbe native Aust ralians reject agriculture in some areas th ey appeared [0 shun every technical cO llvenience On the island o f Tasman ia in the extreme south of Australia where the natives became extinct soon after European settlement began they seemed to have forgotten every art of their ancestors bows boats even how to kindle fi rc In Arnhem Land in the extreme north they used boomerangs to make musi c but no longer as weapons for th e hunt Progress which the European discoverers of Australia believed in fervently seemed to have gone into reverse Australia was not only on the exact opposite side of the world from England it was a topsy-turvy place where everythi ng was upside down

We can hOever be certain that if aborigines rejected agriculture o r other practices Europeans considered progressive it must have been for good reasons TIle aborigines did not lack the knowledge necessary to switch from fo raging to farming had they so wished When they gathered wild yams or the root known as

James COO K from Captain Cooks Journal During his First Voyage Round the World

nardoo they ensured that enough of the plant remained in the ground to grow back In many regions too they used fire to control the grazi ng grounds of kangaroos and concentrate Ihem for hunting a common technique among herders to manage pasture and among tillers to renew the soil Along the Murray and Darling Rivers aborigines even watered and weeded wild cro ps and policed their boundaries against human and animal pred ators (sec Map 20

The abo rigi nal Australians could also have systematically planted and irrigated crops farmed the grubs they liked to eat pen ned kangashyroos and even tried to domestica te them (Kangaroos are can tankerous creatures but people do make pets o f them Breeding selected speci shymen s would probably produce a domestic strain in a few generations ) In the far no rth of Australia aboriginal communities traded with the farming cultures of New Guinea So even if they hadnt developed agrishyculture on th eir own they could have lea rned it fro m o utsi ders If the aborigines did not farm it must have been because they did not want to In short they were doing well without it Simil ar cases all over the world support this conclusion Where wild foods are abundant there is no in shycentive to do mesticate them Of course people o ften adopt p ractices that d o them no good We can concede this general principle but case by case we stiJI han t ( 0 know why

Preagricultura l Settlements

PA C IF IC

o C E A N

IN 0 IA N o C E AN

Australia

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AustraliaMgtmiddot

Under some conditions people can settle in one place without the trouble of farmshying Archaeological evidence in the region we now ca ll the Middle East shows this After the Ice Age ended about 15000 lJCE a frontier zone between forest and grassland stretched across the eastern sho re of the Mediterranean and what are now Iran eastern Turkey and Iraq (see Map 22) The forests were full of acorns pistachios and almonds which gatherers ground into flour and paste The grassshylands bred vast quantjties of wild grass with edible seeds These foods could all he

34 I C H A P TER 2

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Preagricultural Settlements in the Middle East

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bull fo~t

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bull pf llgllcultua l sett lement d~rlbed on page 35

lit O1he r prea9r icu ltural l ~n l ~men t l

a rlcierlt coast lines

warehoused between harvests and had the additional advantage of maturing at di fferent times Dense herds of gazelle in the gra sslands prov ided more nutrition for hunters to bring home Food was so plentiful that foragers did not have to move around much to fi nd it

By abou t 14000 to 15000 years ago permanent sen lements a rose th roughout the region clusters of dwelli ngs with stone wa lls or those made of wood on stone foundations or cue from soft stone and roofed with reeds The foragers who lived in th ese sedentary communities apparently kept to themselves Villages had dis shytinctive iden tit ies and habits wh ich almost amounted to badges of identity Some favored gazelle toe bones for jewelry some preferred fox teeth and partridge legs These people married within their own communities (a practi ce known as en shydogamy) judging from th e evidence of inherited physical characteristics For ex shyample in some villages people were retatimiddotely short while in others they had d istinctive dental patterns These settlers cut what look like plans of their fields on limestone slabs which suggests that they were terri torial- that they had a sense of possession that Captain Cook would have recognized

Out of the Mud Far mIng and Herding A fter tne Ice Age 35

In sum the lives of preagricultural settlers were so much like the lives of the early fa rmers who succeeded them that when anhaeologists first found the forshyagers villages in the 1930s they assumed the inhabitants were farmers Bue the setshylied foragers were 3ctuaHy better off than farmers Their rema ins on the whole show better health and nourishme nt than the fa rming peoples who followed later in the sa me region A diet rich in seeds and nuts had ground down their teeth but- unl ike the farmers-they have none of the streaked tooth -enamel common among people who suffer from food shortages

Simi la r evidence of preagricultural settlements exists in other places Take a few conspicuous examples The Jomon (JOHM-mehn ) people of central Honshu Island in Japan hved in permanent vi llages 13000 years ago feeding themselves by fishing il nd gathering acorns and chestnuts They made pots fo r display in elaboshyrate shapes modeled on flames and serpents an d lacquered them with tree sap Their potters were in a sense magicians transforming clay into objects of prestige and ritua l In the Egyp tim Sahara lit Nabta Playa about forty plant species inclu shyding sorghum a type of cereal grass grew alongside hearths and pit oven~ evi shydence of settled life from about 10000 years ago In other pa rts of (en tral Sahara in the same period that had plenty of water and a cookr climate than now foragers fou nd sorghum and millet another cereal grass At Gobekli Tepe (goh- BEHK-lee TEH-pchl a hilltop site in so utheast Turkey co ntemporaries who lived mainly by gathering wild wheat he ed seven -ton pillars from li mestone They reerected them in a sunken chamber in their village and decorated them with carvings of snakes boar gazelles cra nes and symbols that look suspiciously like writing

What was life li ke in these earliest settl ements Small permanent houses sugshygest that nuclear families-parents and children-predominated though so me sites clearty have communal work areas for grinding seeds and nuts As for who did the work the most stunn ing find ing of recent archaeology in the Middle East sugshygests that work was probably shared behleen the sexes The way skeletons are musshycled suggests th at women did slightly more kneeling (and therefore slightly more gr inding) than men and men did more throwing (and therefore more hunting) than women But both sexes did both activit ies Male and female bodies began to reconverge after a long period during which they bad evolved to look differently As food product ion replaced hunting and gathering wa r and child rearing became the main sex-specific jobs in society The convergence between th e physical feashytures of men and women seems still to be in progress today Indeed it seems to be accelerating as men and women share more and morc tasks and the need for heavshyily muscled or big framed bod ies di minishes along wi th physica ll y demanding jobs in much of the world

The Disadvantages of Farming

Prernrming comm unities do not simply progress to fann ing If foraging produces abundance and sec urity it does not necessarily follow that farming can deliver more of the same The consequences of adopting agriculture are by no means all positive In the early stages of moving from foraging to fa rm ing the food supply actually becomes less reliable because people depend on a relatively small range of fa rmed foods or even on a si ngle species As a result a community becomes vulnerable to ecological disasters Famine becomes more likely as diet narrows Moreover when people have 0 plant and grow food as weDas gather it they have to use up more energy to get the sa me amount of nourishment (Although domesmiddot ticated food s once harvested tend to be easier to process for eating) The need to

lomon pottery Ten thousand years ago the Jomon potters of Japan produced the worlds earliest knOvn earthenware vessels Other pottel)-makmg peoples also practled farm ing but the Jomon people were sedentary foragers--l lvlng in permamiddot nent or long-term settlements but managing the environment in mInimal ways and relyIng on abunshydant wild foods including nuts seeds acorns some 70 marine animal Spec ies and land mamshymals---eatmg no just boar deer and hare but also wolves Wildcats f lYing squIrrel s and mon keys

Overuse deforms bones ArchaeolO8) can reconmiddot struc t how ancient peop le b(gthaved by measuring the deformities In their skeletons The woman hose toe th is was lived In a commuMy of eady sedentary foragers In what is now Syria She evIshydently spent much of her tIme kneeling presumshyably to grlFld the acorns and kernels of Wild wheat on whIch her people re lied for food

36 I C H A P T ER 2

Early Forager Settlements (All dales are approximate)

15000 yea rs ago 14000-15000

yea rs ago 13000 years ago 10000 years ago

l

World emerges from the Ice Age Permanent settlements appear In Middle East

Honshu Island Japan

Nabta Playa Egypt GObekh Tepe Turkey

organize labor encourages inequalities and explo itation Concentrashytions of domesticated animals spread disease such as smallpox measles rubella ch icken pox influenza and tuberculosis

So the problem is really the opposite of what Cook supposed It is fanners behavior not fo ragers that is strange Husba nd ry is not a step along a march of improvement because in some ways it makes life worse No one has PU l the problem better than the histo rian of agronomy Jack L Harlan

people who do not farm do about eveq1hing that farmers do but they do lot work as hard They understand thllifc cycles of plants kno the seashysons of the year and when and where the natural plant food resources can he

Jack Harlan from Crops and Man

Chukchi herder The choice between huntmg and herding otten depends on local and historical Clrmiddot cumstances Remdeermiddotherding is an anCient pracmiddot tlce In muc h of northern Euragtla whereas irl North America the can bou have remained wild In e~treme norlheast Asia close to America the Chukchi long resisted the example of neighboring peo ple and preferred hunting 10 herding In the last two or Illree cenlurles however they have adopted the herdsman s vocat ion shown here

hareswd in great abundance with the least eff() rt There is evidence that thl diet of g-athshyering peoples was better than that of cultivators that slarvation was rare that there was a lower incidence of chronic disease and not nearly so many cavities in their teeth

The question must be raised Whr furm Vhy work harder for food less nut rishytious md a supply more capricious Why invite famine plague ~poundtilcnce and crowded living conditions 1

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

Part of what is surprising about agriculture is that it is so common Not only has almost th e entire human world adopted 1t many peoples ca me to it indepenshydently of one anot her Scholars used to su ppose that it was so extraordinary it must have begun in some particular spo t and that diffusion spread it from there- carried by migrants or conquerors or transmitted by t rade o r im itated The last 40 years of research have shown on the contrary that the transition to

food product io n happened over and over agai n in a range of regions and a variety of environments with d ifferen t foodstuffs and di fferent techn iques The most obv ious co ntrast in environ ments is betwee n herders and tillers Herd ing develops where plan ts a re tOO spa rse or indigestible to sustain human life but a nim als can convert these pla nts into meat-an energy SO UTee tha t people can access by eating th e anim als Tilling deshyvelops where th e soil is suitable or enough ecologica l di shyversity ex ists to susta in plant husbandry o r mi xed farming of plants and animals

Herders Environments

[n three regions of the Earth-tundra the evergreen foresls of no rthern Eurasia and great grasslands- il is not possible to grow enough humanly d igest ible plant foods to keep large numbers of people alive [n the

tund ra and evergreen forests average temperatures arc too low the growing sea shyson too short the surface soil too vulnerable to frost and the subso il in some areas too froze n In these environments thert~ are only two options People can remain foragers- an d primari ly hu nters seeking the fa t-ri ch species rypical of stich zones The [nu it in the North American Arctic for example hunt seal and walrus Or people can become herders like the Sami and Samoyeds of north ern Europe and northwest Asia who live off rei ndeer

Out of the Mud Farming and H erding After the Ice Age I 37

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 FORAGERS AND FARMERS COMPARED

FORAGERS FARMERS

Food procurers Food producers

hUn and gather husbandry (breed animals cultivate crops)

Fit into nature Chanampe nature

little environmental impact herders some environmental impact tillers massive environment impact

Manaampethe landscape Nature remade and reimagined

Dependence on wild animals and plants Interdependence between humans plants and animals

animals and plants exploited and domeslicated

Stable food supply Unstable food supply

nomadic fOfltlgcrs move in response 10 environmental small range of farmed foods increases vulnerability change sedentary fo ragers vulnerable to changes of climate to ecological disasters

Stable popUlation

relatively little labor needed population COlltrol avalable mainly by managed lactatioll

Expandinamp population

breeding livestock and cultivating plants leads to increased food supply increased population concentrations of domesticated animals spread disease

Stable society

kinship and age fi x ind ividuals place in sodery sexes usually share labor by spedalidng in difterent economic tasks

Radically changed unstable society

need to control labor and food distribution leads to social inequalititS work shared between the sexes increased reliance on female labor ~trong nates dewlop with powerful elites complex technologies

Similarly the soils of the world s vast grassla nds- known as prairie in North America pampa in South America steppe in Eurasia and the Sahel (sah-HEHL) in Africa- have for most of history been unfavorable for tillage (sce Map 23) The sad is mostly too difficu lt to turn without a steel plow Except for patches of excepshytionally favorable soil herding has been the only possible fo rm of husbandry in these areas The peoples of the Eurasian and Africa n grasslands were probably herdi ng by about 5000 acE Native American grassland dwellers of the New World on the othe r hand retained a foraging way of life because available species-bison various types of antelope-were (or the lIlost part more abun shydant for the hunt and less suitable fo r herding

For those who choose it herding has three special consequences First it imposshyes a mobile way of life The proportion of the population ho follow the herdsshyand in som e cases it is the enri re popu lation-cannot seuJe into permanent

--

38 I CHAP TER 2

lt ()

N 0 R A M E R

IP ralre ~ T-

- r- laquo bull- ATlANTIC

PA C IFIC ~- I DC E A No C E A shyN ~

Mh Herders Environments

1 undr~

evergreen fo rests

o gr~sslinds

Sol hunlell ind herders dlsu ibld On piges 3amp-38

KEN YA modem-day COIntry

www prenhat tcomarmesto _maps

SOU AMER I CA

bull

villages Herder peoples are not ul1iLling or unable to build permanently or on a large sca le The Scythians for instance people of the -estern Asian steppe who first domesticated the horse and invented th e wheel and axle about 6000 to 7OCX years ago built impressive stone structures Bul these wefe underground tombs dwellings fo r the dead while the living inhabited temporary camps Some herding societies in Asia and Africa have become rich enough to fou nd ci ties fo r elites OT for specialists working outside of food production such as craftsmen or miners Indeed as we shall see (Chap ter 13) in the thirteenth century CF a city of thi s type Karakorum in Mongolia was one of the most admired cities in the world On the whole howshyever herding does no t favo r the development of cities o r the kind of culture that cities nourish such as monumental buildings large-scale inst itutions fo r education and the arts and ind ustrial technology

Second since herde rs breed from animal s that naturally share their grassland habitats thei r herds consist of such creatures as cattl e sheep horses goats-milkshyyielding stock To get the fu ll benefit fro m their auimals herdin g peoples have to eat dai ry products To modern milk-fed Americans this may sound perfeclly no rshyma l But it required a modification of human evolution Most people in most part s of the world do not natural1 ) produce lactase the substance that enables them to d igest milk after infancy They respond to dairy products wit h distaste or even intol erance The Masai of Kenya in East Africa get 80 percent of their energy

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

-c

~ ~r - E u R

E St ep peU R 0 P ---6 [ -~

-shy~ c_

R I C A

h e

Il ~ KENYA

A 5 I A

MONGOlIA

A 5 I A

PACIFIC

o C E A N

IN D I A N

o C E A N bull

--~

4NT ARCTI CA

intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

animal images The earliest paintings that decorate the rocks of Arnhem La nd in northernmost Australia show faint traces of long4 extinct giant kangaroos and scary snakes A clue to the very idea of representing life in art fades today (wm a rock face in Ken niff Australia where stencils of human hands and tools were made 20000 years ago Aut most of the evidence has been lost weathered away on exposed rock faces perished with ule bod ies or hides on which it was painted or scattered by wind from the earth where it was scratched

Ice-Age Culture and Society

4The d iscovery of so much comparable art of comparable age in such widely separated parts of the world suggests an important and often overlooked fact The Ice Age as the last great era of what we would now call a kind of globalization That is key clements of culture were the same allover the inhabited worJd People practiced the same hunter-gatherer economy with similar kinds of technology ate similar kinds of food enjoyed similar levels of material cult ure and- as far as we can tell-had similar religiOUS practices

The material culture- concrete objects people create- that many archeologi shycal digs yield offers cl ues to what goes on in the mind A simple test establi shes that fact We ca n make in fo rmed inferences about peoples religion or politics or their attitudes toward natlLre and society or their values in general by looking at what they eat hOI they dress and how they decorate their homes For instan ce the peo 4

pIe who hunted mammot hs to e)tinction 20 000 years ago on the Ice-Age steppes of what is now southern Russia built dome- shaped dwellings of mammoth bones on a circula r plan twelve or fifteen feet in diameter that seem sublime triumphs of the imaginat ion They are reconstructions of mammoth nature humanly reimag4

[ned perhaps to acquire the beasts strength o r to magically assume power over the species In fact o rdinary everyday activities went on inside these eXlraord inary dwellings-sleeping eating and all the routines of fam ily life-in communities on aerage of fewer than a hundred people But no dwell ing is purely practical Your house refl ects your ideas about your place in the world

Thanks to the clues material culture yields we can make some confident asser4

t ions about other aspect s of lee-Age peoples lives their symbolic systems their magic and the kind of social and political units they lived in Although lee-Age people had nothing we recognize as writing they did have hig hly expressive symshybols which we ca n only struggle to translate Realistic drawings made 20000 to 30000 years ago show recurr ing gestures and postures Moreover they ofte n in shyclude what seem to be numbers sign ifi ed by dots and notches Ot her marks whi ch we can no long interpret are undeniab ly systematic One widely occurr ing mark that looks like a P may be a symbol for female because it resembles the curves of a womans body What looks as if it might be a calendar was made 30000 years ago in the Dordogne region in France It is a flat bone inscribed with crescen ts and cirshycles that may reco rd phases of the moon

Clues to lhe spiritual li fe of lhe ti me appear in traces of red ochre the earliest substance that seems to have had a role in ritual The oldest known ochre mi ne in the world about 42000 years old is at Lion Cave in what is now Lesotho in south 4

ern Africa The vivid lurid color was applied in burials perhaps as a precious

O ut of the Ice Peopling the Earth I 2 1

cave art Until they dIed out-Ylctfms of competition with and explOItation by settler commUnitles-m t he early twentieth century the Sout hern Bushmen of South Afnca made cave paintings similar 10 those Their ancestors made more than 20000 years ago On rock surfaces and cave walls sh amans painted thei r ~islons Of the creatures of the sPiri t-world glimpsed in stateli of ecstasy on imaginary journeys beyond the ord inarily accesshySible wor ld

offer ing perhaps to imitate blood and reinvest the dead w ith li fe The speculation that people m ight also have used ochre to paint their livi ng bod ies is hard to resist

Ice-Age people also used symbols and substances such as ochre in magic and those who controlled them ielded power In pain tin gs and ca rvings we can glimpse the Ice-Age elite people considered special and set apart fro m the group In fi gures wearing animal masks- antlered o r lionlike-the wearer is transformed From anthropological studies of the recent past we know such disguises are norshymally efforts to com m un icate with the dead o r with the gods Bringing messages from other worlds is the Tole of a shaman (SHAH-mehn) someone who acts as an intermedia ry between humans and spirits or gods The shaman may seck a sta te of ecstasy in duced by drugs or dan ci ng or drumming to see and hear realms normally inaccessible to the senses He becomes the medium through which spirits talk to th is world Among the Chukchi hu nters of northern Siberia whose way of life an d env ironment are simil ar to Icc-Age peoples the shltlillans experience is rep resented as a journey to co nsult the spirits in a realm that only the dead can norma lly enter The shaman may adopt an animal disguise to acquire the animals speed or strength or identify with an animal ancesto r The shamans role can be an awesome source o f authority Shamans can chaUenge alpha males Like other rd igions shamanism in shyvolves spiritual insight which people of both sexes various levels of intellect and a ll kinds of physique can acquire It can replace the strong with the seer and the stge By choosing el ites who had the gift o f commu nicating with sp irit s Ice-Age societies could escape the oppression of the physically powerful or those privileged by birth

Althou gh we cannot be SliTe about the nature of the Ice-Age power class we know it existed because of glaring inequalities in the way Ice-Age people were buried In a cemetery at Sunghir (SOON-geer) near Moscow dated about 24000 years ago the highest-status person seems at first glance to have been an el derly man His burshyial goods include a cap sewn with foxs teeth and about twenty ivory bracelets Nearshyby however two boys of aboll t eight or ten years old have even more spectacular ornaments As well as ivo ry bracelets and necklaces and fox-tooth buttons the boys have animal carvings and bcautifu U) wrought weapons including spea rs of mamshymoth ivo ry each over six fcct long About 3500 finely worked ivory beads had been drizzled over the head 10rso and limbs o f each boy Here was a society that marked leaders for greatness from boyhood and therefore perhaps from birth

In our attempt (0 undcrstand where power lay in lee-Age societies the ti nal bits of evidence are crumbs from ridl peoples tables fragments of feasts Archaeologists have found ashes from large-scale cooking and the calcified debris of food at sites in northern Spain perhaps from as long as 23000 years ago The tally sticks that survive from the s1me region in the same period may also have been records of expendirure on feasts Vlhat were such feasts for Dy analogy with modem hunting peoples the most likely reason was alliance-making between communities They were probably not male-bondshying occasions as some scholars think beca use they are close to major dwelling sites where women and child ren would be present Instead from the momen t of its emershygence the idea of th e feast had practical consequences to bu ild and strengthen societies and enhance the power o f those who organized the fcast~ and cont rolled the food (for more discussio n of feasting see Going to the Source feas ting pases 152-1 55)

Peopling the New World

The New World Jas the last part of the planet Homo sapiens peopled We can be sure of th at much but il is no t easy to say exactly when o r by whom According to the for merly dominant theo ry a gap opened benyeneen glaciers towa rd th e end of the Jee Age A race of hunters crossed the land lin k betvcen North America and

Out of t he Ice Peopling the Earth I 23

Shaman In many societies communication With the spirit-world remains the responSibility of the speCial ists whom anthropologists call shamans Typically they garb and paint or disguise themshyselves to resemble spirits or the animals deemed to have prIVI leged access to rulms beyond human sense The shamans then ~ JOurney to the spirits 01 ancesto~ In trances Induced by danCing drumshyming or drugs Shamans often aCQU ire SOCial mllumiddot ence and pol i tical authority as heale~ prophets and a rb l tra to~ _

Sunghir burial A prolUSion of beads distinguishes the graves of people Of high status at Sunghlr in RUSSia from about 24000 yea~ ago The dlstribushylion of signs of wealth In burials suggests that even m the Ice Age inequalities were fi fe and that status could be Inhell ted

24 1 CHAP T E R 1

(

The Peopling of the New World

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PA CIFIC

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early habitation ~Ite desulbed on pilge 2S

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Asia where the Bering Strai t now flows to cilter a paradi se where no human hunter h ad ever trod before Thc abundance wa~ so great and the animals so unshywary that the invaders ate enormously and multiplied greatly The) spread rapi dly over the hemisphere hUllting th e great gam e to exti nction as they went Th e story 3ppealcd to an unsophisticated fo rm of US paTriot ism The Clov is people as these hunters were dubbed after an ea rly archaeological site in New Mexico seemed to resemb le modern American pioneers They exhibited quick-fire locomotion husshytl e and bustle technical prowess big appetit es irrepress ible strength enormous cultural reach and a talent for reforging th e environment

By comparison the truth about the peopling of the hemisphere is d isappo intingshyly undramatic T hese first great American superheroes-like most of their successhysors-did not really exist Although archeologists have excavated too few sites for a co mplete and reliable picture to emerge a new theory dominates We have evidence of early human settlement scanered from the Yukon to Uruguay and from near th e Bering Strait to the edge of the Beagle Channel- that is from the waterway that dishyvides North Am erica and Asia to the sou thern limjts of the South American mainshyland This evide nce is so widespread over so lo ng a period in so m any diffe rent geological layers and with such avast range of cultural diversity th at one conclusion is inescapable---ltolonists came at di fferent times br inging different cultures with them

No generally accepted evidence dates any inhabited sites iT) the American hem ishysphere earlier than abo ut 13000 BCE (see Map 13) T he first arrivals came du ring a time when glaciers covered much of North Am erica They stuck dose to the cold where th e game was fattest They followed corridors benleen walls of icc or alon g narrow shores away fro m glaciers Other arrivals came by sea and continued to come afrer the land bridge laS submerged Arou nd 10000 )ears ago a catastrop hic cluster ofexti nctio ns wiped o ut the manuno th mastodon ho rse gian t sloth sabershytoothed tiger and at least thirty-five other large species in the Americas New hunt shying techniques and perhaps new hunting peoples were probably partly responsible But we can only explain the even ts in the context of vast climatic changes that afshyfec ted habitats and the whole ecology on which these an imals depended

Many supposedJy early sites of human habitation have proved to be delusions of overenthusiastic archaeologists-false or at best unconvi ncing A few sites however offer strong evidence of the antiquity and range of settlemen t Most are in the eastern Uni led States- a long way from Asia It must have taken a lon g time for these peoplc to get there from the vicinity of th e modern Bering Strait [n the mid-1970s 15000shyyear-old baskcrwork and tools made with fine flints emerged fro m deep under the d isshycarded beer cans that topped a d ig at Meadowcroft on the Ohio River near the border of Pennsylvania and West Virginia Archaeologists are investigating similar sites beshytvmiddoteen the Ohio and Sava nnah Rivers Later in the 19705 excavations at Monte Verde (MON-teh VER-deh) in southern Chile revealed a twen ty-foot long wooden hideshycovered dwelling preserved in a peat bog fo r about 12500 years Nearby wCrt a big mastodon-butchery and a space devoted to making tools The inhabitants bro ught salt and seaweed from the coast forty miles away and medicinal herbs from mounshytains equally fa r in the opposite direction Halfmiddotchewed lum ps of seaweed show the eaters dental bites a boys footprints survive in the clay lining of a pit Tf Meadowcroft is a long way from the colonizers entry po illt n ear the Bering Strait southern Chile is a world away again-almosl as far as you can get in the Western Hemisphere How lo ng would it have taken the senlers of MOnle Verde to cross the hemisphere over vast distances and th rough many difte rent kinds of environments each dem anding new forms of adaptl1ian Most specialists think it must have taken thousands of years The quest ion of the date of the firs t peopling of the New Vorld therefore remains open

Out of the Ice Peop ling the Earth I 25

l Clovis Points

Monte Verde About 12000 years ago a younil permiddot son trod in fresh clay thai lined a hearth in Monte Verde Chile Peat sealed and preserved Ihe footmiddot pnnt to be rediscovered by archaeologiSts 111 the 1970s EllcavaMns at Monle Verde revealed II VIImiddot tage of mammoth hunters so old that it made previshyous theories about when people arflved in the Americas Questionable or even untenable

26 I C HA PTER 1

SURVIVAL OF THE FORAGERS M the ice cap retreated and the great herds shifted with it many human communishyties opted to follow them Archeology has unearthed traces of their routes Along fhe way in what is now northern Germa ny about 12000 years ago people sacrificed reindeer by deliberately weighting them with stones sewn into their stomachs and drowning them in a lake About 1000 years later hunters as far north as Yorkshire in England who left a weU-preserved camp at Starr Carr found an elwironmem as abundant as the cave artistss had been Not only was it fill ed with tundramiddotloving species such as red deer elk and aurochs (OW- roks)-huge shaggy wi ld catlleshybut also with wild boar in surroundings that were becoming patchily wooded

At Skateholm in Sweden about 8000 years ago hunters founded the largest known settlement of the era [t was a winter camp in an area where the eighty-seven different animal species roamed that the inhabitants ate trapping river-fi sh netting sea-birds harpooning seals and dolphin sticking pigs and driving deer into pits or pondlt In summer the people must have moved farther north They lie today in groves decorated with beads and ocll1e and filted with the spoils of their careers including antlers and boars tusks Their dogs are buried nearby These burly wolflike companshyions are sometimes interred with more signs of honor than humans were given Dogs were full members of societies where hunting prowess and skill in war determined stashytus Many of the human dead bear wounds from man-made weapons Here too is evshyidence of sexual specialization Women have only a third as many wounds as the men

TIle most persistentJy faithful followe rs of the ice were the Inuit (IN-yoo-it) of North America About 4000 )ears ago they invented the blubber-filled soapstone lamp Now they couJd follow big game beond the tundra and into the darkness of an arctic winter They could track the musk ox to the shore of the ocean and the caribou on its winter migrations when its fur is th ickest and its fat most plentiful This way of life persisted until the late twentieth century although the people who first practiced it have disappeared Migrants from the Arctic Ocean replaced them 1000 )ears ago

Climate change trapped other foraging peoples in envi ronments where they had to develop new ways of life Some of these environments offered new kinds of abundance Here were broad -leaved forests rich in acorns (which make nut ritious food for any humans who have enough time to fine-gr ind them)) and lakes and rivers funof aquatic life New World prairies held apparently inexha usti ble stocks of bison (though th e largest bison species was rapidly hunted to extinction) Beshytween the unstable per iods of climate change around 12000 years ago foragers even colonized dense tropical forests in southeast Asia and in th e New World at Pedra Pintada in Brazil where the Amazon River now flows This is a region where foragers today have to struggle to find foods they can di gest but it seems to have been more environmentally diverse toward the end of the Ice Age

Some societies perpetuated their foraging life in hot arid deserts as different from the best hunting grounds of the ree Age as it is possible to imagine This reshyqu ired two forms of adaptation First the thinly dispersed populations had to create collaborative networks Such interdependence explains why peoples who live in ecoshylogically shaky homelands often require people to marry outside the group (a pracshytice lolOwn as exogamy) and why they regard hospitality to strangers as a sacred obligation Second poor environments demanded that in habitants develop what we might caU orally tra nsmi tted science For a ni with accurate and extensive knowlshyedge of their habitat can people survive in harsh environments

The San or Bushmen of southern Africas Kalahari Desert illustrate the diffi shyculties and solutions Their domain has shrunk in the last fe w centuries as Bantu farmers Khoi herdsmen and white invaders have overrun much of their fonner

Out of t he Ice P eopling t he Eartn I 27

territo ry But their heart1and was already dr Yll the time of tne Sans firs t occupancy about 14000 years ago Tne increased rainfall that usually followed the retreaT of tbe icc hardly fell nere There are undergro und rivers but few permanent water holes The people watch fo r rare signs of rain and hurry to

gather the vegetation that accompa nies it The scrubland pla nt foods induding wa ter-bearing tubers and a kind of cact us su pply 30 percent of tnei r sustenance The rest comes from game which grazes on lough desert shrubs that humans can shynot digest

Laurens van der Post a South African adventurer who has written about the Bushmen once accompanied a band of San hunters in search of their favorite food eland a type of anteshylope O ne morning just after sunrise they found the tracks of a herd By three in the afternoon after nonstop pursuit at a tro t Bushmen Though now obliged to adopt a mixed th ey came on the herd and took aim To kill large game is almosl impossible with a oconomy su pported in part by farming and donamiddot

tions of food the San or Bushmen of southernBushmans bow He wounds the beast with a poisoned barb and fo llows it until it Africa have been among the most conservative of

drops from exhaustion and the effects of the drug before milking the kill On Ibis the worlds peoples They maintained their foragshyoCCllsion the hunters rail for twelve miles without stopping and the final mile was ing way 01 li fe essentially unchanged for millen shy

nla---desplte neighbors attempts to e~lermU1alean all-out sprint The next time they made contact with the herd one bull was seen them ThiS record of survival contrasts with the to be tiring It still took another fu ll hou r of pursuit until he fell Then wit hout rapid turnover of more ambitiOUS Civilizat ions that

pause or break for rest they were fresh enough at the end to plunge straight 3vay rad ically modify their en~lronments usually With

into the formidable task of skinning and cuning up the heavy animal l Bushm en disastrous results

who persist with thi s demanding way of life to this day are obviously pursui ng a commitment that has grown out of generations of invested emoti on As difficul t as it may be for us to understand the San would find it heart-wrenching to change a way of life for the mere sake of efficiency convenience or material ga in

In one sense the worlds food supply st ill depends o n fo raging The amount of food from hunti ng actually increased in the twentieth cen tury which may go down in history not only as the last age of hunring but as the greatest World-over today we practice a highly specialized mechanized and unu sual form of huntingshydeep-sea trawling Fish farming is likely to replace it in the future but in any case deep-sea fishing is a historical th rowback

IN PERSPECTIVE After the Ice

In the post~ke-Age world little by littl e ove r thousa nds of years rn ost societies aban doned for shy CHRONOLOGY aging and adopted fa rming or herding as the way (A N dates are apPfoximltlte-l

to get their food Among peoples who still li ve Over 3 million years ago Lucyd ose to the ice cap the Inuit remain faithfu l to 2-1 million years ago Homo erectus migrates from East Afnca 10 Afnea

their hunting tradition in North America Mos t of and EuraSia

their Old World counterparts however have long 100000 years ago Homo sapiens migrates out of Afnca

abandoned it In Eu rasia though some hunting 67000 years ago Homo sapiens in ASia 50000 years ago Homo sapiens colonizes Australia and New Guineacultures still cling to the old ways at th e eas tern

Homo sapiens reaches Europe end of Siberia the peoples on th e western Arctic 30000 years ago last Neanderthals vanishrim-the Sami (or Lapplanders) of Sca ndinavia

20000- World emerges from the Ice Age and their neighbors the Kardia Samoyeds and 15000 iICE Nenets-adopted re indee r herding over a th oushy 20000 BC pound Invent ion of the bow and arrow sand years ago The Ice- Age way oflife if not over 13000 BCpound Homo sapiens in the Americas is drawing to a close Hunting is now th ought of

28 I CHAP TE R 1

as a pri mitive way to get food long abandoned excep t as an aristoc ratic indulmiddot gellee in som e co untries or as a supposedJy manly sport in others

The disappearance of fo raging lifeways seems a rema rkable turn around for a predatorspecies such as Homo sapiells There was a time before hun ting when our ancestors were scavenge rs but for hundreds of thousands perhaps millions of years foraging was reliable and reward ing It fed people through every change of climate Its practitioners spread over th e world and adapted successfully to every kind of habitat Homo sapiens dominated every ecos)stem they became part of and competed successfully with most other species They achieved startling in shycreases in their numbers which we struggle to e(plain They founded more varied societ ies than any other species (though the differences among these societies were slight compared to later periods) They had art-rich cultures with traditions of learning and symbolic systems to record information They had their own so shycial elites polit ical customs) ambitious magic and practical methods to exploit their environ ment

Our next task is to ask why after the achievements recounted in this chapter did people abandon the foragi ng li fe Renouncing the hunt and pursuing new ways of life after the Ice Age are among the most far- reaching and mysterious transforshymations of the human past If the puzzle of hy Homo sapiens spread over the Earth is the first great questio n in our history the problem of wh) fo ragers became farmers is th e second

PROBLEMS AND PARALLELS 1 When does the story of humankind begm Is it possible to 5 Which stresses cou ld have caused early peoples to d iVide and

defme what it means to be huma n What characteristiCS do f ight eac h other Wh ich theories have been put forward for how we share with chimpanzees and other apes war started

2 How do Neandert hals and Homo floresiensis cha llenge 6 How did ma le domination come to be normal in human soc ishycommonly held definitions of Homo sapiens eties What impact did sexual econom ic specialiZa t ion have on

early SOC iet ies3 Why d id Homo sapiens migrate out of Afr ica How did migrashytion change peoples relationships with each other and wi th 7 Why was the Ice Age a time of affl uence What role did shamans thelf environment play in Ice-Age soc iety What insights Into Ice-Age societies ca n

we glean from its art and the rema ins of anc ient feasts4 What were the factors behind the rapid population growth of Homo sapiens 8 How did some SOCieties perpetuate the fOlaging li fe after the

Ice Age How has the foraging life persisted today

bull bullbull

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE A Case in Point Aboriginal Australians Preagricultural Settlements The Disadvantages of Fa rming

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS Herders Environments Tillers Environments

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE Europe Africa Asia The Pac ific Islands The Americas

SO WHY DID FARMING START Population Pressure The Outcome of Abundance The Power of Politics Cu lt Agriculture Climatic Instability Agriculture by Accident Production As an Outgrowth of Procurement

IN ERSP CT1VEmiddot Saskinamp Stability

n August 1770 the Bri tish navigator Captain James Cook reached the north

coast of Australia on the first of his spectacular voyages of exploration that

charted the lands and limits of the Pacific Ocean Ncar Cape York hc ___-~

paused at an island he named Possession Island For although his

stated purpose was scientific he was also an officer of the Royal Navy

with orders to extend the British Empire To Cooks mind the island

though inhabIted was wa iting to be grabbed The natives could not be

said to possess it because they had left no marks of possession on its soil

A wealth of plants that they could hae domesticated-fruits proper IQr

the support of mann-was growing wild Yet Cook wrote the people know nothshy

ing of cultivation It seems strange He was puzzling over one of the most pershy

plexing problems of history- the- diffe rence between forage rs and farmers food

procurers and food producers

Food is the most precious of resources Nothing Ill happen without it To most people in most societies for most of the time food is and always has been the most important thing in the world Change~ in how we get food and whether we get it arc among histors big changes During the global warming that fo ll owed the Ice Age hUSbandry-breeding animals and cultivating crops-began to replace hunting and gathering and introduced the biggest cha nge of all

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE

Husbandry happened in two distinct ways involving different tpes of environshyments and different levels of environmental intervention In some environments people could exploi t creatures that had a he rd instinct by managing the herds rather than by hunting them Breeding enhanced qualities that evolution did not necessa rily favor such as docility size and yield of meat m il k eggs and fat On the negative side close contact between humans and animals often allowed disease-bearing organisms to thrive th reatening human lives and health and sometimes unleashing plagues Otherwi se however animal husbHlIdry barely affectcd the environment Herds on the whole kept to their traditional patterns of migration and people continued to accompany them-driving the beasts now rather than follOving them Domest icated animals remained recognizably the hei rs of their wild ancestors and the landscapes through which they traveled did not change much except that the herds feeding and manure probably

32 I CHAPTER 2

encouraged the grasses they ate to flourish at the expense of othe r plant species

In other environments however plant husbandry involved massive human intervention In the long run

WHY ARE settled foragers better off than farmers tillage of the soil changed the world mo re than any previshyous innovation by Homo sapiens From postglacial m ud W HAT K INDS of environments are suited to herding people coaxed what we now call civilization-a way of

WHAT KINDS of environments were suited to early agricu lture life based on rad ically modifying the environment Inshy

W H ERE D ID farm ing start and what were t he fi rst crops stead of merely t rying to manage the landscape nature

GIVEN THE d isadvantages why did people iarm provided farmers recarved it with fields and boundaries

The rice fields of Bali in IndoneSia are among the most proo uct ive in the world usrng variet ies of rice and techniques for farming it thal are about 1000 years old Irrigation channels maintained and administered by farmers cooperatives distrrbute water everl ly among the terraces Though oflgirla l ly a lowlarld crop fa voring swampy conditions rice adapts perfec tly ro upland enVIronments and to terrace farmrng

di tches and irrigation ca nals They stamped the land with a new look a geometrical order Agric ul ture enabled humans to see the world in a new way-to imagine that magic and science had the power to change nature Such power in turn changed peoples sense of where they fit into the panorama of life on Earth Now they could become lords or in more modest moments or cultures stewards of creation

Together farm ing and herding revolutionized humans place in their ecosysshyterm Instead of merely dependi ng on other life forms to sustain us we forged a new relationship of interdependence with th ose species we eat We rely on them for food they rely on us for th eir reproduction Domesticated animals would not exist without humans Husbandr was the firs t human challenge to evolution Instead of evolvi ng species through natural selection) fa rming and herding proceed by what might be called unnatural selection-sorting and selecting by human hands for human needs according to human agendas In other words e breed livestock and cultivate plants

Herding and tilling also changed human societies By feeding people on a vastshyly greater scale agricu lture allowed societies to get hugely bigger than ever before We can only guess at the absolute figures but in areas where farming has replaced foraging in modern ti mes population has increased fifty- or even a hundredfol d Larger populations demanded new fo rms of cont rol of labor and food distribu shytion which Il1 turn nurtured strong states and powerful elites Society became more volatile and apparently less stable

In almost every case for reasons we still do not understand when people begin to practice agriculture th e pace of change quickens immeasurably and cu shymulat ively States an d civilizations do not seem to last for long Soc ieties that we think of as being most evo lved turn out to be least fitted for survival Compared with the relat ive stability of forager communities soci eties that depend on agr ishyculture are prone to lurch and coll apse History becomes a path picked amon g their ru ins

Still for Captain Cook and for most people who haye thought about it ever since it was indeed strange that people who had the opportunity to practice agrishyculture should not take advantage of it The advantages of agri culture seem so ob shyvious The farmer can select the best specimens of edible crops and creatures collect th em in the most co nvenient places and pastures crossbreed the livestock and hybridize the plants to improve size yi eld or flavo r By these methods sm all farming socie ties grow into comm unities and build up large populations Usually they go on to create ci ties and develop ever more complex technologies To Cook and his contemporaries in Europe who believed that progress was inevitable and that the same kind of changes are bound to happen everywhere peoples who dung to foraging seemed baffling

Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 33

A Case in Point Aborigina l Australians

Cook and others at the time saw only two explanations for why foragers sllch as the aborigines (AB-eh-rihj- ih-neez) in Australia would reject agriculture They were either stupid o r subhuman Indeed early European painters in Aust ralia depicted aborigines as apelike creatures grimaci ng oddl) and crawling in trees The colo nists s impl y ignored the nati es o r when they got in the way often hunted them downshyas they would beasts But not on ly did tbe native Aust ralians reject agriculture in some areas th ey appeared [0 shun every technical cO llvenience On the island o f Tasman ia in the extreme south of Australia where the natives became extinct soon after European settlement began they seemed to have forgotten every art of their ancestors bows boats even how to kindle fi rc In Arnhem Land in the extreme north they used boomerangs to make musi c but no longer as weapons for th e hunt Progress which the European discoverers of Australia believed in fervently seemed to have gone into reverse Australia was not only on the exact opposite side of the world from England it was a topsy-turvy place where everythi ng was upside down

We can hOever be certain that if aborigines rejected agriculture o r other practices Europeans considered progressive it must have been for good reasons TIle aborigines did not lack the knowledge necessary to switch from fo raging to farming had they so wished When they gathered wild yams or the root known as

James COO K from Captain Cooks Journal During his First Voyage Round the World

nardoo they ensured that enough of the plant remained in the ground to grow back In many regions too they used fire to control the grazi ng grounds of kangaroos and concentrate Ihem for hunting a common technique among herders to manage pasture and among tillers to renew the soil Along the Murray and Darling Rivers aborigines even watered and weeded wild cro ps and policed their boundaries against human and animal pred ators (sec Map 20

The abo rigi nal Australians could also have systematically planted and irrigated crops farmed the grubs they liked to eat pen ned kangashyroos and even tried to domestica te them (Kangaroos are can tankerous creatures but people do make pets o f them Breeding selected speci shymen s would probably produce a domestic strain in a few generations ) In the far no rth of Australia aboriginal communities traded with the farming cultures of New Guinea So even if they hadnt developed agrishyculture on th eir own they could have lea rned it fro m o utsi ders If the aborigines did not farm it must have been because they did not want to In short they were doing well without it Simil ar cases all over the world support this conclusion Where wild foods are abundant there is no in shycentive to do mesticate them Of course people o ften adopt p ractices that d o them no good We can concede this general principle but case by case we stiJI han t ( 0 know why

Preagricultura l Settlements

PA C IF IC

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Under some conditions people can settle in one place without the trouble of farmshying Archaeological evidence in the region we now ca ll the Middle East shows this After the Ice Age ended about 15000 lJCE a frontier zone between forest and grassland stretched across the eastern sho re of the Mediterranean and what are now Iran eastern Turkey and Iraq (see Map 22) The forests were full of acorns pistachios and almonds which gatherers ground into flour and paste The grassshylands bred vast quantjties of wild grass with edible seeds These foods could all he

34 I C H A P TER 2

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Preagricultural Settlements in the Middle East

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warehoused between harvests and had the additional advantage of maturing at di fferent times Dense herds of gazelle in the gra sslands prov ided more nutrition for hunters to bring home Food was so plentiful that foragers did not have to move around much to fi nd it

By abou t 14000 to 15000 years ago permanent sen lements a rose th roughout the region clusters of dwelli ngs with stone wa lls or those made of wood on stone foundations or cue from soft stone and roofed with reeds The foragers who lived in th ese sedentary communities apparently kept to themselves Villages had dis shytinctive iden tit ies and habits wh ich almost amounted to badges of identity Some favored gazelle toe bones for jewelry some preferred fox teeth and partridge legs These people married within their own communities (a practi ce known as en shydogamy) judging from th e evidence of inherited physical characteristics For ex shyample in some villages people were retatimiddotely short while in others they had d istinctive dental patterns These settlers cut what look like plans of their fields on limestone slabs which suggests that they were terri torial- that they had a sense of possession that Captain Cook would have recognized

Out of the Mud Far mIng and Herding A fter tne Ice Age 35

In sum the lives of preagricultural settlers were so much like the lives of the early fa rmers who succeeded them that when anhaeologists first found the forshyagers villages in the 1930s they assumed the inhabitants were farmers Bue the setshylied foragers were 3ctuaHy better off than farmers Their rema ins on the whole show better health and nourishme nt than the fa rming peoples who followed later in the sa me region A diet rich in seeds and nuts had ground down their teeth but- unl ike the farmers-they have none of the streaked tooth -enamel common among people who suffer from food shortages

Simi la r evidence of preagricultural settlements exists in other places Take a few conspicuous examples The Jomon (JOHM-mehn ) people of central Honshu Island in Japan hved in permanent vi llages 13000 years ago feeding themselves by fishing il nd gathering acorns and chestnuts They made pots fo r display in elaboshyrate shapes modeled on flames and serpents an d lacquered them with tree sap Their potters were in a sense magicians transforming clay into objects of prestige and ritua l In the Egyp tim Sahara lit Nabta Playa about forty plant species inclu shyding sorghum a type of cereal grass grew alongside hearths and pit oven~ evi shydence of settled life from about 10000 years ago In other pa rts of (en tral Sahara in the same period that had plenty of water and a cookr climate than now foragers fou nd sorghum and millet another cereal grass At Gobekli Tepe (goh- BEHK-lee TEH-pchl a hilltop site in so utheast Turkey co ntemporaries who lived mainly by gathering wild wheat he ed seven -ton pillars from li mestone They reerected them in a sunken chamber in their village and decorated them with carvings of snakes boar gazelles cra nes and symbols that look suspiciously like writing

What was life li ke in these earliest settl ements Small permanent houses sugshygest that nuclear families-parents and children-predominated though so me sites clearty have communal work areas for grinding seeds and nuts As for who did the work the most stunn ing find ing of recent archaeology in the Middle East sugshygests that work was probably shared behleen the sexes The way skeletons are musshycled suggests th at women did slightly more kneeling (and therefore slightly more gr inding) than men and men did more throwing (and therefore more hunting) than women But both sexes did both activit ies Male and female bodies began to reconverge after a long period during which they bad evolved to look differently As food product ion replaced hunting and gathering wa r and child rearing became the main sex-specific jobs in society The convergence between th e physical feashytures of men and women seems still to be in progress today Indeed it seems to be accelerating as men and women share more and morc tasks and the need for heavshyily muscled or big framed bod ies di minishes along wi th physica ll y demanding jobs in much of the world

The Disadvantages of Farming

Prernrming comm unities do not simply progress to fann ing If foraging produces abundance and sec urity it does not necessarily follow that farming can deliver more of the same The consequences of adopting agriculture are by no means all positive In the early stages of moving from foraging to fa rm ing the food supply actually becomes less reliable because people depend on a relatively small range of fa rmed foods or even on a si ngle species As a result a community becomes vulnerable to ecological disasters Famine becomes more likely as diet narrows Moreover when people have 0 plant and grow food as weDas gather it they have to use up more energy to get the sa me amount of nourishment (Although domesmiddot ticated food s once harvested tend to be easier to process for eating) The need to

lomon pottery Ten thousand years ago the Jomon potters of Japan produced the worlds earliest knOvn earthenware vessels Other pottel)-makmg peoples also practled farm ing but the Jomon people were sedentary foragers--l lvlng in permamiddot nent or long-term settlements but managing the environment in mInimal ways and relyIng on abunshydant wild foods including nuts seeds acorns some 70 marine animal Spec ies and land mamshymals---eatmg no just boar deer and hare but also wolves Wildcats f lYing squIrrel s and mon keys

Overuse deforms bones ArchaeolO8) can reconmiddot struc t how ancient peop le b(gthaved by measuring the deformities In their skeletons The woman hose toe th is was lived In a commuMy of eady sedentary foragers In what is now Syria She evIshydently spent much of her tIme kneeling presumshyably to grlFld the acorns and kernels of Wild wheat on whIch her people re lied for food

36 I C H A P T ER 2

Early Forager Settlements (All dales are approximate)

15000 yea rs ago 14000-15000

yea rs ago 13000 years ago 10000 years ago

l

World emerges from the Ice Age Permanent settlements appear In Middle East

Honshu Island Japan

Nabta Playa Egypt GObekh Tepe Turkey

organize labor encourages inequalities and explo itation Concentrashytions of domesticated animals spread disease such as smallpox measles rubella ch icken pox influenza and tuberculosis

So the problem is really the opposite of what Cook supposed It is fanners behavior not fo ragers that is strange Husba nd ry is not a step along a march of improvement because in some ways it makes life worse No one has PU l the problem better than the histo rian of agronomy Jack L Harlan

people who do not farm do about eveq1hing that farmers do but they do lot work as hard They understand thllifc cycles of plants kno the seashysons of the year and when and where the natural plant food resources can he

Jack Harlan from Crops and Man

Chukchi herder The choice between huntmg and herding otten depends on local and historical Clrmiddot cumstances Remdeermiddotherding is an anCient pracmiddot tlce In muc h of northern Euragtla whereas irl North America the can bou have remained wild In e~treme norlheast Asia close to America the Chukchi long resisted the example of neighboring peo ple and preferred hunting 10 herding In the last two or Illree cenlurles however they have adopted the herdsman s vocat ion shown here

hareswd in great abundance with the least eff() rt There is evidence that thl diet of g-athshyering peoples was better than that of cultivators that slarvation was rare that there was a lower incidence of chronic disease and not nearly so many cavities in their teeth

The question must be raised Whr furm Vhy work harder for food less nut rishytious md a supply more capricious Why invite famine plague ~poundtilcnce and crowded living conditions 1

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

Part of what is surprising about agriculture is that it is so common Not only has almost th e entire human world adopted 1t many peoples ca me to it indepenshydently of one anot her Scholars used to su ppose that it was so extraordinary it must have begun in some particular spo t and that diffusion spread it from there- carried by migrants or conquerors or transmitted by t rade o r im itated The last 40 years of research have shown on the contrary that the transition to

food product io n happened over and over agai n in a range of regions and a variety of environments with d ifferen t foodstuffs and di fferent techn iques The most obv ious co ntrast in environ ments is betwee n herders and tillers Herd ing develops where plan ts a re tOO spa rse or indigestible to sustain human life but a nim als can convert these pla nts into meat-an energy SO UTee tha t people can access by eating th e anim als Tilling deshyvelops where th e soil is suitable or enough ecologica l di shyversity ex ists to susta in plant husbandry o r mi xed farming of plants and animals

Herders Environments

[n three regions of the Earth-tundra the evergreen foresls of no rthern Eurasia and great grasslands- il is not possible to grow enough humanly d igest ible plant foods to keep large numbers of people alive [n the

tund ra and evergreen forests average temperatures arc too low the growing sea shyson too short the surface soil too vulnerable to frost and the subso il in some areas too froze n In these environments thert~ are only two options People can remain foragers- an d primari ly hu nters seeking the fa t-ri ch species rypical of stich zones The [nu it in the North American Arctic for example hunt seal and walrus Or people can become herders like the Sami and Samoyeds of north ern Europe and northwest Asia who live off rei ndeer

Out of the Mud Farming and H erding After the Ice Age I 37

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 FORAGERS AND FARMERS COMPARED

FORAGERS FARMERS

Food procurers Food producers

hUn and gather husbandry (breed animals cultivate crops)

Fit into nature Chanampe nature

little environmental impact herders some environmental impact tillers massive environment impact

Manaampethe landscape Nature remade and reimagined

Dependence on wild animals and plants Interdependence between humans plants and animals

animals and plants exploited and domeslicated

Stable food supply Unstable food supply

nomadic fOfltlgcrs move in response 10 environmental small range of farmed foods increases vulnerability change sedentary fo ragers vulnerable to changes of climate to ecological disasters

Stable popUlation

relatively little labor needed population COlltrol avalable mainly by managed lactatioll

Expandinamp population

breeding livestock and cultivating plants leads to increased food supply increased population concentrations of domesticated animals spread disease

Stable society

kinship and age fi x ind ividuals place in sodery sexes usually share labor by spedalidng in difterent economic tasks

Radically changed unstable society

need to control labor and food distribution leads to social inequalititS work shared between the sexes increased reliance on female labor ~trong nates dewlop with powerful elites complex technologies

Similarly the soils of the world s vast grassla nds- known as prairie in North America pampa in South America steppe in Eurasia and the Sahel (sah-HEHL) in Africa- have for most of history been unfavorable for tillage (sce Map 23) The sad is mostly too difficu lt to turn without a steel plow Except for patches of excepshytionally favorable soil herding has been the only possible fo rm of husbandry in these areas The peoples of the Eurasian and Africa n grasslands were probably herdi ng by about 5000 acE Native American grassland dwellers of the New World on the othe r hand retained a foraging way of life because available species-bison various types of antelope-were (or the lIlost part more abun shydant for the hunt and less suitable fo r herding

For those who choose it herding has three special consequences First it imposshyes a mobile way of life The proportion of the population ho follow the herdsshyand in som e cases it is the enri re popu lation-cannot seuJe into permanent

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38 I CHAP TER 2

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villages Herder peoples are not ul1iLling or unable to build permanently or on a large sca le The Scythians for instance people of the -estern Asian steppe who first domesticated the horse and invented th e wheel and axle about 6000 to 7OCX years ago built impressive stone structures Bul these wefe underground tombs dwellings fo r the dead while the living inhabited temporary camps Some herding societies in Asia and Africa have become rich enough to fou nd ci ties fo r elites OT for specialists working outside of food production such as craftsmen or miners Indeed as we shall see (Chap ter 13) in the thirteenth century CF a city of thi s type Karakorum in Mongolia was one of the most admired cities in the world On the whole howshyever herding does no t favo r the development of cities o r the kind of culture that cities nourish such as monumental buildings large-scale inst itutions fo r education and the arts and ind ustrial technology

Second since herde rs breed from animal s that naturally share their grassland habitats thei r herds consist of such creatures as cattl e sheep horses goats-milkshyyielding stock To get the fu ll benefit fro m their auimals herdin g peoples have to eat dai ry products To modern milk-fed Americans this may sound perfeclly no rshyma l But it required a modification of human evolution Most people in most part s of the world do not natural1 ) produce lactase the substance that enables them to d igest milk after infancy They respond to dairy products wit h distaste or even intol erance The Masai of Kenya in East Africa get 80 percent of their energy

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

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intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

offer ing perhaps to imitate blood and reinvest the dead w ith li fe The speculation that people m ight also have used ochre to paint their livi ng bod ies is hard to resist

Ice-Age people also used symbols and substances such as ochre in magic and those who controlled them ielded power In pain tin gs and ca rvings we can glimpse the Ice-Age elite people considered special and set apart fro m the group In fi gures wearing animal masks- antlered o r lionlike-the wearer is transformed From anthropological studies of the recent past we know such disguises are norshymally efforts to com m un icate with the dead o r with the gods Bringing messages from other worlds is the Tole of a shaman (SHAH-mehn) someone who acts as an intermedia ry between humans and spirits or gods The shaman may seck a sta te of ecstasy in duced by drugs or dan ci ng or drumming to see and hear realms normally inaccessible to the senses He becomes the medium through which spirits talk to th is world Among the Chukchi hu nters of northern Siberia whose way of life an d env ironment are simil ar to Icc-Age peoples the shltlillans experience is rep resented as a journey to co nsult the spirits in a realm that only the dead can norma lly enter The shaman may adopt an animal disguise to acquire the animals speed or strength or identify with an animal ancesto r The shamans role can be an awesome source o f authority Shamans can chaUenge alpha males Like other rd igions shamanism in shyvolves spiritual insight which people of both sexes various levels of intellect and a ll kinds of physique can acquire It can replace the strong with the seer and the stge By choosing el ites who had the gift o f commu nicating with sp irit s Ice-Age societies could escape the oppression of the physically powerful or those privileged by birth

Althou gh we cannot be SliTe about the nature of the Ice-Age power class we know it existed because of glaring inequalities in the way Ice-Age people were buried In a cemetery at Sunghir (SOON-geer) near Moscow dated about 24000 years ago the highest-status person seems at first glance to have been an el derly man His burshyial goods include a cap sewn with foxs teeth and about twenty ivory bracelets Nearshyby however two boys of aboll t eight or ten years old have even more spectacular ornaments As well as ivo ry bracelets and necklaces and fox-tooth buttons the boys have animal carvings and bcautifu U) wrought weapons including spea rs of mamshymoth ivo ry each over six fcct long About 3500 finely worked ivory beads had been drizzled over the head 10rso and limbs o f each boy Here was a society that marked leaders for greatness from boyhood and therefore perhaps from birth

In our attempt (0 undcrstand where power lay in lee-Age societies the ti nal bits of evidence are crumbs from ridl peoples tables fragments of feasts Archaeologists have found ashes from large-scale cooking and the calcified debris of food at sites in northern Spain perhaps from as long as 23000 years ago The tally sticks that survive from the s1me region in the same period may also have been records of expendirure on feasts Vlhat were such feasts for Dy analogy with modem hunting peoples the most likely reason was alliance-making between communities They were probably not male-bondshying occasions as some scholars think beca use they are close to major dwelling sites where women and child ren would be present Instead from the momen t of its emershygence the idea of th e feast had practical consequences to bu ild and strengthen societies and enhance the power o f those who organized the fcast~ and cont rolled the food (for more discussio n of feasting see Going to the Source feas ting pases 152-1 55)

Peopling the New World

The New World Jas the last part of the planet Homo sapiens peopled We can be sure of th at much but il is no t easy to say exactly when o r by whom According to the for merly dominant theo ry a gap opened benyeneen glaciers towa rd th e end of the Jee Age A race of hunters crossed the land lin k betvcen North America and

Out of t he Ice Peopling the Earth I 23

Shaman In many societies communication With the spirit-world remains the responSibility of the speCial ists whom anthropologists call shamans Typically they garb and paint or disguise themshyselves to resemble spirits or the animals deemed to have prIVI leged access to rulms beyond human sense The shamans then ~ JOurney to the spirits 01 ancesto~ In trances Induced by danCing drumshyming or drugs Shamans often aCQU ire SOCial mllumiddot ence and pol i tical authority as heale~ prophets and a rb l tra to~ _

Sunghir burial A prolUSion of beads distinguishes the graves of people Of high status at Sunghlr in RUSSia from about 24000 yea~ ago The dlstribushylion of signs of wealth In burials suggests that even m the Ice Age inequalities were fi fe and that status could be Inhell ted

24 1 CHAP T E R 1

(

The Peopling of the New World

A RCTI C O CEAN ~

~-J -

~ ~~ Greenland~ lt ampCgtEI~tk

-r-~ ~

PA CIFIC

ATL ANTIC

o C E A N

13000-8000 BC o C E A N

o exten t of ke over 20000 yur~ ~go shy

bull extent of ice cover 2000 yea ago

tundra

tundra and conife rous forests

bull

mm native peoples

pol~i bJe 1 1lt1 migriltion route

poSl ble ltoa~a l mlgratiOlU

early habitation ~Ite desulbed on pilge 2S

bull othe r eilrly habitation sites

~ forager settle ment desc ribed on pages 26-27

+ rrrIIRGfl7 mooern-day state

CHILE mooernmiddotd~y country

ancie nt coast lines

anc ie nt lake

Amazon Ba s i ii

50 U TH AMERICA

10000 Ke co II lu mogtI lttei 000 0 OOOO _rn~

liooo bull 000

I L III I I

Beagle middot Channel

11000 1 oft osoo OLL Mo 1000 Matlt -V wlpO

ny Il

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Asia where the Bering Strai t now flows to cilter a paradi se where no human hunter h ad ever trod before Thc abundance wa~ so great and the animals so unshywary that the invaders ate enormously and multiplied greatly The) spread rapi dly over the hemisphere hUllting th e great gam e to exti nction as they went Th e story 3ppealcd to an unsophisticated fo rm of US paTriot ism The Clov is people as these hunters were dubbed after an ea rly archaeological site in New Mexico seemed to resemb le modern American pioneers They exhibited quick-fire locomotion husshytl e and bustle technical prowess big appetit es irrepress ible strength enormous cultural reach and a talent for reforging th e environment

By comparison the truth about the peopling of the hemisphere is d isappo intingshyly undramatic T hese first great American superheroes-like most of their successhysors-did not really exist Although archeologists have excavated too few sites for a co mplete and reliable picture to emerge a new theory dominates We have evidence of early human settlement scanered from the Yukon to Uruguay and from near th e Bering Strait to the edge of the Beagle Channel- that is from the waterway that dishyvides North Am erica and Asia to the sou thern limjts of the South American mainshyland This evide nce is so widespread over so lo ng a period in so m any diffe rent geological layers and with such avast range of cultural diversity th at one conclusion is inescapable---ltolonists came at di fferent times br inging different cultures with them

No generally accepted evidence dates any inhabited sites iT) the American hem ishysphere earlier than abo ut 13000 BCE (see Map 13) T he first arrivals came du ring a time when glaciers covered much of North Am erica They stuck dose to the cold where th e game was fattest They followed corridors benleen walls of icc or alon g narrow shores away fro m glaciers Other arrivals came by sea and continued to come afrer the land bridge laS submerged Arou nd 10000 )ears ago a catastrop hic cluster ofexti nctio ns wiped o ut the manuno th mastodon ho rse gian t sloth sabershytoothed tiger and at least thirty-five other large species in the Americas New hunt shying techniques and perhaps new hunting peoples were probably partly responsible But we can only explain the even ts in the context of vast climatic changes that afshyfec ted habitats and the whole ecology on which these an imals depended

Many supposedJy early sites of human habitation have proved to be delusions of overenthusiastic archaeologists-false or at best unconvi ncing A few sites however offer strong evidence of the antiquity and range of settlemen t Most are in the eastern Uni led States- a long way from Asia It must have taken a lon g time for these peoplc to get there from the vicinity of th e modern Bering Strait [n the mid-1970s 15000shyyear-old baskcrwork and tools made with fine flints emerged fro m deep under the d isshycarded beer cans that topped a d ig at Meadowcroft on the Ohio River near the border of Pennsylvania and West Virginia Archaeologists are investigating similar sites beshytvmiddoteen the Ohio and Sava nnah Rivers Later in the 19705 excavations at Monte Verde (MON-teh VER-deh) in southern Chile revealed a twen ty-foot long wooden hideshycovered dwelling preserved in a peat bog fo r about 12500 years Nearby wCrt a big mastodon-butchery and a space devoted to making tools The inhabitants bro ught salt and seaweed from the coast forty miles away and medicinal herbs from mounshytains equally fa r in the opposite direction Halfmiddotchewed lum ps of seaweed show the eaters dental bites a boys footprints survive in the clay lining of a pit Tf Meadowcroft is a long way from the colonizers entry po illt n ear the Bering Strait southern Chile is a world away again-almosl as far as you can get in the Western Hemisphere How lo ng would it have taken the senlers of MOnle Verde to cross the hemisphere over vast distances and th rough many difte rent kinds of environments each dem anding new forms of adaptl1ian Most specialists think it must have taken thousands of years The quest ion of the date of the firs t peopling of the New Vorld therefore remains open

Out of the Ice Peop ling the Earth I 25

l Clovis Points

Monte Verde About 12000 years ago a younil permiddot son trod in fresh clay thai lined a hearth in Monte Verde Chile Peat sealed and preserved Ihe footmiddot pnnt to be rediscovered by archaeologiSts 111 the 1970s EllcavaMns at Monle Verde revealed II VIImiddot tage of mammoth hunters so old that it made previshyous theories about when people arflved in the Americas Questionable or even untenable

26 I C HA PTER 1

SURVIVAL OF THE FORAGERS M the ice cap retreated and the great herds shifted with it many human communishyties opted to follow them Archeology has unearthed traces of their routes Along fhe way in what is now northern Germa ny about 12000 years ago people sacrificed reindeer by deliberately weighting them with stones sewn into their stomachs and drowning them in a lake About 1000 years later hunters as far north as Yorkshire in England who left a weU-preserved camp at Starr Carr found an elwironmem as abundant as the cave artistss had been Not only was it fill ed with tundramiddotloving species such as red deer elk and aurochs (OW- roks)-huge shaggy wi ld catlleshybut also with wild boar in surroundings that were becoming patchily wooded

At Skateholm in Sweden about 8000 years ago hunters founded the largest known settlement of the era [t was a winter camp in an area where the eighty-seven different animal species roamed that the inhabitants ate trapping river-fi sh netting sea-birds harpooning seals and dolphin sticking pigs and driving deer into pits or pondlt In summer the people must have moved farther north They lie today in groves decorated with beads and ocll1e and filted with the spoils of their careers including antlers and boars tusks Their dogs are buried nearby These burly wolflike companshyions are sometimes interred with more signs of honor than humans were given Dogs were full members of societies where hunting prowess and skill in war determined stashytus Many of the human dead bear wounds from man-made weapons Here too is evshyidence of sexual specialization Women have only a third as many wounds as the men

TIle most persistentJy faithful followe rs of the ice were the Inuit (IN-yoo-it) of North America About 4000 )ears ago they invented the blubber-filled soapstone lamp Now they couJd follow big game beond the tundra and into the darkness of an arctic winter They could track the musk ox to the shore of the ocean and the caribou on its winter migrations when its fur is th ickest and its fat most plentiful This way of life persisted until the late twentieth century although the people who first practiced it have disappeared Migrants from the Arctic Ocean replaced them 1000 )ears ago

Climate change trapped other foraging peoples in envi ronments where they had to develop new ways of life Some of these environments offered new kinds of abundance Here were broad -leaved forests rich in acorns (which make nut ritious food for any humans who have enough time to fine-gr ind them)) and lakes and rivers funof aquatic life New World prairies held apparently inexha usti ble stocks of bison (though th e largest bison species was rapidly hunted to extinction) Beshytween the unstable per iods of climate change around 12000 years ago foragers even colonized dense tropical forests in southeast Asia and in th e New World at Pedra Pintada in Brazil where the Amazon River now flows This is a region where foragers today have to struggle to find foods they can di gest but it seems to have been more environmentally diverse toward the end of the Ice Age

Some societies perpetuated their foraging life in hot arid deserts as different from the best hunting grounds of the ree Age as it is possible to imagine This reshyqu ired two forms of adaptation First the thinly dispersed populations had to create collaborative networks Such interdependence explains why peoples who live in ecoshylogically shaky homelands often require people to marry outside the group (a pracshytice lolOwn as exogamy) and why they regard hospitality to strangers as a sacred obligation Second poor environments demanded that in habitants develop what we might caU orally tra nsmi tted science For a ni with accurate and extensive knowlshyedge of their habitat can people survive in harsh environments

The San or Bushmen of southern Africas Kalahari Desert illustrate the diffi shyculties and solutions Their domain has shrunk in the last fe w centuries as Bantu farmers Khoi herdsmen and white invaders have overrun much of their fonner

Out of t he Ice P eopling t he Eartn I 27

territo ry But their heart1and was already dr Yll the time of tne Sans firs t occupancy about 14000 years ago Tne increased rainfall that usually followed the retreaT of tbe icc hardly fell nere There are undergro und rivers but few permanent water holes The people watch fo r rare signs of rain and hurry to

gather the vegetation that accompa nies it The scrubland pla nt foods induding wa ter-bearing tubers and a kind of cact us su pply 30 percent of tnei r sustenance The rest comes from game which grazes on lough desert shrubs that humans can shynot digest

Laurens van der Post a South African adventurer who has written about the Bushmen once accompanied a band of San hunters in search of their favorite food eland a type of anteshylope O ne morning just after sunrise they found the tracks of a herd By three in the afternoon after nonstop pursuit at a tro t Bushmen Though now obliged to adopt a mixed th ey came on the herd and took aim To kill large game is almosl impossible with a oconomy su pported in part by farming and donamiddot

tions of food the San or Bushmen of southernBushmans bow He wounds the beast with a poisoned barb and fo llows it until it Africa have been among the most conservative of

drops from exhaustion and the effects of the drug before milking the kill On Ibis the worlds peoples They maintained their foragshyoCCllsion the hunters rail for twelve miles without stopping and the final mile was ing way 01 li fe essentially unchanged for millen shy

nla---desplte neighbors attempts to e~lermU1alean all-out sprint The next time they made contact with the herd one bull was seen them ThiS record of survival contrasts with the to be tiring It still took another fu ll hou r of pursuit until he fell Then wit hout rapid turnover of more ambitiOUS Civilizat ions that

pause or break for rest they were fresh enough at the end to plunge straight 3vay rad ically modify their en~lronments usually With

into the formidable task of skinning and cuning up the heavy animal l Bushm en disastrous results

who persist with thi s demanding way of life to this day are obviously pursui ng a commitment that has grown out of generations of invested emoti on As difficul t as it may be for us to understand the San would find it heart-wrenching to change a way of life for the mere sake of efficiency convenience or material ga in

In one sense the worlds food supply st ill depends o n fo raging The amount of food from hunti ng actually increased in the twentieth cen tury which may go down in history not only as the last age of hunring but as the greatest World-over today we practice a highly specialized mechanized and unu sual form of huntingshydeep-sea trawling Fish farming is likely to replace it in the future but in any case deep-sea fishing is a historical th rowback

IN PERSPECTIVE After the Ice

In the post~ke-Age world little by littl e ove r thousa nds of years rn ost societies aban doned for shy CHRONOLOGY aging and adopted fa rming or herding as the way (A N dates are apPfoximltlte-l

to get their food Among peoples who still li ve Over 3 million years ago Lucyd ose to the ice cap the Inuit remain faithfu l to 2-1 million years ago Homo erectus migrates from East Afnca 10 Afnea

their hunting tradition in North America Mos t of and EuraSia

their Old World counterparts however have long 100000 years ago Homo sapiens migrates out of Afnca

abandoned it In Eu rasia though some hunting 67000 years ago Homo sapiens in ASia 50000 years ago Homo sapiens colonizes Australia and New Guineacultures still cling to the old ways at th e eas tern

Homo sapiens reaches Europe end of Siberia the peoples on th e western Arctic 30000 years ago last Neanderthals vanishrim-the Sami (or Lapplanders) of Sca ndinavia

20000- World emerges from the Ice Age and their neighbors the Kardia Samoyeds and 15000 iICE Nenets-adopted re indee r herding over a th oushy 20000 BC pound Invent ion of the bow and arrow sand years ago The Ice- Age way oflife if not over 13000 BCpound Homo sapiens in the Americas is drawing to a close Hunting is now th ought of

28 I CHAP TE R 1

as a pri mitive way to get food long abandoned excep t as an aristoc ratic indulmiddot gellee in som e co untries or as a supposedJy manly sport in others

The disappearance of fo raging lifeways seems a rema rkable turn around for a predatorspecies such as Homo sapiells There was a time before hun ting when our ancestors were scavenge rs but for hundreds of thousands perhaps millions of years foraging was reliable and reward ing It fed people through every change of climate Its practitioners spread over th e world and adapted successfully to every kind of habitat Homo sapiens dominated every ecos)stem they became part of and competed successfully with most other species They achieved startling in shycreases in their numbers which we struggle to e(plain They founded more varied societ ies than any other species (though the differences among these societies were slight compared to later periods) They had art-rich cultures with traditions of learning and symbolic systems to record information They had their own so shycial elites polit ical customs) ambitious magic and practical methods to exploit their environ ment

Our next task is to ask why after the achievements recounted in this chapter did people abandon the foragi ng li fe Renouncing the hunt and pursuing new ways of life after the Ice Age are among the most far- reaching and mysterious transforshymations of the human past If the puzzle of hy Homo sapiens spread over the Earth is the first great questio n in our history the problem of wh) fo ragers became farmers is th e second

PROBLEMS AND PARALLELS 1 When does the story of humankind begm Is it possible to 5 Which stresses cou ld have caused early peoples to d iVide and

defme what it means to be huma n What characteristiCS do f ight eac h other Wh ich theories have been put forward for how we share with chimpanzees and other apes war started

2 How do Neandert hals and Homo floresiensis cha llenge 6 How did ma le domination come to be normal in human soc ishycommonly held definitions of Homo sapiens eties What impact did sexual econom ic specialiZa t ion have on

early SOC iet ies3 Why d id Homo sapiens migrate out of Afr ica How did migrashytion change peoples relationships with each other and wi th 7 Why was the Ice Age a time of affl uence What role did shamans thelf environment play in Ice-Age soc iety What insights Into Ice-Age societies ca n

we glean from its art and the rema ins of anc ient feasts4 What were the factors behind the rapid population growth of Homo sapiens 8 How did some SOCieties perpetuate the fOlaging li fe after the

Ice Age How has the foraging life persisted today

bull bullbull

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE A Case in Point Aboriginal Australians Preagricultural Settlements The Disadvantages of Fa rming

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS Herders Environments Tillers Environments

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE Europe Africa Asia The Pac ific Islands The Americas

SO WHY DID FARMING START Population Pressure The Outcome of Abundance The Power of Politics Cu lt Agriculture Climatic Instability Agriculture by Accident Production As an Outgrowth of Procurement

IN ERSP CT1VEmiddot Saskinamp Stability

n August 1770 the Bri tish navigator Captain James Cook reached the north

coast of Australia on the first of his spectacular voyages of exploration that

charted the lands and limits of the Pacific Ocean Ncar Cape York hc ___-~

paused at an island he named Possession Island For although his

stated purpose was scientific he was also an officer of the Royal Navy

with orders to extend the British Empire To Cooks mind the island

though inhabIted was wa iting to be grabbed The natives could not be

said to possess it because they had left no marks of possession on its soil

A wealth of plants that they could hae domesticated-fruits proper IQr

the support of mann-was growing wild Yet Cook wrote the people know nothshy

ing of cultivation It seems strange He was puzzling over one of the most pershy

plexing problems of history- the- diffe rence between forage rs and farmers food

procurers and food producers

Food is the most precious of resources Nothing Ill happen without it To most people in most societies for most of the time food is and always has been the most important thing in the world Change~ in how we get food and whether we get it arc among histors big changes During the global warming that fo ll owed the Ice Age hUSbandry-breeding animals and cultivating crops-began to replace hunting and gathering and introduced the biggest cha nge of all

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE

Husbandry happened in two distinct ways involving different tpes of environshyments and different levels of environmental intervention In some environments people could exploi t creatures that had a he rd instinct by managing the herds rather than by hunting them Breeding enhanced qualities that evolution did not necessa rily favor such as docility size and yield of meat m il k eggs and fat On the negative side close contact between humans and animals often allowed disease-bearing organisms to thrive th reatening human lives and health and sometimes unleashing plagues Otherwi se however animal husbHlIdry barely affectcd the environment Herds on the whole kept to their traditional patterns of migration and people continued to accompany them-driving the beasts now rather than follOving them Domest icated animals remained recognizably the hei rs of their wild ancestors and the landscapes through which they traveled did not change much except that the herds feeding and manure probably

32 I CHAPTER 2

encouraged the grasses they ate to flourish at the expense of othe r plant species

In other environments however plant husbandry involved massive human intervention In the long run

WHY ARE settled foragers better off than farmers tillage of the soil changed the world mo re than any previshyous innovation by Homo sapiens From postglacial m ud W HAT K INDS of environments are suited to herding people coaxed what we now call civilization-a way of

WHAT KINDS of environments were suited to early agricu lture life based on rad ically modifying the environment Inshy

W H ERE D ID farm ing start and what were t he fi rst crops stead of merely t rying to manage the landscape nature

GIVEN THE d isadvantages why did people iarm provided farmers recarved it with fields and boundaries

The rice fields of Bali in IndoneSia are among the most proo uct ive in the world usrng variet ies of rice and techniques for farming it thal are about 1000 years old Irrigation channels maintained and administered by farmers cooperatives distrrbute water everl ly among the terraces Though oflgirla l ly a lowlarld crop fa voring swampy conditions rice adapts perfec tly ro upland enVIronments and to terrace farmrng

di tches and irrigation ca nals They stamped the land with a new look a geometrical order Agric ul ture enabled humans to see the world in a new way-to imagine that magic and science had the power to change nature Such power in turn changed peoples sense of where they fit into the panorama of life on Earth Now they could become lords or in more modest moments or cultures stewards of creation

Together farm ing and herding revolutionized humans place in their ecosysshyterm Instead of merely dependi ng on other life forms to sustain us we forged a new relationship of interdependence with th ose species we eat We rely on them for food they rely on us for th eir reproduction Domesticated animals would not exist without humans Husbandr was the firs t human challenge to evolution Instead of evolvi ng species through natural selection) fa rming and herding proceed by what might be called unnatural selection-sorting and selecting by human hands for human needs according to human agendas In other words e breed livestock and cultivate plants

Herding and tilling also changed human societies By feeding people on a vastshyly greater scale agricu lture allowed societies to get hugely bigger than ever before We can only guess at the absolute figures but in areas where farming has replaced foraging in modern ti mes population has increased fifty- or even a hundredfol d Larger populations demanded new fo rms of cont rol of labor and food distribu shytion which Il1 turn nurtured strong states and powerful elites Society became more volatile and apparently less stable

In almost every case for reasons we still do not understand when people begin to practice agriculture th e pace of change quickens immeasurably and cu shymulat ively States an d civilizations do not seem to last for long Soc ieties that we think of as being most evo lved turn out to be least fitted for survival Compared with the relat ive stability of forager communities soci eties that depend on agr ishyculture are prone to lurch and coll apse History becomes a path picked amon g their ru ins

Still for Captain Cook and for most people who haye thought about it ever since it was indeed strange that people who had the opportunity to practice agrishyculture should not take advantage of it The advantages of agri culture seem so ob shyvious The farmer can select the best specimens of edible crops and creatures collect th em in the most co nvenient places and pastures crossbreed the livestock and hybridize the plants to improve size yi eld or flavo r By these methods sm all farming socie ties grow into comm unities and build up large populations Usually they go on to create ci ties and develop ever more complex technologies To Cook and his contemporaries in Europe who believed that progress was inevitable and that the same kind of changes are bound to happen everywhere peoples who dung to foraging seemed baffling

Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 33

A Case in Point Aborigina l Australians

Cook and others at the time saw only two explanations for why foragers sllch as the aborigines (AB-eh-rihj- ih-neez) in Australia would reject agriculture They were either stupid o r subhuman Indeed early European painters in Aust ralia depicted aborigines as apelike creatures grimaci ng oddl) and crawling in trees The colo nists s impl y ignored the nati es o r when they got in the way often hunted them downshyas they would beasts But not on ly did tbe native Aust ralians reject agriculture in some areas th ey appeared [0 shun every technical cO llvenience On the island o f Tasman ia in the extreme south of Australia where the natives became extinct soon after European settlement began they seemed to have forgotten every art of their ancestors bows boats even how to kindle fi rc In Arnhem Land in the extreme north they used boomerangs to make musi c but no longer as weapons for th e hunt Progress which the European discoverers of Australia believed in fervently seemed to have gone into reverse Australia was not only on the exact opposite side of the world from England it was a topsy-turvy place where everythi ng was upside down

We can hOever be certain that if aborigines rejected agriculture o r other practices Europeans considered progressive it must have been for good reasons TIle aborigines did not lack the knowledge necessary to switch from fo raging to farming had they so wished When they gathered wild yams or the root known as

James COO K from Captain Cooks Journal During his First Voyage Round the World

nardoo they ensured that enough of the plant remained in the ground to grow back In many regions too they used fire to control the grazi ng grounds of kangaroos and concentrate Ihem for hunting a common technique among herders to manage pasture and among tillers to renew the soil Along the Murray and Darling Rivers aborigines even watered and weeded wild cro ps and policed their boundaries against human and animal pred ators (sec Map 20

The abo rigi nal Australians could also have systematically planted and irrigated crops farmed the grubs they liked to eat pen ned kangashyroos and even tried to domestica te them (Kangaroos are can tankerous creatures but people do make pets o f them Breeding selected speci shymen s would probably produce a domestic strain in a few generations ) In the far no rth of Australia aboriginal communities traded with the farming cultures of New Guinea So even if they hadnt developed agrishyculture on th eir own they could have lea rned it fro m o utsi ders If the aborigines did not farm it must have been because they did not want to In short they were doing well without it Simil ar cases all over the world support this conclusion Where wild foods are abundant there is no in shycentive to do mesticate them Of course people o ften adopt p ractices that d o them no good We can concede this general principle but case by case we stiJI han t ( 0 know why

Preagricultura l Settlements

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Under some conditions people can settle in one place without the trouble of farmshying Archaeological evidence in the region we now ca ll the Middle East shows this After the Ice Age ended about 15000 lJCE a frontier zone between forest and grassland stretched across the eastern sho re of the Mediterranean and what are now Iran eastern Turkey and Iraq (see Map 22) The forests were full of acorns pistachios and almonds which gatherers ground into flour and paste The grassshylands bred vast quantjties of wild grass with edible seeds These foods could all he

34 I C H A P TER 2

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warehoused between harvests and had the additional advantage of maturing at di fferent times Dense herds of gazelle in the gra sslands prov ided more nutrition for hunters to bring home Food was so plentiful that foragers did not have to move around much to fi nd it

By abou t 14000 to 15000 years ago permanent sen lements a rose th roughout the region clusters of dwelli ngs with stone wa lls or those made of wood on stone foundations or cue from soft stone and roofed with reeds The foragers who lived in th ese sedentary communities apparently kept to themselves Villages had dis shytinctive iden tit ies and habits wh ich almost amounted to badges of identity Some favored gazelle toe bones for jewelry some preferred fox teeth and partridge legs These people married within their own communities (a practi ce known as en shydogamy) judging from th e evidence of inherited physical characteristics For ex shyample in some villages people were retatimiddotely short while in others they had d istinctive dental patterns These settlers cut what look like plans of their fields on limestone slabs which suggests that they were terri torial- that they had a sense of possession that Captain Cook would have recognized

Out of the Mud Far mIng and Herding A fter tne Ice Age 35

In sum the lives of preagricultural settlers were so much like the lives of the early fa rmers who succeeded them that when anhaeologists first found the forshyagers villages in the 1930s they assumed the inhabitants were farmers Bue the setshylied foragers were 3ctuaHy better off than farmers Their rema ins on the whole show better health and nourishme nt than the fa rming peoples who followed later in the sa me region A diet rich in seeds and nuts had ground down their teeth but- unl ike the farmers-they have none of the streaked tooth -enamel common among people who suffer from food shortages

Simi la r evidence of preagricultural settlements exists in other places Take a few conspicuous examples The Jomon (JOHM-mehn ) people of central Honshu Island in Japan hved in permanent vi llages 13000 years ago feeding themselves by fishing il nd gathering acorns and chestnuts They made pots fo r display in elaboshyrate shapes modeled on flames and serpents an d lacquered them with tree sap Their potters were in a sense magicians transforming clay into objects of prestige and ritua l In the Egyp tim Sahara lit Nabta Playa about forty plant species inclu shyding sorghum a type of cereal grass grew alongside hearths and pit oven~ evi shydence of settled life from about 10000 years ago In other pa rts of (en tral Sahara in the same period that had plenty of water and a cookr climate than now foragers fou nd sorghum and millet another cereal grass At Gobekli Tepe (goh- BEHK-lee TEH-pchl a hilltop site in so utheast Turkey co ntemporaries who lived mainly by gathering wild wheat he ed seven -ton pillars from li mestone They reerected them in a sunken chamber in their village and decorated them with carvings of snakes boar gazelles cra nes and symbols that look suspiciously like writing

What was life li ke in these earliest settl ements Small permanent houses sugshygest that nuclear families-parents and children-predominated though so me sites clearty have communal work areas for grinding seeds and nuts As for who did the work the most stunn ing find ing of recent archaeology in the Middle East sugshygests that work was probably shared behleen the sexes The way skeletons are musshycled suggests th at women did slightly more kneeling (and therefore slightly more gr inding) than men and men did more throwing (and therefore more hunting) than women But both sexes did both activit ies Male and female bodies began to reconverge after a long period during which they bad evolved to look differently As food product ion replaced hunting and gathering wa r and child rearing became the main sex-specific jobs in society The convergence between th e physical feashytures of men and women seems still to be in progress today Indeed it seems to be accelerating as men and women share more and morc tasks and the need for heavshyily muscled or big framed bod ies di minishes along wi th physica ll y demanding jobs in much of the world

The Disadvantages of Farming

Prernrming comm unities do not simply progress to fann ing If foraging produces abundance and sec urity it does not necessarily follow that farming can deliver more of the same The consequences of adopting agriculture are by no means all positive In the early stages of moving from foraging to fa rm ing the food supply actually becomes less reliable because people depend on a relatively small range of fa rmed foods or even on a si ngle species As a result a community becomes vulnerable to ecological disasters Famine becomes more likely as diet narrows Moreover when people have 0 plant and grow food as weDas gather it they have to use up more energy to get the sa me amount of nourishment (Although domesmiddot ticated food s once harvested tend to be easier to process for eating) The need to

lomon pottery Ten thousand years ago the Jomon potters of Japan produced the worlds earliest knOvn earthenware vessels Other pottel)-makmg peoples also practled farm ing but the Jomon people were sedentary foragers--l lvlng in permamiddot nent or long-term settlements but managing the environment in mInimal ways and relyIng on abunshydant wild foods including nuts seeds acorns some 70 marine animal Spec ies and land mamshymals---eatmg no just boar deer and hare but also wolves Wildcats f lYing squIrrel s and mon keys

Overuse deforms bones ArchaeolO8) can reconmiddot struc t how ancient peop le b(gthaved by measuring the deformities In their skeletons The woman hose toe th is was lived In a commuMy of eady sedentary foragers In what is now Syria She evIshydently spent much of her tIme kneeling presumshyably to grlFld the acorns and kernels of Wild wheat on whIch her people re lied for food

36 I C H A P T ER 2

Early Forager Settlements (All dales are approximate)

15000 yea rs ago 14000-15000

yea rs ago 13000 years ago 10000 years ago

l

World emerges from the Ice Age Permanent settlements appear In Middle East

Honshu Island Japan

Nabta Playa Egypt GObekh Tepe Turkey

organize labor encourages inequalities and explo itation Concentrashytions of domesticated animals spread disease such as smallpox measles rubella ch icken pox influenza and tuberculosis

So the problem is really the opposite of what Cook supposed It is fanners behavior not fo ragers that is strange Husba nd ry is not a step along a march of improvement because in some ways it makes life worse No one has PU l the problem better than the histo rian of agronomy Jack L Harlan

people who do not farm do about eveq1hing that farmers do but they do lot work as hard They understand thllifc cycles of plants kno the seashysons of the year and when and where the natural plant food resources can he

Jack Harlan from Crops and Man

Chukchi herder The choice between huntmg and herding otten depends on local and historical Clrmiddot cumstances Remdeermiddotherding is an anCient pracmiddot tlce In muc h of northern Euragtla whereas irl North America the can bou have remained wild In e~treme norlheast Asia close to America the Chukchi long resisted the example of neighboring peo ple and preferred hunting 10 herding In the last two or Illree cenlurles however they have adopted the herdsman s vocat ion shown here

hareswd in great abundance with the least eff() rt There is evidence that thl diet of g-athshyering peoples was better than that of cultivators that slarvation was rare that there was a lower incidence of chronic disease and not nearly so many cavities in their teeth

The question must be raised Whr furm Vhy work harder for food less nut rishytious md a supply more capricious Why invite famine plague ~poundtilcnce and crowded living conditions 1

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

Part of what is surprising about agriculture is that it is so common Not only has almost th e entire human world adopted 1t many peoples ca me to it indepenshydently of one anot her Scholars used to su ppose that it was so extraordinary it must have begun in some particular spo t and that diffusion spread it from there- carried by migrants or conquerors or transmitted by t rade o r im itated The last 40 years of research have shown on the contrary that the transition to

food product io n happened over and over agai n in a range of regions and a variety of environments with d ifferen t foodstuffs and di fferent techn iques The most obv ious co ntrast in environ ments is betwee n herders and tillers Herd ing develops where plan ts a re tOO spa rse or indigestible to sustain human life but a nim als can convert these pla nts into meat-an energy SO UTee tha t people can access by eating th e anim als Tilling deshyvelops where th e soil is suitable or enough ecologica l di shyversity ex ists to susta in plant husbandry o r mi xed farming of plants and animals

Herders Environments

[n three regions of the Earth-tundra the evergreen foresls of no rthern Eurasia and great grasslands- il is not possible to grow enough humanly d igest ible plant foods to keep large numbers of people alive [n the

tund ra and evergreen forests average temperatures arc too low the growing sea shyson too short the surface soil too vulnerable to frost and the subso il in some areas too froze n In these environments thert~ are only two options People can remain foragers- an d primari ly hu nters seeking the fa t-ri ch species rypical of stich zones The [nu it in the North American Arctic for example hunt seal and walrus Or people can become herders like the Sami and Samoyeds of north ern Europe and northwest Asia who live off rei ndeer

Out of the Mud Farming and H erding After the Ice Age I 37

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 FORAGERS AND FARMERS COMPARED

FORAGERS FARMERS

Food procurers Food producers

hUn and gather husbandry (breed animals cultivate crops)

Fit into nature Chanampe nature

little environmental impact herders some environmental impact tillers massive environment impact

Manaampethe landscape Nature remade and reimagined

Dependence on wild animals and plants Interdependence between humans plants and animals

animals and plants exploited and domeslicated

Stable food supply Unstable food supply

nomadic fOfltlgcrs move in response 10 environmental small range of farmed foods increases vulnerability change sedentary fo ragers vulnerable to changes of climate to ecological disasters

Stable popUlation

relatively little labor needed population COlltrol avalable mainly by managed lactatioll

Expandinamp population

breeding livestock and cultivating plants leads to increased food supply increased population concentrations of domesticated animals spread disease

Stable society

kinship and age fi x ind ividuals place in sodery sexes usually share labor by spedalidng in difterent economic tasks

Radically changed unstable society

need to control labor and food distribution leads to social inequalititS work shared between the sexes increased reliance on female labor ~trong nates dewlop with powerful elites complex technologies

Similarly the soils of the world s vast grassla nds- known as prairie in North America pampa in South America steppe in Eurasia and the Sahel (sah-HEHL) in Africa- have for most of history been unfavorable for tillage (sce Map 23) The sad is mostly too difficu lt to turn without a steel plow Except for patches of excepshytionally favorable soil herding has been the only possible fo rm of husbandry in these areas The peoples of the Eurasian and Africa n grasslands were probably herdi ng by about 5000 acE Native American grassland dwellers of the New World on the othe r hand retained a foraging way of life because available species-bison various types of antelope-were (or the lIlost part more abun shydant for the hunt and less suitable fo r herding

For those who choose it herding has three special consequences First it imposshyes a mobile way of life The proportion of the population ho follow the herdsshyand in som e cases it is the enri re popu lation-cannot seuJe into permanent

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38 I CHAP TER 2

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villages Herder peoples are not ul1iLling or unable to build permanently or on a large sca le The Scythians for instance people of the -estern Asian steppe who first domesticated the horse and invented th e wheel and axle about 6000 to 7OCX years ago built impressive stone structures Bul these wefe underground tombs dwellings fo r the dead while the living inhabited temporary camps Some herding societies in Asia and Africa have become rich enough to fou nd ci ties fo r elites OT for specialists working outside of food production such as craftsmen or miners Indeed as we shall see (Chap ter 13) in the thirteenth century CF a city of thi s type Karakorum in Mongolia was one of the most admired cities in the world On the whole howshyever herding does no t favo r the development of cities o r the kind of culture that cities nourish such as monumental buildings large-scale inst itutions fo r education and the arts and ind ustrial technology

Second since herde rs breed from animal s that naturally share their grassland habitats thei r herds consist of such creatures as cattl e sheep horses goats-milkshyyielding stock To get the fu ll benefit fro m their auimals herdin g peoples have to eat dai ry products To modern milk-fed Americans this may sound perfeclly no rshyma l But it required a modification of human evolution Most people in most part s of the world do not natural1 ) produce lactase the substance that enables them to d igest milk after infancy They respond to dairy products wit h distaste or even intol erance The Masai of Kenya in East Africa get 80 percent of their energy

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

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intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

24 1 CHAP T E R 1

(

The Peopling of the New World

A RCTI C O CEAN ~

~-J -

~ ~~ Greenland~ lt ampCgtEI~tk

-r-~ ~

PA CIFIC

ATL ANTIC

o C E A N

13000-8000 BC o C E A N

o exten t of ke over 20000 yur~ ~go shy

bull extent of ice cover 2000 yea ago

tundra

tundra and conife rous forests

bull

mm native peoples

pol~i bJe 1 1lt1 migriltion route

poSl ble ltoa~a l mlgratiOlU

early habitation ~Ite desulbed on pilge 2S

bull othe r eilrly habitation sites

~ forager settle ment desc ribed on pages 26-27

+ rrrIIRGfl7 mooern-day state

CHILE mooernmiddotd~y country

ancie nt coast lines

anc ie nt lake

Amazon Ba s i ii

50 U TH AMERICA

10000 Ke co II lu mogtI lttei 000 0 OOOO _rn~

liooo bull 000

I L III I I

Beagle middot Channel

11000 1 oft osoo OLL Mo 1000 Matlt -V wlpO

ny Il

-~

Asia where the Bering Strai t now flows to cilter a paradi se where no human hunter h ad ever trod before Thc abundance wa~ so great and the animals so unshywary that the invaders ate enormously and multiplied greatly The) spread rapi dly over the hemisphere hUllting th e great gam e to exti nction as they went Th e story 3ppealcd to an unsophisticated fo rm of US paTriot ism The Clov is people as these hunters were dubbed after an ea rly archaeological site in New Mexico seemed to resemb le modern American pioneers They exhibited quick-fire locomotion husshytl e and bustle technical prowess big appetit es irrepress ible strength enormous cultural reach and a talent for reforging th e environment

By comparison the truth about the peopling of the hemisphere is d isappo intingshyly undramatic T hese first great American superheroes-like most of their successhysors-did not really exist Although archeologists have excavated too few sites for a co mplete and reliable picture to emerge a new theory dominates We have evidence of early human settlement scanered from the Yukon to Uruguay and from near th e Bering Strait to the edge of the Beagle Channel- that is from the waterway that dishyvides North Am erica and Asia to the sou thern limjts of the South American mainshyland This evide nce is so widespread over so lo ng a period in so m any diffe rent geological layers and with such avast range of cultural diversity th at one conclusion is inescapable---ltolonists came at di fferent times br inging different cultures with them

No generally accepted evidence dates any inhabited sites iT) the American hem ishysphere earlier than abo ut 13000 BCE (see Map 13) T he first arrivals came du ring a time when glaciers covered much of North Am erica They stuck dose to the cold where th e game was fattest They followed corridors benleen walls of icc or alon g narrow shores away fro m glaciers Other arrivals came by sea and continued to come afrer the land bridge laS submerged Arou nd 10000 )ears ago a catastrop hic cluster ofexti nctio ns wiped o ut the manuno th mastodon ho rse gian t sloth sabershytoothed tiger and at least thirty-five other large species in the Americas New hunt shying techniques and perhaps new hunting peoples were probably partly responsible But we can only explain the even ts in the context of vast climatic changes that afshyfec ted habitats and the whole ecology on which these an imals depended

Many supposedJy early sites of human habitation have proved to be delusions of overenthusiastic archaeologists-false or at best unconvi ncing A few sites however offer strong evidence of the antiquity and range of settlemen t Most are in the eastern Uni led States- a long way from Asia It must have taken a lon g time for these peoplc to get there from the vicinity of th e modern Bering Strait [n the mid-1970s 15000shyyear-old baskcrwork and tools made with fine flints emerged fro m deep under the d isshycarded beer cans that topped a d ig at Meadowcroft on the Ohio River near the border of Pennsylvania and West Virginia Archaeologists are investigating similar sites beshytvmiddoteen the Ohio and Sava nnah Rivers Later in the 19705 excavations at Monte Verde (MON-teh VER-deh) in southern Chile revealed a twen ty-foot long wooden hideshycovered dwelling preserved in a peat bog fo r about 12500 years Nearby wCrt a big mastodon-butchery and a space devoted to making tools The inhabitants bro ught salt and seaweed from the coast forty miles away and medicinal herbs from mounshytains equally fa r in the opposite direction Halfmiddotchewed lum ps of seaweed show the eaters dental bites a boys footprints survive in the clay lining of a pit Tf Meadowcroft is a long way from the colonizers entry po illt n ear the Bering Strait southern Chile is a world away again-almosl as far as you can get in the Western Hemisphere How lo ng would it have taken the senlers of MOnle Verde to cross the hemisphere over vast distances and th rough many difte rent kinds of environments each dem anding new forms of adaptl1ian Most specialists think it must have taken thousands of years The quest ion of the date of the firs t peopling of the New Vorld therefore remains open

Out of the Ice Peop ling the Earth I 25

l Clovis Points

Monte Verde About 12000 years ago a younil permiddot son trod in fresh clay thai lined a hearth in Monte Verde Chile Peat sealed and preserved Ihe footmiddot pnnt to be rediscovered by archaeologiSts 111 the 1970s EllcavaMns at Monle Verde revealed II VIImiddot tage of mammoth hunters so old that it made previshyous theories about when people arflved in the Americas Questionable or even untenable

26 I C HA PTER 1

SURVIVAL OF THE FORAGERS M the ice cap retreated and the great herds shifted with it many human communishyties opted to follow them Archeology has unearthed traces of their routes Along fhe way in what is now northern Germa ny about 12000 years ago people sacrificed reindeer by deliberately weighting them with stones sewn into their stomachs and drowning them in a lake About 1000 years later hunters as far north as Yorkshire in England who left a weU-preserved camp at Starr Carr found an elwironmem as abundant as the cave artistss had been Not only was it fill ed with tundramiddotloving species such as red deer elk and aurochs (OW- roks)-huge shaggy wi ld catlleshybut also with wild boar in surroundings that were becoming patchily wooded

At Skateholm in Sweden about 8000 years ago hunters founded the largest known settlement of the era [t was a winter camp in an area where the eighty-seven different animal species roamed that the inhabitants ate trapping river-fi sh netting sea-birds harpooning seals and dolphin sticking pigs and driving deer into pits or pondlt In summer the people must have moved farther north They lie today in groves decorated with beads and ocll1e and filted with the spoils of their careers including antlers and boars tusks Their dogs are buried nearby These burly wolflike companshyions are sometimes interred with more signs of honor than humans were given Dogs were full members of societies where hunting prowess and skill in war determined stashytus Many of the human dead bear wounds from man-made weapons Here too is evshyidence of sexual specialization Women have only a third as many wounds as the men

TIle most persistentJy faithful followe rs of the ice were the Inuit (IN-yoo-it) of North America About 4000 )ears ago they invented the blubber-filled soapstone lamp Now they couJd follow big game beond the tundra and into the darkness of an arctic winter They could track the musk ox to the shore of the ocean and the caribou on its winter migrations when its fur is th ickest and its fat most plentiful This way of life persisted until the late twentieth century although the people who first practiced it have disappeared Migrants from the Arctic Ocean replaced them 1000 )ears ago

Climate change trapped other foraging peoples in envi ronments where they had to develop new ways of life Some of these environments offered new kinds of abundance Here were broad -leaved forests rich in acorns (which make nut ritious food for any humans who have enough time to fine-gr ind them)) and lakes and rivers funof aquatic life New World prairies held apparently inexha usti ble stocks of bison (though th e largest bison species was rapidly hunted to extinction) Beshytween the unstable per iods of climate change around 12000 years ago foragers even colonized dense tropical forests in southeast Asia and in th e New World at Pedra Pintada in Brazil where the Amazon River now flows This is a region where foragers today have to struggle to find foods they can di gest but it seems to have been more environmentally diverse toward the end of the Ice Age

Some societies perpetuated their foraging life in hot arid deserts as different from the best hunting grounds of the ree Age as it is possible to imagine This reshyqu ired two forms of adaptation First the thinly dispersed populations had to create collaborative networks Such interdependence explains why peoples who live in ecoshylogically shaky homelands often require people to marry outside the group (a pracshytice lolOwn as exogamy) and why they regard hospitality to strangers as a sacred obligation Second poor environments demanded that in habitants develop what we might caU orally tra nsmi tted science For a ni with accurate and extensive knowlshyedge of their habitat can people survive in harsh environments

The San or Bushmen of southern Africas Kalahari Desert illustrate the diffi shyculties and solutions Their domain has shrunk in the last fe w centuries as Bantu farmers Khoi herdsmen and white invaders have overrun much of their fonner

Out of t he Ice P eopling t he Eartn I 27

territo ry But their heart1and was already dr Yll the time of tne Sans firs t occupancy about 14000 years ago Tne increased rainfall that usually followed the retreaT of tbe icc hardly fell nere There are undergro und rivers but few permanent water holes The people watch fo r rare signs of rain and hurry to

gather the vegetation that accompa nies it The scrubland pla nt foods induding wa ter-bearing tubers and a kind of cact us su pply 30 percent of tnei r sustenance The rest comes from game which grazes on lough desert shrubs that humans can shynot digest

Laurens van der Post a South African adventurer who has written about the Bushmen once accompanied a band of San hunters in search of their favorite food eland a type of anteshylope O ne morning just after sunrise they found the tracks of a herd By three in the afternoon after nonstop pursuit at a tro t Bushmen Though now obliged to adopt a mixed th ey came on the herd and took aim To kill large game is almosl impossible with a oconomy su pported in part by farming and donamiddot

tions of food the San or Bushmen of southernBushmans bow He wounds the beast with a poisoned barb and fo llows it until it Africa have been among the most conservative of

drops from exhaustion and the effects of the drug before milking the kill On Ibis the worlds peoples They maintained their foragshyoCCllsion the hunters rail for twelve miles without stopping and the final mile was ing way 01 li fe essentially unchanged for millen shy

nla---desplte neighbors attempts to e~lermU1alean all-out sprint The next time they made contact with the herd one bull was seen them ThiS record of survival contrasts with the to be tiring It still took another fu ll hou r of pursuit until he fell Then wit hout rapid turnover of more ambitiOUS Civilizat ions that

pause or break for rest they were fresh enough at the end to plunge straight 3vay rad ically modify their en~lronments usually With

into the formidable task of skinning and cuning up the heavy animal l Bushm en disastrous results

who persist with thi s demanding way of life to this day are obviously pursui ng a commitment that has grown out of generations of invested emoti on As difficul t as it may be for us to understand the San would find it heart-wrenching to change a way of life for the mere sake of efficiency convenience or material ga in

In one sense the worlds food supply st ill depends o n fo raging The amount of food from hunti ng actually increased in the twentieth cen tury which may go down in history not only as the last age of hunring but as the greatest World-over today we practice a highly specialized mechanized and unu sual form of huntingshydeep-sea trawling Fish farming is likely to replace it in the future but in any case deep-sea fishing is a historical th rowback

IN PERSPECTIVE After the Ice

In the post~ke-Age world little by littl e ove r thousa nds of years rn ost societies aban doned for shy CHRONOLOGY aging and adopted fa rming or herding as the way (A N dates are apPfoximltlte-l

to get their food Among peoples who still li ve Over 3 million years ago Lucyd ose to the ice cap the Inuit remain faithfu l to 2-1 million years ago Homo erectus migrates from East Afnca 10 Afnea

their hunting tradition in North America Mos t of and EuraSia

their Old World counterparts however have long 100000 years ago Homo sapiens migrates out of Afnca

abandoned it In Eu rasia though some hunting 67000 years ago Homo sapiens in ASia 50000 years ago Homo sapiens colonizes Australia and New Guineacultures still cling to the old ways at th e eas tern

Homo sapiens reaches Europe end of Siberia the peoples on th e western Arctic 30000 years ago last Neanderthals vanishrim-the Sami (or Lapplanders) of Sca ndinavia

20000- World emerges from the Ice Age and their neighbors the Kardia Samoyeds and 15000 iICE Nenets-adopted re indee r herding over a th oushy 20000 BC pound Invent ion of the bow and arrow sand years ago The Ice- Age way oflife if not over 13000 BCpound Homo sapiens in the Americas is drawing to a close Hunting is now th ought of

28 I CHAP TE R 1

as a pri mitive way to get food long abandoned excep t as an aristoc ratic indulmiddot gellee in som e co untries or as a supposedJy manly sport in others

The disappearance of fo raging lifeways seems a rema rkable turn around for a predatorspecies such as Homo sapiells There was a time before hun ting when our ancestors were scavenge rs but for hundreds of thousands perhaps millions of years foraging was reliable and reward ing It fed people through every change of climate Its practitioners spread over th e world and adapted successfully to every kind of habitat Homo sapiens dominated every ecos)stem they became part of and competed successfully with most other species They achieved startling in shycreases in their numbers which we struggle to e(plain They founded more varied societ ies than any other species (though the differences among these societies were slight compared to later periods) They had art-rich cultures with traditions of learning and symbolic systems to record information They had their own so shycial elites polit ical customs) ambitious magic and practical methods to exploit their environ ment

Our next task is to ask why after the achievements recounted in this chapter did people abandon the foragi ng li fe Renouncing the hunt and pursuing new ways of life after the Ice Age are among the most far- reaching and mysterious transforshymations of the human past If the puzzle of hy Homo sapiens spread over the Earth is the first great questio n in our history the problem of wh) fo ragers became farmers is th e second

PROBLEMS AND PARALLELS 1 When does the story of humankind begm Is it possible to 5 Which stresses cou ld have caused early peoples to d iVide and

defme what it means to be huma n What characteristiCS do f ight eac h other Wh ich theories have been put forward for how we share with chimpanzees and other apes war started

2 How do Neandert hals and Homo floresiensis cha llenge 6 How did ma le domination come to be normal in human soc ishycommonly held definitions of Homo sapiens eties What impact did sexual econom ic specialiZa t ion have on

early SOC iet ies3 Why d id Homo sapiens migrate out of Afr ica How did migrashytion change peoples relationships with each other and wi th 7 Why was the Ice Age a time of affl uence What role did shamans thelf environment play in Ice-Age soc iety What insights Into Ice-Age societies ca n

we glean from its art and the rema ins of anc ient feasts4 What were the factors behind the rapid population growth of Homo sapiens 8 How did some SOCieties perpetuate the fOlaging li fe after the

Ice Age How has the foraging life persisted today

bull bullbull

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE A Case in Point Aboriginal Australians Preagricultural Settlements The Disadvantages of Fa rming

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS Herders Environments Tillers Environments

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE Europe Africa Asia The Pac ific Islands The Americas

SO WHY DID FARMING START Population Pressure The Outcome of Abundance The Power of Politics Cu lt Agriculture Climatic Instability Agriculture by Accident Production As an Outgrowth of Procurement

IN ERSP CT1VEmiddot Saskinamp Stability

n August 1770 the Bri tish navigator Captain James Cook reached the north

coast of Australia on the first of his spectacular voyages of exploration that

charted the lands and limits of the Pacific Ocean Ncar Cape York hc ___-~

paused at an island he named Possession Island For although his

stated purpose was scientific he was also an officer of the Royal Navy

with orders to extend the British Empire To Cooks mind the island

though inhabIted was wa iting to be grabbed The natives could not be

said to possess it because they had left no marks of possession on its soil

A wealth of plants that they could hae domesticated-fruits proper IQr

the support of mann-was growing wild Yet Cook wrote the people know nothshy

ing of cultivation It seems strange He was puzzling over one of the most pershy

plexing problems of history- the- diffe rence between forage rs and farmers food

procurers and food producers

Food is the most precious of resources Nothing Ill happen without it To most people in most societies for most of the time food is and always has been the most important thing in the world Change~ in how we get food and whether we get it arc among histors big changes During the global warming that fo ll owed the Ice Age hUSbandry-breeding animals and cultivating crops-began to replace hunting and gathering and introduced the biggest cha nge of all

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE

Husbandry happened in two distinct ways involving different tpes of environshyments and different levels of environmental intervention In some environments people could exploi t creatures that had a he rd instinct by managing the herds rather than by hunting them Breeding enhanced qualities that evolution did not necessa rily favor such as docility size and yield of meat m il k eggs and fat On the negative side close contact between humans and animals often allowed disease-bearing organisms to thrive th reatening human lives and health and sometimes unleashing plagues Otherwi se however animal husbHlIdry barely affectcd the environment Herds on the whole kept to their traditional patterns of migration and people continued to accompany them-driving the beasts now rather than follOving them Domest icated animals remained recognizably the hei rs of their wild ancestors and the landscapes through which they traveled did not change much except that the herds feeding and manure probably

32 I CHAPTER 2

encouraged the grasses they ate to flourish at the expense of othe r plant species

In other environments however plant husbandry involved massive human intervention In the long run

WHY ARE settled foragers better off than farmers tillage of the soil changed the world mo re than any previshyous innovation by Homo sapiens From postglacial m ud W HAT K INDS of environments are suited to herding people coaxed what we now call civilization-a way of

WHAT KINDS of environments were suited to early agricu lture life based on rad ically modifying the environment Inshy

W H ERE D ID farm ing start and what were t he fi rst crops stead of merely t rying to manage the landscape nature

GIVEN THE d isadvantages why did people iarm provided farmers recarved it with fields and boundaries

The rice fields of Bali in IndoneSia are among the most proo uct ive in the world usrng variet ies of rice and techniques for farming it thal are about 1000 years old Irrigation channels maintained and administered by farmers cooperatives distrrbute water everl ly among the terraces Though oflgirla l ly a lowlarld crop fa voring swampy conditions rice adapts perfec tly ro upland enVIronments and to terrace farmrng

di tches and irrigation ca nals They stamped the land with a new look a geometrical order Agric ul ture enabled humans to see the world in a new way-to imagine that magic and science had the power to change nature Such power in turn changed peoples sense of where they fit into the panorama of life on Earth Now they could become lords or in more modest moments or cultures stewards of creation

Together farm ing and herding revolutionized humans place in their ecosysshyterm Instead of merely dependi ng on other life forms to sustain us we forged a new relationship of interdependence with th ose species we eat We rely on them for food they rely on us for th eir reproduction Domesticated animals would not exist without humans Husbandr was the firs t human challenge to evolution Instead of evolvi ng species through natural selection) fa rming and herding proceed by what might be called unnatural selection-sorting and selecting by human hands for human needs according to human agendas In other words e breed livestock and cultivate plants

Herding and tilling also changed human societies By feeding people on a vastshyly greater scale agricu lture allowed societies to get hugely bigger than ever before We can only guess at the absolute figures but in areas where farming has replaced foraging in modern ti mes population has increased fifty- or even a hundredfol d Larger populations demanded new fo rms of cont rol of labor and food distribu shytion which Il1 turn nurtured strong states and powerful elites Society became more volatile and apparently less stable

In almost every case for reasons we still do not understand when people begin to practice agriculture th e pace of change quickens immeasurably and cu shymulat ively States an d civilizations do not seem to last for long Soc ieties that we think of as being most evo lved turn out to be least fitted for survival Compared with the relat ive stability of forager communities soci eties that depend on agr ishyculture are prone to lurch and coll apse History becomes a path picked amon g their ru ins

Still for Captain Cook and for most people who haye thought about it ever since it was indeed strange that people who had the opportunity to practice agrishyculture should not take advantage of it The advantages of agri culture seem so ob shyvious The farmer can select the best specimens of edible crops and creatures collect th em in the most co nvenient places and pastures crossbreed the livestock and hybridize the plants to improve size yi eld or flavo r By these methods sm all farming socie ties grow into comm unities and build up large populations Usually they go on to create ci ties and develop ever more complex technologies To Cook and his contemporaries in Europe who believed that progress was inevitable and that the same kind of changes are bound to happen everywhere peoples who dung to foraging seemed baffling

Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 33

A Case in Point Aborigina l Australians

Cook and others at the time saw only two explanations for why foragers sllch as the aborigines (AB-eh-rihj- ih-neez) in Australia would reject agriculture They were either stupid o r subhuman Indeed early European painters in Aust ralia depicted aborigines as apelike creatures grimaci ng oddl) and crawling in trees The colo nists s impl y ignored the nati es o r when they got in the way often hunted them downshyas they would beasts But not on ly did tbe native Aust ralians reject agriculture in some areas th ey appeared [0 shun every technical cO llvenience On the island o f Tasman ia in the extreme south of Australia where the natives became extinct soon after European settlement began they seemed to have forgotten every art of their ancestors bows boats even how to kindle fi rc In Arnhem Land in the extreme north they used boomerangs to make musi c but no longer as weapons for th e hunt Progress which the European discoverers of Australia believed in fervently seemed to have gone into reverse Australia was not only on the exact opposite side of the world from England it was a topsy-turvy place where everythi ng was upside down

We can hOever be certain that if aborigines rejected agriculture o r other practices Europeans considered progressive it must have been for good reasons TIle aborigines did not lack the knowledge necessary to switch from fo raging to farming had they so wished When they gathered wild yams or the root known as

James COO K from Captain Cooks Journal During his First Voyage Round the World

nardoo they ensured that enough of the plant remained in the ground to grow back In many regions too they used fire to control the grazi ng grounds of kangaroos and concentrate Ihem for hunting a common technique among herders to manage pasture and among tillers to renew the soil Along the Murray and Darling Rivers aborigines even watered and weeded wild cro ps and policed their boundaries against human and animal pred ators (sec Map 20

The abo rigi nal Australians could also have systematically planted and irrigated crops farmed the grubs they liked to eat pen ned kangashyroos and even tried to domestica te them (Kangaroos are can tankerous creatures but people do make pets o f them Breeding selected speci shymen s would probably produce a domestic strain in a few generations ) In the far no rth of Australia aboriginal communities traded with the farming cultures of New Guinea So even if they hadnt developed agrishyculture on th eir own they could have lea rned it fro m o utsi ders If the aborigines did not farm it must have been because they did not want to In short they were doing well without it Simil ar cases all over the world support this conclusion Where wild foods are abundant there is no in shycentive to do mesticate them Of course people o ften adopt p ractices that d o them no good We can concede this general principle but case by case we stiJI han t ( 0 know why

Preagricultura l Settlements

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Under some conditions people can settle in one place without the trouble of farmshying Archaeological evidence in the region we now ca ll the Middle East shows this After the Ice Age ended about 15000 lJCE a frontier zone between forest and grassland stretched across the eastern sho re of the Mediterranean and what are now Iran eastern Turkey and Iraq (see Map 22) The forests were full of acorns pistachios and almonds which gatherers ground into flour and paste The grassshylands bred vast quantjties of wild grass with edible seeds These foods could all he

34 I C H A P TER 2

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Preagricultural Settlements in the Middle East

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warehoused between harvests and had the additional advantage of maturing at di fferent times Dense herds of gazelle in the gra sslands prov ided more nutrition for hunters to bring home Food was so plentiful that foragers did not have to move around much to fi nd it

By abou t 14000 to 15000 years ago permanent sen lements a rose th roughout the region clusters of dwelli ngs with stone wa lls or those made of wood on stone foundations or cue from soft stone and roofed with reeds The foragers who lived in th ese sedentary communities apparently kept to themselves Villages had dis shytinctive iden tit ies and habits wh ich almost amounted to badges of identity Some favored gazelle toe bones for jewelry some preferred fox teeth and partridge legs These people married within their own communities (a practi ce known as en shydogamy) judging from th e evidence of inherited physical characteristics For ex shyample in some villages people were retatimiddotely short while in others they had d istinctive dental patterns These settlers cut what look like plans of their fields on limestone slabs which suggests that they were terri torial- that they had a sense of possession that Captain Cook would have recognized

Out of the Mud Far mIng and Herding A fter tne Ice Age 35

In sum the lives of preagricultural settlers were so much like the lives of the early fa rmers who succeeded them that when anhaeologists first found the forshyagers villages in the 1930s they assumed the inhabitants were farmers Bue the setshylied foragers were 3ctuaHy better off than farmers Their rema ins on the whole show better health and nourishme nt than the fa rming peoples who followed later in the sa me region A diet rich in seeds and nuts had ground down their teeth but- unl ike the farmers-they have none of the streaked tooth -enamel common among people who suffer from food shortages

Simi la r evidence of preagricultural settlements exists in other places Take a few conspicuous examples The Jomon (JOHM-mehn ) people of central Honshu Island in Japan hved in permanent vi llages 13000 years ago feeding themselves by fishing il nd gathering acorns and chestnuts They made pots fo r display in elaboshyrate shapes modeled on flames and serpents an d lacquered them with tree sap Their potters were in a sense magicians transforming clay into objects of prestige and ritua l In the Egyp tim Sahara lit Nabta Playa about forty plant species inclu shyding sorghum a type of cereal grass grew alongside hearths and pit oven~ evi shydence of settled life from about 10000 years ago In other pa rts of (en tral Sahara in the same period that had plenty of water and a cookr climate than now foragers fou nd sorghum and millet another cereal grass At Gobekli Tepe (goh- BEHK-lee TEH-pchl a hilltop site in so utheast Turkey co ntemporaries who lived mainly by gathering wild wheat he ed seven -ton pillars from li mestone They reerected them in a sunken chamber in their village and decorated them with carvings of snakes boar gazelles cra nes and symbols that look suspiciously like writing

What was life li ke in these earliest settl ements Small permanent houses sugshygest that nuclear families-parents and children-predominated though so me sites clearty have communal work areas for grinding seeds and nuts As for who did the work the most stunn ing find ing of recent archaeology in the Middle East sugshygests that work was probably shared behleen the sexes The way skeletons are musshycled suggests th at women did slightly more kneeling (and therefore slightly more gr inding) than men and men did more throwing (and therefore more hunting) than women But both sexes did both activit ies Male and female bodies began to reconverge after a long period during which they bad evolved to look differently As food product ion replaced hunting and gathering wa r and child rearing became the main sex-specific jobs in society The convergence between th e physical feashytures of men and women seems still to be in progress today Indeed it seems to be accelerating as men and women share more and morc tasks and the need for heavshyily muscled or big framed bod ies di minishes along wi th physica ll y demanding jobs in much of the world

The Disadvantages of Farming

Prernrming comm unities do not simply progress to fann ing If foraging produces abundance and sec urity it does not necessarily follow that farming can deliver more of the same The consequences of adopting agriculture are by no means all positive In the early stages of moving from foraging to fa rm ing the food supply actually becomes less reliable because people depend on a relatively small range of fa rmed foods or even on a si ngle species As a result a community becomes vulnerable to ecological disasters Famine becomes more likely as diet narrows Moreover when people have 0 plant and grow food as weDas gather it they have to use up more energy to get the sa me amount of nourishment (Although domesmiddot ticated food s once harvested tend to be easier to process for eating) The need to

lomon pottery Ten thousand years ago the Jomon potters of Japan produced the worlds earliest knOvn earthenware vessels Other pottel)-makmg peoples also practled farm ing but the Jomon people were sedentary foragers--l lvlng in permamiddot nent or long-term settlements but managing the environment in mInimal ways and relyIng on abunshydant wild foods including nuts seeds acorns some 70 marine animal Spec ies and land mamshymals---eatmg no just boar deer and hare but also wolves Wildcats f lYing squIrrel s and mon keys

Overuse deforms bones ArchaeolO8) can reconmiddot struc t how ancient peop le b(gthaved by measuring the deformities In their skeletons The woman hose toe th is was lived In a commuMy of eady sedentary foragers In what is now Syria She evIshydently spent much of her tIme kneeling presumshyably to grlFld the acorns and kernels of Wild wheat on whIch her people re lied for food

36 I C H A P T ER 2

Early Forager Settlements (All dales are approximate)

15000 yea rs ago 14000-15000

yea rs ago 13000 years ago 10000 years ago

l

World emerges from the Ice Age Permanent settlements appear In Middle East

Honshu Island Japan

Nabta Playa Egypt GObekh Tepe Turkey

organize labor encourages inequalities and explo itation Concentrashytions of domesticated animals spread disease such as smallpox measles rubella ch icken pox influenza and tuberculosis

So the problem is really the opposite of what Cook supposed It is fanners behavior not fo ragers that is strange Husba nd ry is not a step along a march of improvement because in some ways it makes life worse No one has PU l the problem better than the histo rian of agronomy Jack L Harlan

people who do not farm do about eveq1hing that farmers do but they do lot work as hard They understand thllifc cycles of plants kno the seashysons of the year and when and where the natural plant food resources can he

Jack Harlan from Crops and Man

Chukchi herder The choice between huntmg and herding otten depends on local and historical Clrmiddot cumstances Remdeermiddotherding is an anCient pracmiddot tlce In muc h of northern Euragtla whereas irl North America the can bou have remained wild In e~treme norlheast Asia close to America the Chukchi long resisted the example of neighboring peo ple and preferred hunting 10 herding In the last two or Illree cenlurles however they have adopted the herdsman s vocat ion shown here

hareswd in great abundance with the least eff() rt There is evidence that thl diet of g-athshyering peoples was better than that of cultivators that slarvation was rare that there was a lower incidence of chronic disease and not nearly so many cavities in their teeth

The question must be raised Whr furm Vhy work harder for food less nut rishytious md a supply more capricious Why invite famine plague ~poundtilcnce and crowded living conditions 1

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

Part of what is surprising about agriculture is that it is so common Not only has almost th e entire human world adopted 1t many peoples ca me to it indepenshydently of one anot her Scholars used to su ppose that it was so extraordinary it must have begun in some particular spo t and that diffusion spread it from there- carried by migrants or conquerors or transmitted by t rade o r im itated The last 40 years of research have shown on the contrary that the transition to

food product io n happened over and over agai n in a range of regions and a variety of environments with d ifferen t foodstuffs and di fferent techn iques The most obv ious co ntrast in environ ments is betwee n herders and tillers Herd ing develops where plan ts a re tOO spa rse or indigestible to sustain human life but a nim als can convert these pla nts into meat-an energy SO UTee tha t people can access by eating th e anim als Tilling deshyvelops where th e soil is suitable or enough ecologica l di shyversity ex ists to susta in plant husbandry o r mi xed farming of plants and animals

Herders Environments

[n three regions of the Earth-tundra the evergreen foresls of no rthern Eurasia and great grasslands- il is not possible to grow enough humanly d igest ible plant foods to keep large numbers of people alive [n the

tund ra and evergreen forests average temperatures arc too low the growing sea shyson too short the surface soil too vulnerable to frost and the subso il in some areas too froze n In these environments thert~ are only two options People can remain foragers- an d primari ly hu nters seeking the fa t-ri ch species rypical of stich zones The [nu it in the North American Arctic for example hunt seal and walrus Or people can become herders like the Sami and Samoyeds of north ern Europe and northwest Asia who live off rei ndeer

Out of the Mud Farming and H erding After the Ice Age I 37

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 FORAGERS AND FARMERS COMPARED

FORAGERS FARMERS

Food procurers Food producers

hUn and gather husbandry (breed animals cultivate crops)

Fit into nature Chanampe nature

little environmental impact herders some environmental impact tillers massive environment impact

Manaampethe landscape Nature remade and reimagined

Dependence on wild animals and plants Interdependence between humans plants and animals

animals and plants exploited and domeslicated

Stable food supply Unstable food supply

nomadic fOfltlgcrs move in response 10 environmental small range of farmed foods increases vulnerability change sedentary fo ragers vulnerable to changes of climate to ecological disasters

Stable popUlation

relatively little labor needed population COlltrol avalable mainly by managed lactatioll

Expandinamp population

breeding livestock and cultivating plants leads to increased food supply increased population concentrations of domesticated animals spread disease

Stable society

kinship and age fi x ind ividuals place in sodery sexes usually share labor by spedalidng in difterent economic tasks

Radically changed unstable society

need to control labor and food distribution leads to social inequalititS work shared between the sexes increased reliance on female labor ~trong nates dewlop with powerful elites complex technologies

Similarly the soils of the world s vast grassla nds- known as prairie in North America pampa in South America steppe in Eurasia and the Sahel (sah-HEHL) in Africa- have for most of history been unfavorable for tillage (sce Map 23) The sad is mostly too difficu lt to turn without a steel plow Except for patches of excepshytionally favorable soil herding has been the only possible fo rm of husbandry in these areas The peoples of the Eurasian and Africa n grasslands were probably herdi ng by about 5000 acE Native American grassland dwellers of the New World on the othe r hand retained a foraging way of life because available species-bison various types of antelope-were (or the lIlost part more abun shydant for the hunt and less suitable fo r herding

For those who choose it herding has three special consequences First it imposshyes a mobile way of life The proportion of the population ho follow the herdsshyand in som e cases it is the enri re popu lation-cannot seuJe into permanent

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38 I CHAP TER 2

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villages Herder peoples are not ul1iLling or unable to build permanently or on a large sca le The Scythians for instance people of the -estern Asian steppe who first domesticated the horse and invented th e wheel and axle about 6000 to 7OCX years ago built impressive stone structures Bul these wefe underground tombs dwellings fo r the dead while the living inhabited temporary camps Some herding societies in Asia and Africa have become rich enough to fou nd ci ties fo r elites OT for specialists working outside of food production such as craftsmen or miners Indeed as we shall see (Chap ter 13) in the thirteenth century CF a city of thi s type Karakorum in Mongolia was one of the most admired cities in the world On the whole howshyever herding does no t favo r the development of cities o r the kind of culture that cities nourish such as monumental buildings large-scale inst itutions fo r education and the arts and ind ustrial technology

Second since herde rs breed from animal s that naturally share their grassland habitats thei r herds consist of such creatures as cattl e sheep horses goats-milkshyyielding stock To get the fu ll benefit fro m their auimals herdin g peoples have to eat dai ry products To modern milk-fed Americans this may sound perfeclly no rshyma l But it required a modification of human evolution Most people in most part s of the world do not natural1 ) produce lactase the substance that enables them to d igest milk after infancy They respond to dairy products wit h distaste or even intol erance The Masai of Kenya in East Africa get 80 percent of their energy

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

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intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

Asia where the Bering Strai t now flows to cilter a paradi se where no human hunter h ad ever trod before Thc abundance wa~ so great and the animals so unshywary that the invaders ate enormously and multiplied greatly The) spread rapi dly over the hemisphere hUllting th e great gam e to exti nction as they went Th e story 3ppealcd to an unsophisticated fo rm of US paTriot ism The Clov is people as these hunters were dubbed after an ea rly archaeological site in New Mexico seemed to resemb le modern American pioneers They exhibited quick-fire locomotion husshytl e and bustle technical prowess big appetit es irrepress ible strength enormous cultural reach and a talent for reforging th e environment

By comparison the truth about the peopling of the hemisphere is d isappo intingshyly undramatic T hese first great American superheroes-like most of their successhysors-did not really exist Although archeologists have excavated too few sites for a co mplete and reliable picture to emerge a new theory dominates We have evidence of early human settlement scanered from the Yukon to Uruguay and from near th e Bering Strait to the edge of the Beagle Channel- that is from the waterway that dishyvides North Am erica and Asia to the sou thern limjts of the South American mainshyland This evide nce is so widespread over so lo ng a period in so m any diffe rent geological layers and with such avast range of cultural diversity th at one conclusion is inescapable---ltolonists came at di fferent times br inging different cultures with them

No generally accepted evidence dates any inhabited sites iT) the American hem ishysphere earlier than abo ut 13000 BCE (see Map 13) T he first arrivals came du ring a time when glaciers covered much of North Am erica They stuck dose to the cold where th e game was fattest They followed corridors benleen walls of icc or alon g narrow shores away fro m glaciers Other arrivals came by sea and continued to come afrer the land bridge laS submerged Arou nd 10000 )ears ago a catastrop hic cluster ofexti nctio ns wiped o ut the manuno th mastodon ho rse gian t sloth sabershytoothed tiger and at least thirty-five other large species in the Americas New hunt shying techniques and perhaps new hunting peoples were probably partly responsible But we can only explain the even ts in the context of vast climatic changes that afshyfec ted habitats and the whole ecology on which these an imals depended

Many supposedJy early sites of human habitation have proved to be delusions of overenthusiastic archaeologists-false or at best unconvi ncing A few sites however offer strong evidence of the antiquity and range of settlemen t Most are in the eastern Uni led States- a long way from Asia It must have taken a lon g time for these peoplc to get there from the vicinity of th e modern Bering Strait [n the mid-1970s 15000shyyear-old baskcrwork and tools made with fine flints emerged fro m deep under the d isshycarded beer cans that topped a d ig at Meadowcroft on the Ohio River near the border of Pennsylvania and West Virginia Archaeologists are investigating similar sites beshytvmiddoteen the Ohio and Sava nnah Rivers Later in the 19705 excavations at Monte Verde (MON-teh VER-deh) in southern Chile revealed a twen ty-foot long wooden hideshycovered dwelling preserved in a peat bog fo r about 12500 years Nearby wCrt a big mastodon-butchery and a space devoted to making tools The inhabitants bro ught salt and seaweed from the coast forty miles away and medicinal herbs from mounshytains equally fa r in the opposite direction Halfmiddotchewed lum ps of seaweed show the eaters dental bites a boys footprints survive in the clay lining of a pit Tf Meadowcroft is a long way from the colonizers entry po illt n ear the Bering Strait southern Chile is a world away again-almosl as far as you can get in the Western Hemisphere How lo ng would it have taken the senlers of MOnle Verde to cross the hemisphere over vast distances and th rough many difte rent kinds of environments each dem anding new forms of adaptl1ian Most specialists think it must have taken thousands of years The quest ion of the date of the firs t peopling of the New Vorld therefore remains open

Out of the Ice Peop ling the Earth I 25

l Clovis Points

Monte Verde About 12000 years ago a younil permiddot son trod in fresh clay thai lined a hearth in Monte Verde Chile Peat sealed and preserved Ihe footmiddot pnnt to be rediscovered by archaeologiSts 111 the 1970s EllcavaMns at Monle Verde revealed II VIImiddot tage of mammoth hunters so old that it made previshyous theories about when people arflved in the Americas Questionable or even untenable

26 I C HA PTER 1

SURVIVAL OF THE FORAGERS M the ice cap retreated and the great herds shifted with it many human communishyties opted to follow them Archeology has unearthed traces of their routes Along fhe way in what is now northern Germa ny about 12000 years ago people sacrificed reindeer by deliberately weighting them with stones sewn into their stomachs and drowning them in a lake About 1000 years later hunters as far north as Yorkshire in England who left a weU-preserved camp at Starr Carr found an elwironmem as abundant as the cave artistss had been Not only was it fill ed with tundramiddotloving species such as red deer elk and aurochs (OW- roks)-huge shaggy wi ld catlleshybut also with wild boar in surroundings that were becoming patchily wooded

At Skateholm in Sweden about 8000 years ago hunters founded the largest known settlement of the era [t was a winter camp in an area where the eighty-seven different animal species roamed that the inhabitants ate trapping river-fi sh netting sea-birds harpooning seals and dolphin sticking pigs and driving deer into pits or pondlt In summer the people must have moved farther north They lie today in groves decorated with beads and ocll1e and filted with the spoils of their careers including antlers and boars tusks Their dogs are buried nearby These burly wolflike companshyions are sometimes interred with more signs of honor than humans were given Dogs were full members of societies where hunting prowess and skill in war determined stashytus Many of the human dead bear wounds from man-made weapons Here too is evshyidence of sexual specialization Women have only a third as many wounds as the men

TIle most persistentJy faithful followe rs of the ice were the Inuit (IN-yoo-it) of North America About 4000 )ears ago they invented the blubber-filled soapstone lamp Now they couJd follow big game beond the tundra and into the darkness of an arctic winter They could track the musk ox to the shore of the ocean and the caribou on its winter migrations when its fur is th ickest and its fat most plentiful This way of life persisted until the late twentieth century although the people who first practiced it have disappeared Migrants from the Arctic Ocean replaced them 1000 )ears ago

Climate change trapped other foraging peoples in envi ronments where they had to develop new ways of life Some of these environments offered new kinds of abundance Here were broad -leaved forests rich in acorns (which make nut ritious food for any humans who have enough time to fine-gr ind them)) and lakes and rivers funof aquatic life New World prairies held apparently inexha usti ble stocks of bison (though th e largest bison species was rapidly hunted to extinction) Beshytween the unstable per iods of climate change around 12000 years ago foragers even colonized dense tropical forests in southeast Asia and in th e New World at Pedra Pintada in Brazil where the Amazon River now flows This is a region where foragers today have to struggle to find foods they can di gest but it seems to have been more environmentally diverse toward the end of the Ice Age

Some societies perpetuated their foraging life in hot arid deserts as different from the best hunting grounds of the ree Age as it is possible to imagine This reshyqu ired two forms of adaptation First the thinly dispersed populations had to create collaborative networks Such interdependence explains why peoples who live in ecoshylogically shaky homelands often require people to marry outside the group (a pracshytice lolOwn as exogamy) and why they regard hospitality to strangers as a sacred obligation Second poor environments demanded that in habitants develop what we might caU orally tra nsmi tted science For a ni with accurate and extensive knowlshyedge of their habitat can people survive in harsh environments

The San or Bushmen of southern Africas Kalahari Desert illustrate the diffi shyculties and solutions Their domain has shrunk in the last fe w centuries as Bantu farmers Khoi herdsmen and white invaders have overrun much of their fonner

Out of t he Ice P eopling t he Eartn I 27

territo ry But their heart1and was already dr Yll the time of tne Sans firs t occupancy about 14000 years ago Tne increased rainfall that usually followed the retreaT of tbe icc hardly fell nere There are undergro und rivers but few permanent water holes The people watch fo r rare signs of rain and hurry to

gather the vegetation that accompa nies it The scrubland pla nt foods induding wa ter-bearing tubers and a kind of cact us su pply 30 percent of tnei r sustenance The rest comes from game which grazes on lough desert shrubs that humans can shynot digest

Laurens van der Post a South African adventurer who has written about the Bushmen once accompanied a band of San hunters in search of their favorite food eland a type of anteshylope O ne morning just after sunrise they found the tracks of a herd By three in the afternoon after nonstop pursuit at a tro t Bushmen Though now obliged to adopt a mixed th ey came on the herd and took aim To kill large game is almosl impossible with a oconomy su pported in part by farming and donamiddot

tions of food the San or Bushmen of southernBushmans bow He wounds the beast with a poisoned barb and fo llows it until it Africa have been among the most conservative of

drops from exhaustion and the effects of the drug before milking the kill On Ibis the worlds peoples They maintained their foragshyoCCllsion the hunters rail for twelve miles without stopping and the final mile was ing way 01 li fe essentially unchanged for millen shy

nla---desplte neighbors attempts to e~lermU1alean all-out sprint The next time they made contact with the herd one bull was seen them ThiS record of survival contrasts with the to be tiring It still took another fu ll hou r of pursuit until he fell Then wit hout rapid turnover of more ambitiOUS Civilizat ions that

pause or break for rest they were fresh enough at the end to plunge straight 3vay rad ically modify their en~lronments usually With

into the formidable task of skinning and cuning up the heavy animal l Bushm en disastrous results

who persist with thi s demanding way of life to this day are obviously pursui ng a commitment that has grown out of generations of invested emoti on As difficul t as it may be for us to understand the San would find it heart-wrenching to change a way of life for the mere sake of efficiency convenience or material ga in

In one sense the worlds food supply st ill depends o n fo raging The amount of food from hunti ng actually increased in the twentieth cen tury which may go down in history not only as the last age of hunring but as the greatest World-over today we practice a highly specialized mechanized and unu sual form of huntingshydeep-sea trawling Fish farming is likely to replace it in the future but in any case deep-sea fishing is a historical th rowback

IN PERSPECTIVE After the Ice

In the post~ke-Age world little by littl e ove r thousa nds of years rn ost societies aban doned for shy CHRONOLOGY aging and adopted fa rming or herding as the way (A N dates are apPfoximltlte-l

to get their food Among peoples who still li ve Over 3 million years ago Lucyd ose to the ice cap the Inuit remain faithfu l to 2-1 million years ago Homo erectus migrates from East Afnca 10 Afnea

their hunting tradition in North America Mos t of and EuraSia

their Old World counterparts however have long 100000 years ago Homo sapiens migrates out of Afnca

abandoned it In Eu rasia though some hunting 67000 years ago Homo sapiens in ASia 50000 years ago Homo sapiens colonizes Australia and New Guineacultures still cling to the old ways at th e eas tern

Homo sapiens reaches Europe end of Siberia the peoples on th e western Arctic 30000 years ago last Neanderthals vanishrim-the Sami (or Lapplanders) of Sca ndinavia

20000- World emerges from the Ice Age and their neighbors the Kardia Samoyeds and 15000 iICE Nenets-adopted re indee r herding over a th oushy 20000 BC pound Invent ion of the bow and arrow sand years ago The Ice- Age way oflife if not over 13000 BCpound Homo sapiens in the Americas is drawing to a close Hunting is now th ought of

28 I CHAP TE R 1

as a pri mitive way to get food long abandoned excep t as an aristoc ratic indulmiddot gellee in som e co untries or as a supposedJy manly sport in others

The disappearance of fo raging lifeways seems a rema rkable turn around for a predatorspecies such as Homo sapiells There was a time before hun ting when our ancestors were scavenge rs but for hundreds of thousands perhaps millions of years foraging was reliable and reward ing It fed people through every change of climate Its practitioners spread over th e world and adapted successfully to every kind of habitat Homo sapiens dominated every ecos)stem they became part of and competed successfully with most other species They achieved startling in shycreases in their numbers which we struggle to e(plain They founded more varied societ ies than any other species (though the differences among these societies were slight compared to later periods) They had art-rich cultures with traditions of learning and symbolic systems to record information They had their own so shycial elites polit ical customs) ambitious magic and practical methods to exploit their environ ment

Our next task is to ask why after the achievements recounted in this chapter did people abandon the foragi ng li fe Renouncing the hunt and pursuing new ways of life after the Ice Age are among the most far- reaching and mysterious transforshymations of the human past If the puzzle of hy Homo sapiens spread over the Earth is the first great questio n in our history the problem of wh) fo ragers became farmers is th e second

PROBLEMS AND PARALLELS 1 When does the story of humankind begm Is it possible to 5 Which stresses cou ld have caused early peoples to d iVide and

defme what it means to be huma n What characteristiCS do f ight eac h other Wh ich theories have been put forward for how we share with chimpanzees and other apes war started

2 How do Neandert hals and Homo floresiensis cha llenge 6 How did ma le domination come to be normal in human soc ishycommonly held definitions of Homo sapiens eties What impact did sexual econom ic specialiZa t ion have on

early SOC iet ies3 Why d id Homo sapiens migrate out of Afr ica How did migrashytion change peoples relationships with each other and wi th 7 Why was the Ice Age a time of affl uence What role did shamans thelf environment play in Ice-Age soc iety What insights Into Ice-Age societies ca n

we glean from its art and the rema ins of anc ient feasts4 What were the factors behind the rapid population growth of Homo sapiens 8 How did some SOCieties perpetuate the fOlaging li fe after the

Ice Age How has the foraging life persisted today

bull bullbull

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE A Case in Point Aboriginal Australians Preagricultural Settlements The Disadvantages of Fa rming

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS Herders Environments Tillers Environments

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE Europe Africa Asia The Pac ific Islands The Americas

SO WHY DID FARMING START Population Pressure The Outcome of Abundance The Power of Politics Cu lt Agriculture Climatic Instability Agriculture by Accident Production As an Outgrowth of Procurement

IN ERSP CT1VEmiddot Saskinamp Stability

n August 1770 the Bri tish navigator Captain James Cook reached the north

coast of Australia on the first of his spectacular voyages of exploration that

charted the lands and limits of the Pacific Ocean Ncar Cape York hc ___-~

paused at an island he named Possession Island For although his

stated purpose was scientific he was also an officer of the Royal Navy

with orders to extend the British Empire To Cooks mind the island

though inhabIted was wa iting to be grabbed The natives could not be

said to possess it because they had left no marks of possession on its soil

A wealth of plants that they could hae domesticated-fruits proper IQr

the support of mann-was growing wild Yet Cook wrote the people know nothshy

ing of cultivation It seems strange He was puzzling over one of the most pershy

plexing problems of history- the- diffe rence between forage rs and farmers food

procurers and food producers

Food is the most precious of resources Nothing Ill happen without it To most people in most societies for most of the time food is and always has been the most important thing in the world Change~ in how we get food and whether we get it arc among histors big changes During the global warming that fo ll owed the Ice Age hUSbandry-breeding animals and cultivating crops-began to replace hunting and gathering and introduced the biggest cha nge of all

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE

Husbandry happened in two distinct ways involving different tpes of environshyments and different levels of environmental intervention In some environments people could exploi t creatures that had a he rd instinct by managing the herds rather than by hunting them Breeding enhanced qualities that evolution did not necessa rily favor such as docility size and yield of meat m il k eggs and fat On the negative side close contact between humans and animals often allowed disease-bearing organisms to thrive th reatening human lives and health and sometimes unleashing plagues Otherwi se however animal husbHlIdry barely affectcd the environment Herds on the whole kept to their traditional patterns of migration and people continued to accompany them-driving the beasts now rather than follOving them Domest icated animals remained recognizably the hei rs of their wild ancestors and the landscapes through which they traveled did not change much except that the herds feeding and manure probably

32 I CHAPTER 2

encouraged the grasses they ate to flourish at the expense of othe r plant species

In other environments however plant husbandry involved massive human intervention In the long run

WHY ARE settled foragers better off than farmers tillage of the soil changed the world mo re than any previshyous innovation by Homo sapiens From postglacial m ud W HAT K INDS of environments are suited to herding people coaxed what we now call civilization-a way of

WHAT KINDS of environments were suited to early agricu lture life based on rad ically modifying the environment Inshy

W H ERE D ID farm ing start and what were t he fi rst crops stead of merely t rying to manage the landscape nature

GIVEN THE d isadvantages why did people iarm provided farmers recarved it with fields and boundaries

The rice fields of Bali in IndoneSia are among the most proo uct ive in the world usrng variet ies of rice and techniques for farming it thal are about 1000 years old Irrigation channels maintained and administered by farmers cooperatives distrrbute water everl ly among the terraces Though oflgirla l ly a lowlarld crop fa voring swampy conditions rice adapts perfec tly ro upland enVIronments and to terrace farmrng

di tches and irrigation ca nals They stamped the land with a new look a geometrical order Agric ul ture enabled humans to see the world in a new way-to imagine that magic and science had the power to change nature Such power in turn changed peoples sense of where they fit into the panorama of life on Earth Now they could become lords or in more modest moments or cultures stewards of creation

Together farm ing and herding revolutionized humans place in their ecosysshyterm Instead of merely dependi ng on other life forms to sustain us we forged a new relationship of interdependence with th ose species we eat We rely on them for food they rely on us for th eir reproduction Domesticated animals would not exist without humans Husbandr was the firs t human challenge to evolution Instead of evolvi ng species through natural selection) fa rming and herding proceed by what might be called unnatural selection-sorting and selecting by human hands for human needs according to human agendas In other words e breed livestock and cultivate plants

Herding and tilling also changed human societies By feeding people on a vastshyly greater scale agricu lture allowed societies to get hugely bigger than ever before We can only guess at the absolute figures but in areas where farming has replaced foraging in modern ti mes population has increased fifty- or even a hundredfol d Larger populations demanded new fo rms of cont rol of labor and food distribu shytion which Il1 turn nurtured strong states and powerful elites Society became more volatile and apparently less stable

In almost every case for reasons we still do not understand when people begin to practice agriculture th e pace of change quickens immeasurably and cu shymulat ively States an d civilizations do not seem to last for long Soc ieties that we think of as being most evo lved turn out to be least fitted for survival Compared with the relat ive stability of forager communities soci eties that depend on agr ishyculture are prone to lurch and coll apse History becomes a path picked amon g their ru ins

Still for Captain Cook and for most people who haye thought about it ever since it was indeed strange that people who had the opportunity to practice agrishyculture should not take advantage of it The advantages of agri culture seem so ob shyvious The farmer can select the best specimens of edible crops and creatures collect th em in the most co nvenient places and pastures crossbreed the livestock and hybridize the plants to improve size yi eld or flavo r By these methods sm all farming socie ties grow into comm unities and build up large populations Usually they go on to create ci ties and develop ever more complex technologies To Cook and his contemporaries in Europe who believed that progress was inevitable and that the same kind of changes are bound to happen everywhere peoples who dung to foraging seemed baffling

Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 33

A Case in Point Aborigina l Australians

Cook and others at the time saw only two explanations for why foragers sllch as the aborigines (AB-eh-rihj- ih-neez) in Australia would reject agriculture They were either stupid o r subhuman Indeed early European painters in Aust ralia depicted aborigines as apelike creatures grimaci ng oddl) and crawling in trees The colo nists s impl y ignored the nati es o r when they got in the way often hunted them downshyas they would beasts But not on ly did tbe native Aust ralians reject agriculture in some areas th ey appeared [0 shun every technical cO llvenience On the island o f Tasman ia in the extreme south of Australia where the natives became extinct soon after European settlement began they seemed to have forgotten every art of their ancestors bows boats even how to kindle fi rc In Arnhem Land in the extreme north they used boomerangs to make musi c but no longer as weapons for th e hunt Progress which the European discoverers of Australia believed in fervently seemed to have gone into reverse Australia was not only on the exact opposite side of the world from England it was a topsy-turvy place where everythi ng was upside down

We can hOever be certain that if aborigines rejected agriculture o r other practices Europeans considered progressive it must have been for good reasons TIle aborigines did not lack the knowledge necessary to switch from fo raging to farming had they so wished When they gathered wild yams or the root known as

James COO K from Captain Cooks Journal During his First Voyage Round the World

nardoo they ensured that enough of the plant remained in the ground to grow back In many regions too they used fire to control the grazi ng grounds of kangaroos and concentrate Ihem for hunting a common technique among herders to manage pasture and among tillers to renew the soil Along the Murray and Darling Rivers aborigines even watered and weeded wild cro ps and policed their boundaries against human and animal pred ators (sec Map 20

The abo rigi nal Australians could also have systematically planted and irrigated crops farmed the grubs they liked to eat pen ned kangashyroos and even tried to domestica te them (Kangaroos are can tankerous creatures but people do make pets o f them Breeding selected speci shymen s would probably produce a domestic strain in a few generations ) In the far no rth of Australia aboriginal communities traded with the farming cultures of New Guinea So even if they hadnt developed agrishyculture on th eir own they could have lea rned it fro m o utsi ders If the aborigines did not farm it must have been because they did not want to In short they were doing well without it Simil ar cases all over the world support this conclusion Where wild foods are abundant there is no in shycentive to do mesticate them Of course people o ften adopt p ractices that d o them no good We can concede this general principle but case by case we stiJI han t ( 0 know why

Preagricultura l Settlements

PA C IF IC

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Australia

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Under some conditions people can settle in one place without the trouble of farmshying Archaeological evidence in the region we now ca ll the Middle East shows this After the Ice Age ended about 15000 lJCE a frontier zone between forest and grassland stretched across the eastern sho re of the Mediterranean and what are now Iran eastern Turkey and Iraq (see Map 22) The forests were full of acorns pistachios and almonds which gatherers ground into flour and paste The grassshylands bred vast quantjties of wild grass with edible seeds These foods could all he

34 I C H A P TER 2

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Preagricultural Settlements in the Middle East

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warehoused between harvests and had the additional advantage of maturing at di fferent times Dense herds of gazelle in the gra sslands prov ided more nutrition for hunters to bring home Food was so plentiful that foragers did not have to move around much to fi nd it

By abou t 14000 to 15000 years ago permanent sen lements a rose th roughout the region clusters of dwelli ngs with stone wa lls or those made of wood on stone foundations or cue from soft stone and roofed with reeds The foragers who lived in th ese sedentary communities apparently kept to themselves Villages had dis shytinctive iden tit ies and habits wh ich almost amounted to badges of identity Some favored gazelle toe bones for jewelry some preferred fox teeth and partridge legs These people married within their own communities (a practi ce known as en shydogamy) judging from th e evidence of inherited physical characteristics For ex shyample in some villages people were retatimiddotely short while in others they had d istinctive dental patterns These settlers cut what look like plans of their fields on limestone slabs which suggests that they were terri torial- that they had a sense of possession that Captain Cook would have recognized

Out of the Mud Far mIng and Herding A fter tne Ice Age 35

In sum the lives of preagricultural settlers were so much like the lives of the early fa rmers who succeeded them that when anhaeologists first found the forshyagers villages in the 1930s they assumed the inhabitants were farmers Bue the setshylied foragers were 3ctuaHy better off than farmers Their rema ins on the whole show better health and nourishme nt than the fa rming peoples who followed later in the sa me region A diet rich in seeds and nuts had ground down their teeth but- unl ike the farmers-they have none of the streaked tooth -enamel common among people who suffer from food shortages

Simi la r evidence of preagricultural settlements exists in other places Take a few conspicuous examples The Jomon (JOHM-mehn ) people of central Honshu Island in Japan hved in permanent vi llages 13000 years ago feeding themselves by fishing il nd gathering acorns and chestnuts They made pots fo r display in elaboshyrate shapes modeled on flames and serpents an d lacquered them with tree sap Their potters were in a sense magicians transforming clay into objects of prestige and ritua l In the Egyp tim Sahara lit Nabta Playa about forty plant species inclu shyding sorghum a type of cereal grass grew alongside hearths and pit oven~ evi shydence of settled life from about 10000 years ago In other pa rts of (en tral Sahara in the same period that had plenty of water and a cookr climate than now foragers fou nd sorghum and millet another cereal grass At Gobekli Tepe (goh- BEHK-lee TEH-pchl a hilltop site in so utheast Turkey co ntemporaries who lived mainly by gathering wild wheat he ed seven -ton pillars from li mestone They reerected them in a sunken chamber in their village and decorated them with carvings of snakes boar gazelles cra nes and symbols that look suspiciously like writing

What was life li ke in these earliest settl ements Small permanent houses sugshygest that nuclear families-parents and children-predominated though so me sites clearty have communal work areas for grinding seeds and nuts As for who did the work the most stunn ing find ing of recent archaeology in the Middle East sugshygests that work was probably shared behleen the sexes The way skeletons are musshycled suggests th at women did slightly more kneeling (and therefore slightly more gr inding) than men and men did more throwing (and therefore more hunting) than women But both sexes did both activit ies Male and female bodies began to reconverge after a long period during which they bad evolved to look differently As food product ion replaced hunting and gathering wa r and child rearing became the main sex-specific jobs in society The convergence between th e physical feashytures of men and women seems still to be in progress today Indeed it seems to be accelerating as men and women share more and morc tasks and the need for heavshyily muscled or big framed bod ies di minishes along wi th physica ll y demanding jobs in much of the world

The Disadvantages of Farming

Prernrming comm unities do not simply progress to fann ing If foraging produces abundance and sec urity it does not necessarily follow that farming can deliver more of the same The consequences of adopting agriculture are by no means all positive In the early stages of moving from foraging to fa rm ing the food supply actually becomes less reliable because people depend on a relatively small range of fa rmed foods or even on a si ngle species As a result a community becomes vulnerable to ecological disasters Famine becomes more likely as diet narrows Moreover when people have 0 plant and grow food as weDas gather it they have to use up more energy to get the sa me amount of nourishment (Although domesmiddot ticated food s once harvested tend to be easier to process for eating) The need to

lomon pottery Ten thousand years ago the Jomon potters of Japan produced the worlds earliest knOvn earthenware vessels Other pottel)-makmg peoples also practled farm ing but the Jomon people were sedentary foragers--l lvlng in permamiddot nent or long-term settlements but managing the environment in mInimal ways and relyIng on abunshydant wild foods including nuts seeds acorns some 70 marine animal Spec ies and land mamshymals---eatmg no just boar deer and hare but also wolves Wildcats f lYing squIrrel s and mon keys

Overuse deforms bones ArchaeolO8) can reconmiddot struc t how ancient peop le b(gthaved by measuring the deformities In their skeletons The woman hose toe th is was lived In a commuMy of eady sedentary foragers In what is now Syria She evIshydently spent much of her tIme kneeling presumshyably to grlFld the acorns and kernels of Wild wheat on whIch her people re lied for food

36 I C H A P T ER 2

Early Forager Settlements (All dales are approximate)

15000 yea rs ago 14000-15000

yea rs ago 13000 years ago 10000 years ago

l

World emerges from the Ice Age Permanent settlements appear In Middle East

Honshu Island Japan

Nabta Playa Egypt GObekh Tepe Turkey

organize labor encourages inequalities and explo itation Concentrashytions of domesticated animals spread disease such as smallpox measles rubella ch icken pox influenza and tuberculosis

So the problem is really the opposite of what Cook supposed It is fanners behavior not fo ragers that is strange Husba nd ry is not a step along a march of improvement because in some ways it makes life worse No one has PU l the problem better than the histo rian of agronomy Jack L Harlan

people who do not farm do about eveq1hing that farmers do but they do lot work as hard They understand thllifc cycles of plants kno the seashysons of the year and when and where the natural plant food resources can he

Jack Harlan from Crops and Man

Chukchi herder The choice between huntmg and herding otten depends on local and historical Clrmiddot cumstances Remdeermiddotherding is an anCient pracmiddot tlce In muc h of northern Euragtla whereas irl North America the can bou have remained wild In e~treme norlheast Asia close to America the Chukchi long resisted the example of neighboring peo ple and preferred hunting 10 herding In the last two or Illree cenlurles however they have adopted the herdsman s vocat ion shown here

hareswd in great abundance with the least eff() rt There is evidence that thl diet of g-athshyering peoples was better than that of cultivators that slarvation was rare that there was a lower incidence of chronic disease and not nearly so many cavities in their teeth

The question must be raised Whr furm Vhy work harder for food less nut rishytious md a supply more capricious Why invite famine plague ~poundtilcnce and crowded living conditions 1

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

Part of what is surprising about agriculture is that it is so common Not only has almost th e entire human world adopted 1t many peoples ca me to it indepenshydently of one anot her Scholars used to su ppose that it was so extraordinary it must have begun in some particular spo t and that diffusion spread it from there- carried by migrants or conquerors or transmitted by t rade o r im itated The last 40 years of research have shown on the contrary that the transition to

food product io n happened over and over agai n in a range of regions and a variety of environments with d ifferen t foodstuffs and di fferent techn iques The most obv ious co ntrast in environ ments is betwee n herders and tillers Herd ing develops where plan ts a re tOO spa rse or indigestible to sustain human life but a nim als can convert these pla nts into meat-an energy SO UTee tha t people can access by eating th e anim als Tilling deshyvelops where th e soil is suitable or enough ecologica l di shyversity ex ists to susta in plant husbandry o r mi xed farming of plants and animals

Herders Environments

[n three regions of the Earth-tundra the evergreen foresls of no rthern Eurasia and great grasslands- il is not possible to grow enough humanly d igest ible plant foods to keep large numbers of people alive [n the

tund ra and evergreen forests average temperatures arc too low the growing sea shyson too short the surface soil too vulnerable to frost and the subso il in some areas too froze n In these environments thert~ are only two options People can remain foragers- an d primari ly hu nters seeking the fa t-ri ch species rypical of stich zones The [nu it in the North American Arctic for example hunt seal and walrus Or people can become herders like the Sami and Samoyeds of north ern Europe and northwest Asia who live off rei ndeer

Out of the Mud Farming and H erding After the Ice Age I 37

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 FORAGERS AND FARMERS COMPARED

FORAGERS FARMERS

Food procurers Food producers

hUn and gather husbandry (breed animals cultivate crops)

Fit into nature Chanampe nature

little environmental impact herders some environmental impact tillers massive environment impact

Manaampethe landscape Nature remade and reimagined

Dependence on wild animals and plants Interdependence between humans plants and animals

animals and plants exploited and domeslicated

Stable food supply Unstable food supply

nomadic fOfltlgcrs move in response 10 environmental small range of farmed foods increases vulnerability change sedentary fo ragers vulnerable to changes of climate to ecological disasters

Stable popUlation

relatively little labor needed population COlltrol avalable mainly by managed lactatioll

Expandinamp population

breeding livestock and cultivating plants leads to increased food supply increased population concentrations of domesticated animals spread disease

Stable society

kinship and age fi x ind ividuals place in sodery sexes usually share labor by spedalidng in difterent economic tasks

Radically changed unstable society

need to control labor and food distribution leads to social inequalititS work shared between the sexes increased reliance on female labor ~trong nates dewlop with powerful elites complex technologies

Similarly the soils of the world s vast grassla nds- known as prairie in North America pampa in South America steppe in Eurasia and the Sahel (sah-HEHL) in Africa- have for most of history been unfavorable for tillage (sce Map 23) The sad is mostly too difficu lt to turn without a steel plow Except for patches of excepshytionally favorable soil herding has been the only possible fo rm of husbandry in these areas The peoples of the Eurasian and Africa n grasslands were probably herdi ng by about 5000 acE Native American grassland dwellers of the New World on the othe r hand retained a foraging way of life because available species-bison various types of antelope-were (or the lIlost part more abun shydant for the hunt and less suitable fo r herding

For those who choose it herding has three special consequences First it imposshyes a mobile way of life The proportion of the population ho follow the herdsshyand in som e cases it is the enri re popu lation-cannot seuJe into permanent

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38 I CHAP TER 2

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villages Herder peoples are not ul1iLling or unable to build permanently or on a large sca le The Scythians for instance people of the -estern Asian steppe who first domesticated the horse and invented th e wheel and axle about 6000 to 7OCX years ago built impressive stone structures Bul these wefe underground tombs dwellings fo r the dead while the living inhabited temporary camps Some herding societies in Asia and Africa have become rich enough to fou nd ci ties fo r elites OT for specialists working outside of food production such as craftsmen or miners Indeed as we shall see (Chap ter 13) in the thirteenth century CF a city of thi s type Karakorum in Mongolia was one of the most admired cities in the world On the whole howshyever herding does no t favo r the development of cities o r the kind of culture that cities nourish such as monumental buildings large-scale inst itutions fo r education and the arts and ind ustrial technology

Second since herde rs breed from animal s that naturally share their grassland habitats thei r herds consist of such creatures as cattl e sheep horses goats-milkshyyielding stock To get the fu ll benefit fro m their auimals herdin g peoples have to eat dai ry products To modern milk-fed Americans this may sound perfeclly no rshyma l But it required a modification of human evolution Most people in most part s of the world do not natural1 ) produce lactase the substance that enables them to d igest milk after infancy They respond to dairy products wit h distaste or even intol erance The Masai of Kenya in East Africa get 80 percent of their energy

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

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intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

26 I C HA PTER 1

SURVIVAL OF THE FORAGERS M the ice cap retreated and the great herds shifted with it many human communishyties opted to follow them Archeology has unearthed traces of their routes Along fhe way in what is now northern Germa ny about 12000 years ago people sacrificed reindeer by deliberately weighting them with stones sewn into their stomachs and drowning them in a lake About 1000 years later hunters as far north as Yorkshire in England who left a weU-preserved camp at Starr Carr found an elwironmem as abundant as the cave artistss had been Not only was it fill ed with tundramiddotloving species such as red deer elk and aurochs (OW- roks)-huge shaggy wi ld catlleshybut also with wild boar in surroundings that were becoming patchily wooded

At Skateholm in Sweden about 8000 years ago hunters founded the largest known settlement of the era [t was a winter camp in an area where the eighty-seven different animal species roamed that the inhabitants ate trapping river-fi sh netting sea-birds harpooning seals and dolphin sticking pigs and driving deer into pits or pondlt In summer the people must have moved farther north They lie today in groves decorated with beads and ocll1e and filted with the spoils of their careers including antlers and boars tusks Their dogs are buried nearby These burly wolflike companshyions are sometimes interred with more signs of honor than humans were given Dogs were full members of societies where hunting prowess and skill in war determined stashytus Many of the human dead bear wounds from man-made weapons Here too is evshyidence of sexual specialization Women have only a third as many wounds as the men

TIle most persistentJy faithful followe rs of the ice were the Inuit (IN-yoo-it) of North America About 4000 )ears ago they invented the blubber-filled soapstone lamp Now they couJd follow big game beond the tundra and into the darkness of an arctic winter They could track the musk ox to the shore of the ocean and the caribou on its winter migrations when its fur is th ickest and its fat most plentiful This way of life persisted until the late twentieth century although the people who first practiced it have disappeared Migrants from the Arctic Ocean replaced them 1000 )ears ago

Climate change trapped other foraging peoples in envi ronments where they had to develop new ways of life Some of these environments offered new kinds of abundance Here were broad -leaved forests rich in acorns (which make nut ritious food for any humans who have enough time to fine-gr ind them)) and lakes and rivers funof aquatic life New World prairies held apparently inexha usti ble stocks of bison (though th e largest bison species was rapidly hunted to extinction) Beshytween the unstable per iods of climate change around 12000 years ago foragers even colonized dense tropical forests in southeast Asia and in th e New World at Pedra Pintada in Brazil where the Amazon River now flows This is a region where foragers today have to struggle to find foods they can di gest but it seems to have been more environmentally diverse toward the end of the Ice Age

Some societies perpetuated their foraging life in hot arid deserts as different from the best hunting grounds of the ree Age as it is possible to imagine This reshyqu ired two forms of adaptation First the thinly dispersed populations had to create collaborative networks Such interdependence explains why peoples who live in ecoshylogically shaky homelands often require people to marry outside the group (a pracshytice lolOwn as exogamy) and why they regard hospitality to strangers as a sacred obligation Second poor environments demanded that in habitants develop what we might caU orally tra nsmi tted science For a ni with accurate and extensive knowlshyedge of their habitat can people survive in harsh environments

The San or Bushmen of southern Africas Kalahari Desert illustrate the diffi shyculties and solutions Their domain has shrunk in the last fe w centuries as Bantu farmers Khoi herdsmen and white invaders have overrun much of their fonner

Out of t he Ice P eopling t he Eartn I 27

territo ry But their heart1and was already dr Yll the time of tne Sans firs t occupancy about 14000 years ago Tne increased rainfall that usually followed the retreaT of tbe icc hardly fell nere There are undergro und rivers but few permanent water holes The people watch fo r rare signs of rain and hurry to

gather the vegetation that accompa nies it The scrubland pla nt foods induding wa ter-bearing tubers and a kind of cact us su pply 30 percent of tnei r sustenance The rest comes from game which grazes on lough desert shrubs that humans can shynot digest

Laurens van der Post a South African adventurer who has written about the Bushmen once accompanied a band of San hunters in search of their favorite food eland a type of anteshylope O ne morning just after sunrise they found the tracks of a herd By three in the afternoon after nonstop pursuit at a tro t Bushmen Though now obliged to adopt a mixed th ey came on the herd and took aim To kill large game is almosl impossible with a oconomy su pported in part by farming and donamiddot

tions of food the San or Bushmen of southernBushmans bow He wounds the beast with a poisoned barb and fo llows it until it Africa have been among the most conservative of

drops from exhaustion and the effects of the drug before milking the kill On Ibis the worlds peoples They maintained their foragshyoCCllsion the hunters rail for twelve miles without stopping and the final mile was ing way 01 li fe essentially unchanged for millen shy

nla---desplte neighbors attempts to e~lermU1alean all-out sprint The next time they made contact with the herd one bull was seen them ThiS record of survival contrasts with the to be tiring It still took another fu ll hou r of pursuit until he fell Then wit hout rapid turnover of more ambitiOUS Civilizat ions that

pause or break for rest they were fresh enough at the end to plunge straight 3vay rad ically modify their en~lronments usually With

into the formidable task of skinning and cuning up the heavy animal l Bushm en disastrous results

who persist with thi s demanding way of life to this day are obviously pursui ng a commitment that has grown out of generations of invested emoti on As difficul t as it may be for us to understand the San would find it heart-wrenching to change a way of life for the mere sake of efficiency convenience or material ga in

In one sense the worlds food supply st ill depends o n fo raging The amount of food from hunti ng actually increased in the twentieth cen tury which may go down in history not only as the last age of hunring but as the greatest World-over today we practice a highly specialized mechanized and unu sual form of huntingshydeep-sea trawling Fish farming is likely to replace it in the future but in any case deep-sea fishing is a historical th rowback

IN PERSPECTIVE After the Ice

In the post~ke-Age world little by littl e ove r thousa nds of years rn ost societies aban doned for shy CHRONOLOGY aging and adopted fa rming or herding as the way (A N dates are apPfoximltlte-l

to get their food Among peoples who still li ve Over 3 million years ago Lucyd ose to the ice cap the Inuit remain faithfu l to 2-1 million years ago Homo erectus migrates from East Afnca 10 Afnea

their hunting tradition in North America Mos t of and EuraSia

their Old World counterparts however have long 100000 years ago Homo sapiens migrates out of Afnca

abandoned it In Eu rasia though some hunting 67000 years ago Homo sapiens in ASia 50000 years ago Homo sapiens colonizes Australia and New Guineacultures still cling to the old ways at th e eas tern

Homo sapiens reaches Europe end of Siberia the peoples on th e western Arctic 30000 years ago last Neanderthals vanishrim-the Sami (or Lapplanders) of Sca ndinavia

20000- World emerges from the Ice Age and their neighbors the Kardia Samoyeds and 15000 iICE Nenets-adopted re indee r herding over a th oushy 20000 BC pound Invent ion of the bow and arrow sand years ago The Ice- Age way oflife if not over 13000 BCpound Homo sapiens in the Americas is drawing to a close Hunting is now th ought of

28 I CHAP TE R 1

as a pri mitive way to get food long abandoned excep t as an aristoc ratic indulmiddot gellee in som e co untries or as a supposedJy manly sport in others

The disappearance of fo raging lifeways seems a rema rkable turn around for a predatorspecies such as Homo sapiells There was a time before hun ting when our ancestors were scavenge rs but for hundreds of thousands perhaps millions of years foraging was reliable and reward ing It fed people through every change of climate Its practitioners spread over th e world and adapted successfully to every kind of habitat Homo sapiens dominated every ecos)stem they became part of and competed successfully with most other species They achieved startling in shycreases in their numbers which we struggle to e(plain They founded more varied societ ies than any other species (though the differences among these societies were slight compared to later periods) They had art-rich cultures with traditions of learning and symbolic systems to record information They had their own so shycial elites polit ical customs) ambitious magic and practical methods to exploit their environ ment

Our next task is to ask why after the achievements recounted in this chapter did people abandon the foragi ng li fe Renouncing the hunt and pursuing new ways of life after the Ice Age are among the most far- reaching and mysterious transforshymations of the human past If the puzzle of hy Homo sapiens spread over the Earth is the first great questio n in our history the problem of wh) fo ragers became farmers is th e second

PROBLEMS AND PARALLELS 1 When does the story of humankind begm Is it possible to 5 Which stresses cou ld have caused early peoples to d iVide and

defme what it means to be huma n What characteristiCS do f ight eac h other Wh ich theories have been put forward for how we share with chimpanzees and other apes war started

2 How do Neandert hals and Homo floresiensis cha llenge 6 How did ma le domination come to be normal in human soc ishycommonly held definitions of Homo sapiens eties What impact did sexual econom ic specialiZa t ion have on

early SOC iet ies3 Why d id Homo sapiens migrate out of Afr ica How did migrashytion change peoples relationships with each other and wi th 7 Why was the Ice Age a time of affl uence What role did shamans thelf environment play in Ice-Age soc iety What insights Into Ice-Age societies ca n

we glean from its art and the rema ins of anc ient feasts4 What were the factors behind the rapid population growth of Homo sapiens 8 How did some SOCieties perpetuate the fOlaging li fe after the

Ice Age How has the foraging life persisted today

bull bullbull

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE A Case in Point Aboriginal Australians Preagricultural Settlements The Disadvantages of Fa rming

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS Herders Environments Tillers Environments

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE Europe Africa Asia The Pac ific Islands The Americas

SO WHY DID FARMING START Population Pressure The Outcome of Abundance The Power of Politics Cu lt Agriculture Climatic Instability Agriculture by Accident Production As an Outgrowth of Procurement

IN ERSP CT1VEmiddot Saskinamp Stability

n August 1770 the Bri tish navigator Captain James Cook reached the north

coast of Australia on the first of his spectacular voyages of exploration that

charted the lands and limits of the Pacific Ocean Ncar Cape York hc ___-~

paused at an island he named Possession Island For although his

stated purpose was scientific he was also an officer of the Royal Navy

with orders to extend the British Empire To Cooks mind the island

though inhabIted was wa iting to be grabbed The natives could not be

said to possess it because they had left no marks of possession on its soil

A wealth of plants that they could hae domesticated-fruits proper IQr

the support of mann-was growing wild Yet Cook wrote the people know nothshy

ing of cultivation It seems strange He was puzzling over one of the most pershy

plexing problems of history- the- diffe rence between forage rs and farmers food

procurers and food producers

Food is the most precious of resources Nothing Ill happen without it To most people in most societies for most of the time food is and always has been the most important thing in the world Change~ in how we get food and whether we get it arc among histors big changes During the global warming that fo ll owed the Ice Age hUSbandry-breeding animals and cultivating crops-began to replace hunting and gathering and introduced the biggest cha nge of all

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE

Husbandry happened in two distinct ways involving different tpes of environshyments and different levels of environmental intervention In some environments people could exploi t creatures that had a he rd instinct by managing the herds rather than by hunting them Breeding enhanced qualities that evolution did not necessa rily favor such as docility size and yield of meat m il k eggs and fat On the negative side close contact between humans and animals often allowed disease-bearing organisms to thrive th reatening human lives and health and sometimes unleashing plagues Otherwi se however animal husbHlIdry barely affectcd the environment Herds on the whole kept to their traditional patterns of migration and people continued to accompany them-driving the beasts now rather than follOving them Domest icated animals remained recognizably the hei rs of their wild ancestors and the landscapes through which they traveled did not change much except that the herds feeding and manure probably

32 I CHAPTER 2

encouraged the grasses they ate to flourish at the expense of othe r plant species

In other environments however plant husbandry involved massive human intervention In the long run

WHY ARE settled foragers better off than farmers tillage of the soil changed the world mo re than any previshyous innovation by Homo sapiens From postglacial m ud W HAT K INDS of environments are suited to herding people coaxed what we now call civilization-a way of

WHAT KINDS of environments were suited to early agricu lture life based on rad ically modifying the environment Inshy

W H ERE D ID farm ing start and what were t he fi rst crops stead of merely t rying to manage the landscape nature

GIVEN THE d isadvantages why did people iarm provided farmers recarved it with fields and boundaries

The rice fields of Bali in IndoneSia are among the most proo uct ive in the world usrng variet ies of rice and techniques for farming it thal are about 1000 years old Irrigation channels maintained and administered by farmers cooperatives distrrbute water everl ly among the terraces Though oflgirla l ly a lowlarld crop fa voring swampy conditions rice adapts perfec tly ro upland enVIronments and to terrace farmrng

di tches and irrigation ca nals They stamped the land with a new look a geometrical order Agric ul ture enabled humans to see the world in a new way-to imagine that magic and science had the power to change nature Such power in turn changed peoples sense of where they fit into the panorama of life on Earth Now they could become lords or in more modest moments or cultures stewards of creation

Together farm ing and herding revolutionized humans place in their ecosysshyterm Instead of merely dependi ng on other life forms to sustain us we forged a new relationship of interdependence with th ose species we eat We rely on them for food they rely on us for th eir reproduction Domesticated animals would not exist without humans Husbandr was the firs t human challenge to evolution Instead of evolvi ng species through natural selection) fa rming and herding proceed by what might be called unnatural selection-sorting and selecting by human hands for human needs according to human agendas In other words e breed livestock and cultivate plants

Herding and tilling also changed human societies By feeding people on a vastshyly greater scale agricu lture allowed societies to get hugely bigger than ever before We can only guess at the absolute figures but in areas where farming has replaced foraging in modern ti mes population has increased fifty- or even a hundredfol d Larger populations demanded new fo rms of cont rol of labor and food distribu shytion which Il1 turn nurtured strong states and powerful elites Society became more volatile and apparently less stable

In almost every case for reasons we still do not understand when people begin to practice agriculture th e pace of change quickens immeasurably and cu shymulat ively States an d civilizations do not seem to last for long Soc ieties that we think of as being most evo lved turn out to be least fitted for survival Compared with the relat ive stability of forager communities soci eties that depend on agr ishyculture are prone to lurch and coll apse History becomes a path picked amon g their ru ins

Still for Captain Cook and for most people who haye thought about it ever since it was indeed strange that people who had the opportunity to practice agrishyculture should not take advantage of it The advantages of agri culture seem so ob shyvious The farmer can select the best specimens of edible crops and creatures collect th em in the most co nvenient places and pastures crossbreed the livestock and hybridize the plants to improve size yi eld or flavo r By these methods sm all farming socie ties grow into comm unities and build up large populations Usually they go on to create ci ties and develop ever more complex technologies To Cook and his contemporaries in Europe who believed that progress was inevitable and that the same kind of changes are bound to happen everywhere peoples who dung to foraging seemed baffling

Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 33

A Case in Point Aborigina l Australians

Cook and others at the time saw only two explanations for why foragers sllch as the aborigines (AB-eh-rihj- ih-neez) in Australia would reject agriculture They were either stupid o r subhuman Indeed early European painters in Aust ralia depicted aborigines as apelike creatures grimaci ng oddl) and crawling in trees The colo nists s impl y ignored the nati es o r when they got in the way often hunted them downshyas they would beasts But not on ly did tbe native Aust ralians reject agriculture in some areas th ey appeared [0 shun every technical cO llvenience On the island o f Tasman ia in the extreme south of Australia where the natives became extinct soon after European settlement began they seemed to have forgotten every art of their ancestors bows boats even how to kindle fi rc In Arnhem Land in the extreme north they used boomerangs to make musi c but no longer as weapons for th e hunt Progress which the European discoverers of Australia believed in fervently seemed to have gone into reverse Australia was not only on the exact opposite side of the world from England it was a topsy-turvy place where everythi ng was upside down

We can hOever be certain that if aborigines rejected agriculture o r other practices Europeans considered progressive it must have been for good reasons TIle aborigines did not lack the knowledge necessary to switch from fo raging to farming had they so wished When they gathered wild yams or the root known as

James COO K from Captain Cooks Journal During his First Voyage Round the World

nardoo they ensured that enough of the plant remained in the ground to grow back In many regions too they used fire to control the grazi ng grounds of kangaroos and concentrate Ihem for hunting a common technique among herders to manage pasture and among tillers to renew the soil Along the Murray and Darling Rivers aborigines even watered and weeded wild cro ps and policed their boundaries against human and animal pred ators (sec Map 20

The abo rigi nal Australians could also have systematically planted and irrigated crops farmed the grubs they liked to eat pen ned kangashyroos and even tried to domestica te them (Kangaroos are can tankerous creatures but people do make pets o f them Breeding selected speci shymen s would probably produce a domestic strain in a few generations ) In the far no rth of Australia aboriginal communities traded with the farming cultures of New Guinea So even if they hadnt developed agrishyculture on th eir own they could have lea rned it fro m o utsi ders If the aborigines did not farm it must have been because they did not want to In short they were doing well without it Simil ar cases all over the world support this conclusion Where wild foods are abundant there is no in shycentive to do mesticate them Of course people o ften adopt p ractices that d o them no good We can concede this general principle but case by case we stiJI han t ( 0 know why

Preagricultura l Settlements

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Under some conditions people can settle in one place without the trouble of farmshying Archaeological evidence in the region we now ca ll the Middle East shows this After the Ice Age ended about 15000 lJCE a frontier zone between forest and grassland stretched across the eastern sho re of the Mediterranean and what are now Iran eastern Turkey and Iraq (see Map 22) The forests were full of acorns pistachios and almonds which gatherers ground into flour and paste The grassshylands bred vast quantjties of wild grass with edible seeds These foods could all he

34 I C H A P TER 2

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warehoused between harvests and had the additional advantage of maturing at di fferent times Dense herds of gazelle in the gra sslands prov ided more nutrition for hunters to bring home Food was so plentiful that foragers did not have to move around much to fi nd it

By abou t 14000 to 15000 years ago permanent sen lements a rose th roughout the region clusters of dwelli ngs with stone wa lls or those made of wood on stone foundations or cue from soft stone and roofed with reeds The foragers who lived in th ese sedentary communities apparently kept to themselves Villages had dis shytinctive iden tit ies and habits wh ich almost amounted to badges of identity Some favored gazelle toe bones for jewelry some preferred fox teeth and partridge legs These people married within their own communities (a practi ce known as en shydogamy) judging from th e evidence of inherited physical characteristics For ex shyample in some villages people were retatimiddotely short while in others they had d istinctive dental patterns These settlers cut what look like plans of their fields on limestone slabs which suggests that they were terri torial- that they had a sense of possession that Captain Cook would have recognized

Out of the Mud Far mIng and Herding A fter tne Ice Age 35

In sum the lives of preagricultural settlers were so much like the lives of the early fa rmers who succeeded them that when anhaeologists first found the forshyagers villages in the 1930s they assumed the inhabitants were farmers Bue the setshylied foragers were 3ctuaHy better off than farmers Their rema ins on the whole show better health and nourishme nt than the fa rming peoples who followed later in the sa me region A diet rich in seeds and nuts had ground down their teeth but- unl ike the farmers-they have none of the streaked tooth -enamel common among people who suffer from food shortages

Simi la r evidence of preagricultural settlements exists in other places Take a few conspicuous examples The Jomon (JOHM-mehn ) people of central Honshu Island in Japan hved in permanent vi llages 13000 years ago feeding themselves by fishing il nd gathering acorns and chestnuts They made pots fo r display in elaboshyrate shapes modeled on flames and serpents an d lacquered them with tree sap Their potters were in a sense magicians transforming clay into objects of prestige and ritua l In the Egyp tim Sahara lit Nabta Playa about forty plant species inclu shyding sorghum a type of cereal grass grew alongside hearths and pit oven~ evi shydence of settled life from about 10000 years ago In other pa rts of (en tral Sahara in the same period that had plenty of water and a cookr climate than now foragers fou nd sorghum and millet another cereal grass At Gobekli Tepe (goh- BEHK-lee TEH-pchl a hilltop site in so utheast Turkey co ntemporaries who lived mainly by gathering wild wheat he ed seven -ton pillars from li mestone They reerected them in a sunken chamber in their village and decorated them with carvings of snakes boar gazelles cra nes and symbols that look suspiciously like writing

What was life li ke in these earliest settl ements Small permanent houses sugshygest that nuclear families-parents and children-predominated though so me sites clearty have communal work areas for grinding seeds and nuts As for who did the work the most stunn ing find ing of recent archaeology in the Middle East sugshygests that work was probably shared behleen the sexes The way skeletons are musshycled suggests th at women did slightly more kneeling (and therefore slightly more gr inding) than men and men did more throwing (and therefore more hunting) than women But both sexes did both activit ies Male and female bodies began to reconverge after a long period during which they bad evolved to look differently As food product ion replaced hunting and gathering wa r and child rearing became the main sex-specific jobs in society The convergence between th e physical feashytures of men and women seems still to be in progress today Indeed it seems to be accelerating as men and women share more and morc tasks and the need for heavshyily muscled or big framed bod ies di minishes along wi th physica ll y demanding jobs in much of the world

The Disadvantages of Farming

Prernrming comm unities do not simply progress to fann ing If foraging produces abundance and sec urity it does not necessarily follow that farming can deliver more of the same The consequences of adopting agriculture are by no means all positive In the early stages of moving from foraging to fa rm ing the food supply actually becomes less reliable because people depend on a relatively small range of fa rmed foods or even on a si ngle species As a result a community becomes vulnerable to ecological disasters Famine becomes more likely as diet narrows Moreover when people have 0 plant and grow food as weDas gather it they have to use up more energy to get the sa me amount of nourishment (Although domesmiddot ticated food s once harvested tend to be easier to process for eating) The need to

lomon pottery Ten thousand years ago the Jomon potters of Japan produced the worlds earliest knOvn earthenware vessels Other pottel)-makmg peoples also practled farm ing but the Jomon people were sedentary foragers--l lvlng in permamiddot nent or long-term settlements but managing the environment in mInimal ways and relyIng on abunshydant wild foods including nuts seeds acorns some 70 marine animal Spec ies and land mamshymals---eatmg no just boar deer and hare but also wolves Wildcats f lYing squIrrel s and mon keys

Overuse deforms bones ArchaeolO8) can reconmiddot struc t how ancient peop le b(gthaved by measuring the deformities In their skeletons The woman hose toe th is was lived In a commuMy of eady sedentary foragers In what is now Syria She evIshydently spent much of her tIme kneeling presumshyably to grlFld the acorns and kernels of Wild wheat on whIch her people re lied for food

36 I C H A P T ER 2

Early Forager Settlements (All dales are approximate)

15000 yea rs ago 14000-15000

yea rs ago 13000 years ago 10000 years ago

l

World emerges from the Ice Age Permanent settlements appear In Middle East

Honshu Island Japan

Nabta Playa Egypt GObekh Tepe Turkey

organize labor encourages inequalities and explo itation Concentrashytions of domesticated animals spread disease such as smallpox measles rubella ch icken pox influenza and tuberculosis

So the problem is really the opposite of what Cook supposed It is fanners behavior not fo ragers that is strange Husba nd ry is not a step along a march of improvement because in some ways it makes life worse No one has PU l the problem better than the histo rian of agronomy Jack L Harlan

people who do not farm do about eveq1hing that farmers do but they do lot work as hard They understand thllifc cycles of plants kno the seashysons of the year and when and where the natural plant food resources can he

Jack Harlan from Crops and Man

Chukchi herder The choice between huntmg and herding otten depends on local and historical Clrmiddot cumstances Remdeermiddotherding is an anCient pracmiddot tlce In muc h of northern Euragtla whereas irl North America the can bou have remained wild In e~treme norlheast Asia close to America the Chukchi long resisted the example of neighboring peo ple and preferred hunting 10 herding In the last two or Illree cenlurles however they have adopted the herdsman s vocat ion shown here

hareswd in great abundance with the least eff() rt There is evidence that thl diet of g-athshyering peoples was better than that of cultivators that slarvation was rare that there was a lower incidence of chronic disease and not nearly so many cavities in their teeth

The question must be raised Whr furm Vhy work harder for food less nut rishytious md a supply more capricious Why invite famine plague ~poundtilcnce and crowded living conditions 1

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

Part of what is surprising about agriculture is that it is so common Not only has almost th e entire human world adopted 1t many peoples ca me to it indepenshydently of one anot her Scholars used to su ppose that it was so extraordinary it must have begun in some particular spo t and that diffusion spread it from there- carried by migrants or conquerors or transmitted by t rade o r im itated The last 40 years of research have shown on the contrary that the transition to

food product io n happened over and over agai n in a range of regions and a variety of environments with d ifferen t foodstuffs and di fferent techn iques The most obv ious co ntrast in environ ments is betwee n herders and tillers Herd ing develops where plan ts a re tOO spa rse or indigestible to sustain human life but a nim als can convert these pla nts into meat-an energy SO UTee tha t people can access by eating th e anim als Tilling deshyvelops where th e soil is suitable or enough ecologica l di shyversity ex ists to susta in plant husbandry o r mi xed farming of plants and animals

Herders Environments

[n three regions of the Earth-tundra the evergreen foresls of no rthern Eurasia and great grasslands- il is not possible to grow enough humanly d igest ible plant foods to keep large numbers of people alive [n the

tund ra and evergreen forests average temperatures arc too low the growing sea shyson too short the surface soil too vulnerable to frost and the subso il in some areas too froze n In these environments thert~ are only two options People can remain foragers- an d primari ly hu nters seeking the fa t-ri ch species rypical of stich zones The [nu it in the North American Arctic for example hunt seal and walrus Or people can become herders like the Sami and Samoyeds of north ern Europe and northwest Asia who live off rei ndeer

Out of the Mud Farming and H erding After the Ice Age I 37

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 FORAGERS AND FARMERS COMPARED

FORAGERS FARMERS

Food procurers Food producers

hUn and gather husbandry (breed animals cultivate crops)

Fit into nature Chanampe nature

little environmental impact herders some environmental impact tillers massive environment impact

Manaampethe landscape Nature remade and reimagined

Dependence on wild animals and plants Interdependence between humans plants and animals

animals and plants exploited and domeslicated

Stable food supply Unstable food supply

nomadic fOfltlgcrs move in response 10 environmental small range of farmed foods increases vulnerability change sedentary fo ragers vulnerable to changes of climate to ecological disasters

Stable popUlation

relatively little labor needed population COlltrol avalable mainly by managed lactatioll

Expandinamp population

breeding livestock and cultivating plants leads to increased food supply increased population concentrations of domesticated animals spread disease

Stable society

kinship and age fi x ind ividuals place in sodery sexes usually share labor by spedalidng in difterent economic tasks

Radically changed unstable society

need to control labor and food distribution leads to social inequalititS work shared between the sexes increased reliance on female labor ~trong nates dewlop with powerful elites complex technologies

Similarly the soils of the world s vast grassla nds- known as prairie in North America pampa in South America steppe in Eurasia and the Sahel (sah-HEHL) in Africa- have for most of history been unfavorable for tillage (sce Map 23) The sad is mostly too difficu lt to turn without a steel plow Except for patches of excepshytionally favorable soil herding has been the only possible fo rm of husbandry in these areas The peoples of the Eurasian and Africa n grasslands were probably herdi ng by about 5000 acE Native American grassland dwellers of the New World on the othe r hand retained a foraging way of life because available species-bison various types of antelope-were (or the lIlost part more abun shydant for the hunt and less suitable fo r herding

For those who choose it herding has three special consequences First it imposshyes a mobile way of life The proportion of the population ho follow the herdsshyand in som e cases it is the enri re popu lation-cannot seuJe into permanent

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38 I CHAP TER 2

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villages Herder peoples are not ul1iLling or unable to build permanently or on a large sca le The Scythians for instance people of the -estern Asian steppe who first domesticated the horse and invented th e wheel and axle about 6000 to 7OCX years ago built impressive stone structures Bul these wefe underground tombs dwellings fo r the dead while the living inhabited temporary camps Some herding societies in Asia and Africa have become rich enough to fou nd ci ties fo r elites OT for specialists working outside of food production such as craftsmen or miners Indeed as we shall see (Chap ter 13) in the thirteenth century CF a city of thi s type Karakorum in Mongolia was one of the most admired cities in the world On the whole howshyever herding does no t favo r the development of cities o r the kind of culture that cities nourish such as monumental buildings large-scale inst itutions fo r education and the arts and ind ustrial technology

Second since herde rs breed from animal s that naturally share their grassland habitats thei r herds consist of such creatures as cattl e sheep horses goats-milkshyyielding stock To get the fu ll benefit fro m their auimals herdin g peoples have to eat dai ry products To modern milk-fed Americans this may sound perfeclly no rshyma l But it required a modification of human evolution Most people in most part s of the world do not natural1 ) produce lactase the substance that enables them to d igest milk after infancy They respond to dairy products wit h distaste or even intol erance The Masai of Kenya in East Africa get 80 percent of their energy

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

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intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

Out of t he Ice P eopling t he Eartn I 27

territo ry But their heart1and was already dr Yll the time of tne Sans firs t occupancy about 14000 years ago Tne increased rainfall that usually followed the retreaT of tbe icc hardly fell nere There are undergro und rivers but few permanent water holes The people watch fo r rare signs of rain and hurry to

gather the vegetation that accompa nies it The scrubland pla nt foods induding wa ter-bearing tubers and a kind of cact us su pply 30 percent of tnei r sustenance The rest comes from game which grazes on lough desert shrubs that humans can shynot digest

Laurens van der Post a South African adventurer who has written about the Bushmen once accompanied a band of San hunters in search of their favorite food eland a type of anteshylope O ne morning just after sunrise they found the tracks of a herd By three in the afternoon after nonstop pursuit at a tro t Bushmen Though now obliged to adopt a mixed th ey came on the herd and took aim To kill large game is almosl impossible with a oconomy su pported in part by farming and donamiddot

tions of food the San or Bushmen of southernBushmans bow He wounds the beast with a poisoned barb and fo llows it until it Africa have been among the most conservative of

drops from exhaustion and the effects of the drug before milking the kill On Ibis the worlds peoples They maintained their foragshyoCCllsion the hunters rail for twelve miles without stopping and the final mile was ing way 01 li fe essentially unchanged for millen shy

nla---desplte neighbors attempts to e~lermU1alean all-out sprint The next time they made contact with the herd one bull was seen them ThiS record of survival contrasts with the to be tiring It still took another fu ll hou r of pursuit until he fell Then wit hout rapid turnover of more ambitiOUS Civilizat ions that

pause or break for rest they were fresh enough at the end to plunge straight 3vay rad ically modify their en~lronments usually With

into the formidable task of skinning and cuning up the heavy animal l Bushm en disastrous results

who persist with thi s demanding way of life to this day are obviously pursui ng a commitment that has grown out of generations of invested emoti on As difficul t as it may be for us to understand the San would find it heart-wrenching to change a way of life for the mere sake of efficiency convenience or material ga in

In one sense the worlds food supply st ill depends o n fo raging The amount of food from hunti ng actually increased in the twentieth cen tury which may go down in history not only as the last age of hunring but as the greatest World-over today we practice a highly specialized mechanized and unu sual form of huntingshydeep-sea trawling Fish farming is likely to replace it in the future but in any case deep-sea fishing is a historical th rowback

IN PERSPECTIVE After the Ice

In the post~ke-Age world little by littl e ove r thousa nds of years rn ost societies aban doned for shy CHRONOLOGY aging and adopted fa rming or herding as the way (A N dates are apPfoximltlte-l

to get their food Among peoples who still li ve Over 3 million years ago Lucyd ose to the ice cap the Inuit remain faithfu l to 2-1 million years ago Homo erectus migrates from East Afnca 10 Afnea

their hunting tradition in North America Mos t of and EuraSia

their Old World counterparts however have long 100000 years ago Homo sapiens migrates out of Afnca

abandoned it In Eu rasia though some hunting 67000 years ago Homo sapiens in ASia 50000 years ago Homo sapiens colonizes Australia and New Guineacultures still cling to the old ways at th e eas tern

Homo sapiens reaches Europe end of Siberia the peoples on th e western Arctic 30000 years ago last Neanderthals vanishrim-the Sami (or Lapplanders) of Sca ndinavia

20000- World emerges from the Ice Age and their neighbors the Kardia Samoyeds and 15000 iICE Nenets-adopted re indee r herding over a th oushy 20000 BC pound Invent ion of the bow and arrow sand years ago The Ice- Age way oflife if not over 13000 BCpound Homo sapiens in the Americas is drawing to a close Hunting is now th ought of

28 I CHAP TE R 1

as a pri mitive way to get food long abandoned excep t as an aristoc ratic indulmiddot gellee in som e co untries or as a supposedJy manly sport in others

The disappearance of fo raging lifeways seems a rema rkable turn around for a predatorspecies such as Homo sapiells There was a time before hun ting when our ancestors were scavenge rs but for hundreds of thousands perhaps millions of years foraging was reliable and reward ing It fed people through every change of climate Its practitioners spread over th e world and adapted successfully to every kind of habitat Homo sapiens dominated every ecos)stem they became part of and competed successfully with most other species They achieved startling in shycreases in their numbers which we struggle to e(plain They founded more varied societ ies than any other species (though the differences among these societies were slight compared to later periods) They had art-rich cultures with traditions of learning and symbolic systems to record information They had their own so shycial elites polit ical customs) ambitious magic and practical methods to exploit their environ ment

Our next task is to ask why after the achievements recounted in this chapter did people abandon the foragi ng li fe Renouncing the hunt and pursuing new ways of life after the Ice Age are among the most far- reaching and mysterious transforshymations of the human past If the puzzle of hy Homo sapiens spread over the Earth is the first great questio n in our history the problem of wh) fo ragers became farmers is th e second

PROBLEMS AND PARALLELS 1 When does the story of humankind begm Is it possible to 5 Which stresses cou ld have caused early peoples to d iVide and

defme what it means to be huma n What characteristiCS do f ight eac h other Wh ich theories have been put forward for how we share with chimpanzees and other apes war started

2 How do Neandert hals and Homo floresiensis cha llenge 6 How did ma le domination come to be normal in human soc ishycommonly held definitions of Homo sapiens eties What impact did sexual econom ic specialiZa t ion have on

early SOC iet ies3 Why d id Homo sapiens migrate out of Afr ica How did migrashytion change peoples relationships with each other and wi th 7 Why was the Ice Age a time of affl uence What role did shamans thelf environment play in Ice-Age soc iety What insights Into Ice-Age societies ca n

we glean from its art and the rema ins of anc ient feasts4 What were the factors behind the rapid population growth of Homo sapiens 8 How did some SOCieties perpetuate the fOlaging li fe after the

Ice Age How has the foraging life persisted today

bull bullbull

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE A Case in Point Aboriginal Australians Preagricultural Settlements The Disadvantages of Fa rming

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS Herders Environments Tillers Environments

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE Europe Africa Asia The Pac ific Islands The Americas

SO WHY DID FARMING START Population Pressure The Outcome of Abundance The Power of Politics Cu lt Agriculture Climatic Instability Agriculture by Accident Production As an Outgrowth of Procurement

IN ERSP CT1VEmiddot Saskinamp Stability

n August 1770 the Bri tish navigator Captain James Cook reached the north

coast of Australia on the first of his spectacular voyages of exploration that

charted the lands and limits of the Pacific Ocean Ncar Cape York hc ___-~

paused at an island he named Possession Island For although his

stated purpose was scientific he was also an officer of the Royal Navy

with orders to extend the British Empire To Cooks mind the island

though inhabIted was wa iting to be grabbed The natives could not be

said to possess it because they had left no marks of possession on its soil

A wealth of plants that they could hae domesticated-fruits proper IQr

the support of mann-was growing wild Yet Cook wrote the people know nothshy

ing of cultivation It seems strange He was puzzling over one of the most pershy

plexing problems of history- the- diffe rence between forage rs and farmers food

procurers and food producers

Food is the most precious of resources Nothing Ill happen without it To most people in most societies for most of the time food is and always has been the most important thing in the world Change~ in how we get food and whether we get it arc among histors big changes During the global warming that fo ll owed the Ice Age hUSbandry-breeding animals and cultivating crops-began to replace hunting and gathering and introduced the biggest cha nge of all

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE

Husbandry happened in two distinct ways involving different tpes of environshyments and different levels of environmental intervention In some environments people could exploi t creatures that had a he rd instinct by managing the herds rather than by hunting them Breeding enhanced qualities that evolution did not necessa rily favor such as docility size and yield of meat m il k eggs and fat On the negative side close contact between humans and animals often allowed disease-bearing organisms to thrive th reatening human lives and health and sometimes unleashing plagues Otherwi se however animal husbHlIdry barely affectcd the environment Herds on the whole kept to their traditional patterns of migration and people continued to accompany them-driving the beasts now rather than follOving them Domest icated animals remained recognizably the hei rs of their wild ancestors and the landscapes through which they traveled did not change much except that the herds feeding and manure probably

32 I CHAPTER 2

encouraged the grasses they ate to flourish at the expense of othe r plant species

In other environments however plant husbandry involved massive human intervention In the long run

WHY ARE settled foragers better off than farmers tillage of the soil changed the world mo re than any previshyous innovation by Homo sapiens From postglacial m ud W HAT K INDS of environments are suited to herding people coaxed what we now call civilization-a way of

WHAT KINDS of environments were suited to early agricu lture life based on rad ically modifying the environment Inshy

W H ERE D ID farm ing start and what were t he fi rst crops stead of merely t rying to manage the landscape nature

GIVEN THE d isadvantages why did people iarm provided farmers recarved it with fields and boundaries

The rice fields of Bali in IndoneSia are among the most proo uct ive in the world usrng variet ies of rice and techniques for farming it thal are about 1000 years old Irrigation channels maintained and administered by farmers cooperatives distrrbute water everl ly among the terraces Though oflgirla l ly a lowlarld crop fa voring swampy conditions rice adapts perfec tly ro upland enVIronments and to terrace farmrng

di tches and irrigation ca nals They stamped the land with a new look a geometrical order Agric ul ture enabled humans to see the world in a new way-to imagine that magic and science had the power to change nature Such power in turn changed peoples sense of where they fit into the panorama of life on Earth Now they could become lords or in more modest moments or cultures stewards of creation

Together farm ing and herding revolutionized humans place in their ecosysshyterm Instead of merely dependi ng on other life forms to sustain us we forged a new relationship of interdependence with th ose species we eat We rely on them for food they rely on us for th eir reproduction Domesticated animals would not exist without humans Husbandr was the firs t human challenge to evolution Instead of evolvi ng species through natural selection) fa rming and herding proceed by what might be called unnatural selection-sorting and selecting by human hands for human needs according to human agendas In other words e breed livestock and cultivate plants

Herding and tilling also changed human societies By feeding people on a vastshyly greater scale agricu lture allowed societies to get hugely bigger than ever before We can only guess at the absolute figures but in areas where farming has replaced foraging in modern ti mes population has increased fifty- or even a hundredfol d Larger populations demanded new fo rms of cont rol of labor and food distribu shytion which Il1 turn nurtured strong states and powerful elites Society became more volatile and apparently less stable

In almost every case for reasons we still do not understand when people begin to practice agriculture th e pace of change quickens immeasurably and cu shymulat ively States an d civilizations do not seem to last for long Soc ieties that we think of as being most evo lved turn out to be least fitted for survival Compared with the relat ive stability of forager communities soci eties that depend on agr ishyculture are prone to lurch and coll apse History becomes a path picked amon g their ru ins

Still for Captain Cook and for most people who haye thought about it ever since it was indeed strange that people who had the opportunity to practice agrishyculture should not take advantage of it The advantages of agri culture seem so ob shyvious The farmer can select the best specimens of edible crops and creatures collect th em in the most co nvenient places and pastures crossbreed the livestock and hybridize the plants to improve size yi eld or flavo r By these methods sm all farming socie ties grow into comm unities and build up large populations Usually they go on to create ci ties and develop ever more complex technologies To Cook and his contemporaries in Europe who believed that progress was inevitable and that the same kind of changes are bound to happen everywhere peoples who dung to foraging seemed baffling

Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 33

A Case in Point Aborigina l Australians

Cook and others at the time saw only two explanations for why foragers sllch as the aborigines (AB-eh-rihj- ih-neez) in Australia would reject agriculture They were either stupid o r subhuman Indeed early European painters in Aust ralia depicted aborigines as apelike creatures grimaci ng oddl) and crawling in trees The colo nists s impl y ignored the nati es o r when they got in the way often hunted them downshyas they would beasts But not on ly did tbe native Aust ralians reject agriculture in some areas th ey appeared [0 shun every technical cO llvenience On the island o f Tasman ia in the extreme south of Australia where the natives became extinct soon after European settlement began they seemed to have forgotten every art of their ancestors bows boats even how to kindle fi rc In Arnhem Land in the extreme north they used boomerangs to make musi c but no longer as weapons for th e hunt Progress which the European discoverers of Australia believed in fervently seemed to have gone into reverse Australia was not only on the exact opposite side of the world from England it was a topsy-turvy place where everythi ng was upside down

We can hOever be certain that if aborigines rejected agriculture o r other practices Europeans considered progressive it must have been for good reasons TIle aborigines did not lack the knowledge necessary to switch from fo raging to farming had they so wished When they gathered wild yams or the root known as

James COO K from Captain Cooks Journal During his First Voyage Round the World

nardoo they ensured that enough of the plant remained in the ground to grow back In many regions too they used fire to control the grazi ng grounds of kangaroos and concentrate Ihem for hunting a common technique among herders to manage pasture and among tillers to renew the soil Along the Murray and Darling Rivers aborigines even watered and weeded wild cro ps and policed their boundaries against human and animal pred ators (sec Map 20

The abo rigi nal Australians could also have systematically planted and irrigated crops farmed the grubs they liked to eat pen ned kangashyroos and even tried to domestica te them (Kangaroos are can tankerous creatures but people do make pets o f them Breeding selected speci shymen s would probably produce a domestic strain in a few generations ) In the far no rth of Australia aboriginal communities traded with the farming cultures of New Guinea So even if they hadnt developed agrishyculture on th eir own they could have lea rned it fro m o utsi ders If the aborigines did not farm it must have been because they did not want to In short they were doing well without it Simil ar cases all over the world support this conclusion Where wild foods are abundant there is no in shycentive to do mesticate them Of course people o ften adopt p ractices that d o them no good We can concede this general principle but case by case we stiJI han t ( 0 know why

Preagricultura l Settlements

PA C IF IC

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IN 0 IA N o C E AN

Australia

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Under some conditions people can settle in one place without the trouble of farmshying Archaeological evidence in the region we now ca ll the Middle East shows this After the Ice Age ended about 15000 lJCE a frontier zone between forest and grassland stretched across the eastern sho re of the Mediterranean and what are now Iran eastern Turkey and Iraq (see Map 22) The forests were full of acorns pistachios and almonds which gatherers ground into flour and paste The grassshylands bred vast quantjties of wild grass with edible seeds These foods could all he

34 I C H A P TER 2

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Preagricultural Settlements in the Middle East

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lit O1he r prea9r icu ltural l ~n l ~men t l

a rlcierlt coast lines

warehoused between harvests and had the additional advantage of maturing at di fferent times Dense herds of gazelle in the gra sslands prov ided more nutrition for hunters to bring home Food was so plentiful that foragers did not have to move around much to fi nd it

By abou t 14000 to 15000 years ago permanent sen lements a rose th roughout the region clusters of dwelli ngs with stone wa lls or those made of wood on stone foundations or cue from soft stone and roofed with reeds The foragers who lived in th ese sedentary communities apparently kept to themselves Villages had dis shytinctive iden tit ies and habits wh ich almost amounted to badges of identity Some favored gazelle toe bones for jewelry some preferred fox teeth and partridge legs These people married within their own communities (a practi ce known as en shydogamy) judging from th e evidence of inherited physical characteristics For ex shyample in some villages people were retatimiddotely short while in others they had d istinctive dental patterns These settlers cut what look like plans of their fields on limestone slabs which suggests that they were terri torial- that they had a sense of possession that Captain Cook would have recognized

Out of the Mud Far mIng and Herding A fter tne Ice Age 35

In sum the lives of preagricultural settlers were so much like the lives of the early fa rmers who succeeded them that when anhaeologists first found the forshyagers villages in the 1930s they assumed the inhabitants were farmers Bue the setshylied foragers were 3ctuaHy better off than farmers Their rema ins on the whole show better health and nourishme nt than the fa rming peoples who followed later in the sa me region A diet rich in seeds and nuts had ground down their teeth but- unl ike the farmers-they have none of the streaked tooth -enamel common among people who suffer from food shortages

Simi la r evidence of preagricultural settlements exists in other places Take a few conspicuous examples The Jomon (JOHM-mehn ) people of central Honshu Island in Japan hved in permanent vi llages 13000 years ago feeding themselves by fishing il nd gathering acorns and chestnuts They made pots fo r display in elaboshyrate shapes modeled on flames and serpents an d lacquered them with tree sap Their potters were in a sense magicians transforming clay into objects of prestige and ritua l In the Egyp tim Sahara lit Nabta Playa about forty plant species inclu shyding sorghum a type of cereal grass grew alongside hearths and pit oven~ evi shydence of settled life from about 10000 years ago In other pa rts of (en tral Sahara in the same period that had plenty of water and a cookr climate than now foragers fou nd sorghum and millet another cereal grass At Gobekli Tepe (goh- BEHK-lee TEH-pchl a hilltop site in so utheast Turkey co ntemporaries who lived mainly by gathering wild wheat he ed seven -ton pillars from li mestone They reerected them in a sunken chamber in their village and decorated them with carvings of snakes boar gazelles cra nes and symbols that look suspiciously like writing

What was life li ke in these earliest settl ements Small permanent houses sugshygest that nuclear families-parents and children-predominated though so me sites clearty have communal work areas for grinding seeds and nuts As for who did the work the most stunn ing find ing of recent archaeology in the Middle East sugshygests that work was probably shared behleen the sexes The way skeletons are musshycled suggests th at women did slightly more kneeling (and therefore slightly more gr inding) than men and men did more throwing (and therefore more hunting) than women But both sexes did both activit ies Male and female bodies began to reconverge after a long period during which they bad evolved to look differently As food product ion replaced hunting and gathering wa r and child rearing became the main sex-specific jobs in society The convergence between th e physical feashytures of men and women seems still to be in progress today Indeed it seems to be accelerating as men and women share more and morc tasks and the need for heavshyily muscled or big framed bod ies di minishes along wi th physica ll y demanding jobs in much of the world

The Disadvantages of Farming

Prernrming comm unities do not simply progress to fann ing If foraging produces abundance and sec urity it does not necessarily follow that farming can deliver more of the same The consequences of adopting agriculture are by no means all positive In the early stages of moving from foraging to fa rm ing the food supply actually becomes less reliable because people depend on a relatively small range of fa rmed foods or even on a si ngle species As a result a community becomes vulnerable to ecological disasters Famine becomes more likely as diet narrows Moreover when people have 0 plant and grow food as weDas gather it they have to use up more energy to get the sa me amount of nourishment (Although domesmiddot ticated food s once harvested tend to be easier to process for eating) The need to

lomon pottery Ten thousand years ago the Jomon potters of Japan produced the worlds earliest knOvn earthenware vessels Other pottel)-makmg peoples also practled farm ing but the Jomon people were sedentary foragers--l lvlng in permamiddot nent or long-term settlements but managing the environment in mInimal ways and relyIng on abunshydant wild foods including nuts seeds acorns some 70 marine animal Spec ies and land mamshymals---eatmg no just boar deer and hare but also wolves Wildcats f lYing squIrrel s and mon keys

Overuse deforms bones ArchaeolO8) can reconmiddot struc t how ancient peop le b(gthaved by measuring the deformities In their skeletons The woman hose toe th is was lived In a commuMy of eady sedentary foragers In what is now Syria She evIshydently spent much of her tIme kneeling presumshyably to grlFld the acorns and kernels of Wild wheat on whIch her people re lied for food

36 I C H A P T ER 2

Early Forager Settlements (All dales are approximate)

15000 yea rs ago 14000-15000

yea rs ago 13000 years ago 10000 years ago

l

World emerges from the Ice Age Permanent settlements appear In Middle East

Honshu Island Japan

Nabta Playa Egypt GObekh Tepe Turkey

organize labor encourages inequalities and explo itation Concentrashytions of domesticated animals spread disease such as smallpox measles rubella ch icken pox influenza and tuberculosis

So the problem is really the opposite of what Cook supposed It is fanners behavior not fo ragers that is strange Husba nd ry is not a step along a march of improvement because in some ways it makes life worse No one has PU l the problem better than the histo rian of agronomy Jack L Harlan

people who do not farm do about eveq1hing that farmers do but they do lot work as hard They understand thllifc cycles of plants kno the seashysons of the year and when and where the natural plant food resources can he

Jack Harlan from Crops and Man

Chukchi herder The choice between huntmg and herding otten depends on local and historical Clrmiddot cumstances Remdeermiddotherding is an anCient pracmiddot tlce In muc h of northern Euragtla whereas irl North America the can bou have remained wild In e~treme norlheast Asia close to America the Chukchi long resisted the example of neighboring peo ple and preferred hunting 10 herding In the last two or Illree cenlurles however they have adopted the herdsman s vocat ion shown here

hareswd in great abundance with the least eff() rt There is evidence that thl diet of g-athshyering peoples was better than that of cultivators that slarvation was rare that there was a lower incidence of chronic disease and not nearly so many cavities in their teeth

The question must be raised Whr furm Vhy work harder for food less nut rishytious md a supply more capricious Why invite famine plague ~poundtilcnce and crowded living conditions 1

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

Part of what is surprising about agriculture is that it is so common Not only has almost th e entire human world adopted 1t many peoples ca me to it indepenshydently of one anot her Scholars used to su ppose that it was so extraordinary it must have begun in some particular spo t and that diffusion spread it from there- carried by migrants or conquerors or transmitted by t rade o r im itated The last 40 years of research have shown on the contrary that the transition to

food product io n happened over and over agai n in a range of regions and a variety of environments with d ifferen t foodstuffs and di fferent techn iques The most obv ious co ntrast in environ ments is betwee n herders and tillers Herd ing develops where plan ts a re tOO spa rse or indigestible to sustain human life but a nim als can convert these pla nts into meat-an energy SO UTee tha t people can access by eating th e anim als Tilling deshyvelops where th e soil is suitable or enough ecologica l di shyversity ex ists to susta in plant husbandry o r mi xed farming of plants and animals

Herders Environments

[n three regions of the Earth-tundra the evergreen foresls of no rthern Eurasia and great grasslands- il is not possible to grow enough humanly d igest ible plant foods to keep large numbers of people alive [n the

tund ra and evergreen forests average temperatures arc too low the growing sea shyson too short the surface soil too vulnerable to frost and the subso il in some areas too froze n In these environments thert~ are only two options People can remain foragers- an d primari ly hu nters seeking the fa t-ri ch species rypical of stich zones The [nu it in the North American Arctic for example hunt seal and walrus Or people can become herders like the Sami and Samoyeds of north ern Europe and northwest Asia who live off rei ndeer

Out of the Mud Farming and H erding After the Ice Age I 37

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 FORAGERS AND FARMERS COMPARED

FORAGERS FARMERS

Food procurers Food producers

hUn and gather husbandry (breed animals cultivate crops)

Fit into nature Chanampe nature

little environmental impact herders some environmental impact tillers massive environment impact

Manaampethe landscape Nature remade and reimagined

Dependence on wild animals and plants Interdependence between humans plants and animals

animals and plants exploited and domeslicated

Stable food supply Unstable food supply

nomadic fOfltlgcrs move in response 10 environmental small range of farmed foods increases vulnerability change sedentary fo ragers vulnerable to changes of climate to ecological disasters

Stable popUlation

relatively little labor needed population COlltrol avalable mainly by managed lactatioll

Expandinamp population

breeding livestock and cultivating plants leads to increased food supply increased population concentrations of domesticated animals spread disease

Stable society

kinship and age fi x ind ividuals place in sodery sexes usually share labor by spedalidng in difterent economic tasks

Radically changed unstable society

need to control labor and food distribution leads to social inequalititS work shared between the sexes increased reliance on female labor ~trong nates dewlop with powerful elites complex technologies

Similarly the soils of the world s vast grassla nds- known as prairie in North America pampa in South America steppe in Eurasia and the Sahel (sah-HEHL) in Africa- have for most of history been unfavorable for tillage (sce Map 23) The sad is mostly too difficu lt to turn without a steel plow Except for patches of excepshytionally favorable soil herding has been the only possible fo rm of husbandry in these areas The peoples of the Eurasian and Africa n grasslands were probably herdi ng by about 5000 acE Native American grassland dwellers of the New World on the othe r hand retained a foraging way of life because available species-bison various types of antelope-were (or the lIlost part more abun shydant for the hunt and less suitable fo r herding

For those who choose it herding has three special consequences First it imposshyes a mobile way of life The proportion of the population ho follow the herdsshyand in som e cases it is the enri re popu lation-cannot seuJe into permanent

--

38 I CHAP TER 2

lt ()

N 0 R A M E R

IP ralre ~ T-

- r- laquo bull- ATlANTIC

PA C IFIC ~- I DC E A No C E A shyN ~

Mh Herders Environments

1 undr~

evergreen fo rests

o gr~sslinds

Sol hunlell ind herders dlsu ibld On piges 3amp-38

KEN YA modem-day COIntry

www prenhat tcomarmesto _maps

SOU AMER I CA

bull

villages Herder peoples are not ul1iLling or unable to build permanently or on a large sca le The Scythians for instance people of the -estern Asian steppe who first domesticated the horse and invented th e wheel and axle about 6000 to 7OCX years ago built impressive stone structures Bul these wefe underground tombs dwellings fo r the dead while the living inhabited temporary camps Some herding societies in Asia and Africa have become rich enough to fou nd ci ties fo r elites OT for specialists working outside of food production such as craftsmen or miners Indeed as we shall see (Chap ter 13) in the thirteenth century CF a city of thi s type Karakorum in Mongolia was one of the most admired cities in the world On the whole howshyever herding does no t favo r the development of cities o r the kind of culture that cities nourish such as monumental buildings large-scale inst itutions fo r education and the arts and ind ustrial technology

Second since herde rs breed from animal s that naturally share their grassland habitats thei r herds consist of such creatures as cattl e sheep horses goats-milkshyyielding stock To get the fu ll benefit fro m their auimals herdin g peoples have to eat dai ry products To modern milk-fed Americans this may sound perfeclly no rshyma l But it required a modification of human evolution Most people in most part s of the world do not natural1 ) produce lactase the substance that enables them to d igest milk after infancy They respond to dairy products wit h distaste or even intol erance The Masai of Kenya in East Africa get 80 percent of their energy

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

-c

~ ~r - E u R

E St ep peU R 0 P ---6 [ -~

-shy~ c_

R I C A

h e

Il ~ KENYA

A 5 I A

MONGOlIA

A 5 I A

PACIFIC

o C E A N

IN D I A N

o C E A N bull

--~

4NT ARCTI CA

intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

28 I CHAP TE R 1

as a pri mitive way to get food long abandoned excep t as an aristoc ratic indulmiddot gellee in som e co untries or as a supposedJy manly sport in others

The disappearance of fo raging lifeways seems a rema rkable turn around for a predatorspecies such as Homo sapiells There was a time before hun ting when our ancestors were scavenge rs but for hundreds of thousands perhaps millions of years foraging was reliable and reward ing It fed people through every change of climate Its practitioners spread over th e world and adapted successfully to every kind of habitat Homo sapiens dominated every ecos)stem they became part of and competed successfully with most other species They achieved startling in shycreases in their numbers which we struggle to e(plain They founded more varied societ ies than any other species (though the differences among these societies were slight compared to later periods) They had art-rich cultures with traditions of learning and symbolic systems to record information They had their own so shycial elites polit ical customs) ambitious magic and practical methods to exploit their environ ment

Our next task is to ask why after the achievements recounted in this chapter did people abandon the foragi ng li fe Renouncing the hunt and pursuing new ways of life after the Ice Age are among the most far- reaching and mysterious transforshymations of the human past If the puzzle of hy Homo sapiens spread over the Earth is the first great questio n in our history the problem of wh) fo ragers became farmers is th e second

PROBLEMS AND PARALLELS 1 When does the story of humankind begm Is it possible to 5 Which stresses cou ld have caused early peoples to d iVide and

defme what it means to be huma n What characteristiCS do f ight eac h other Wh ich theories have been put forward for how we share with chimpanzees and other apes war started

2 How do Neandert hals and Homo floresiensis cha llenge 6 How did ma le domination come to be normal in human soc ishycommonly held definitions of Homo sapiens eties What impact did sexual econom ic specialiZa t ion have on

early SOC iet ies3 Why d id Homo sapiens migrate out of Afr ica How did migrashytion change peoples relationships with each other and wi th 7 Why was the Ice Age a time of affl uence What role did shamans thelf environment play in Ice-Age soc iety What insights Into Ice-Age societies ca n

we glean from its art and the rema ins of anc ient feasts4 What were the factors behind the rapid population growth of Homo sapiens 8 How did some SOCieties perpetuate the fOlaging li fe after the

Ice Age How has the foraging life persisted today

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THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE A Case in Point Aboriginal Australians Preagricultural Settlements The Disadvantages of Fa rming

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS Herders Environments Tillers Environments

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE Europe Africa Asia The Pac ific Islands The Americas

SO WHY DID FARMING START Population Pressure The Outcome of Abundance The Power of Politics Cu lt Agriculture Climatic Instability Agriculture by Accident Production As an Outgrowth of Procurement

IN ERSP CT1VEmiddot Saskinamp Stability

n August 1770 the Bri tish navigator Captain James Cook reached the north

coast of Australia on the first of his spectacular voyages of exploration that

charted the lands and limits of the Pacific Ocean Ncar Cape York hc ___-~

paused at an island he named Possession Island For although his

stated purpose was scientific he was also an officer of the Royal Navy

with orders to extend the British Empire To Cooks mind the island

though inhabIted was wa iting to be grabbed The natives could not be

said to possess it because they had left no marks of possession on its soil

A wealth of plants that they could hae domesticated-fruits proper IQr

the support of mann-was growing wild Yet Cook wrote the people know nothshy

ing of cultivation It seems strange He was puzzling over one of the most pershy

plexing problems of history- the- diffe rence between forage rs and farmers food

procurers and food producers

Food is the most precious of resources Nothing Ill happen without it To most people in most societies for most of the time food is and always has been the most important thing in the world Change~ in how we get food and whether we get it arc among histors big changes During the global warming that fo ll owed the Ice Age hUSbandry-breeding animals and cultivating crops-began to replace hunting and gathering and introduced the biggest cha nge of all

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE

Husbandry happened in two distinct ways involving different tpes of environshyments and different levels of environmental intervention In some environments people could exploi t creatures that had a he rd instinct by managing the herds rather than by hunting them Breeding enhanced qualities that evolution did not necessa rily favor such as docility size and yield of meat m il k eggs and fat On the negative side close contact between humans and animals often allowed disease-bearing organisms to thrive th reatening human lives and health and sometimes unleashing plagues Otherwi se however animal husbHlIdry barely affectcd the environment Herds on the whole kept to their traditional patterns of migration and people continued to accompany them-driving the beasts now rather than follOving them Domest icated animals remained recognizably the hei rs of their wild ancestors and the landscapes through which they traveled did not change much except that the herds feeding and manure probably

32 I CHAPTER 2

encouraged the grasses they ate to flourish at the expense of othe r plant species

In other environments however plant husbandry involved massive human intervention In the long run

WHY ARE settled foragers better off than farmers tillage of the soil changed the world mo re than any previshyous innovation by Homo sapiens From postglacial m ud W HAT K INDS of environments are suited to herding people coaxed what we now call civilization-a way of

WHAT KINDS of environments were suited to early agricu lture life based on rad ically modifying the environment Inshy

W H ERE D ID farm ing start and what were t he fi rst crops stead of merely t rying to manage the landscape nature

GIVEN THE d isadvantages why did people iarm provided farmers recarved it with fields and boundaries

The rice fields of Bali in IndoneSia are among the most proo uct ive in the world usrng variet ies of rice and techniques for farming it thal are about 1000 years old Irrigation channels maintained and administered by farmers cooperatives distrrbute water everl ly among the terraces Though oflgirla l ly a lowlarld crop fa voring swampy conditions rice adapts perfec tly ro upland enVIronments and to terrace farmrng

di tches and irrigation ca nals They stamped the land with a new look a geometrical order Agric ul ture enabled humans to see the world in a new way-to imagine that magic and science had the power to change nature Such power in turn changed peoples sense of where they fit into the panorama of life on Earth Now they could become lords or in more modest moments or cultures stewards of creation

Together farm ing and herding revolutionized humans place in their ecosysshyterm Instead of merely dependi ng on other life forms to sustain us we forged a new relationship of interdependence with th ose species we eat We rely on them for food they rely on us for th eir reproduction Domesticated animals would not exist without humans Husbandr was the firs t human challenge to evolution Instead of evolvi ng species through natural selection) fa rming and herding proceed by what might be called unnatural selection-sorting and selecting by human hands for human needs according to human agendas In other words e breed livestock and cultivate plants

Herding and tilling also changed human societies By feeding people on a vastshyly greater scale agricu lture allowed societies to get hugely bigger than ever before We can only guess at the absolute figures but in areas where farming has replaced foraging in modern ti mes population has increased fifty- or even a hundredfol d Larger populations demanded new fo rms of cont rol of labor and food distribu shytion which Il1 turn nurtured strong states and powerful elites Society became more volatile and apparently less stable

In almost every case for reasons we still do not understand when people begin to practice agriculture th e pace of change quickens immeasurably and cu shymulat ively States an d civilizations do not seem to last for long Soc ieties that we think of as being most evo lved turn out to be least fitted for survival Compared with the relat ive stability of forager communities soci eties that depend on agr ishyculture are prone to lurch and coll apse History becomes a path picked amon g their ru ins

Still for Captain Cook and for most people who haye thought about it ever since it was indeed strange that people who had the opportunity to practice agrishyculture should not take advantage of it The advantages of agri culture seem so ob shyvious The farmer can select the best specimens of edible crops and creatures collect th em in the most co nvenient places and pastures crossbreed the livestock and hybridize the plants to improve size yi eld or flavo r By these methods sm all farming socie ties grow into comm unities and build up large populations Usually they go on to create ci ties and develop ever more complex technologies To Cook and his contemporaries in Europe who believed that progress was inevitable and that the same kind of changes are bound to happen everywhere peoples who dung to foraging seemed baffling

Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 33

A Case in Point Aborigina l Australians

Cook and others at the time saw only two explanations for why foragers sllch as the aborigines (AB-eh-rihj- ih-neez) in Australia would reject agriculture They were either stupid o r subhuman Indeed early European painters in Aust ralia depicted aborigines as apelike creatures grimaci ng oddl) and crawling in trees The colo nists s impl y ignored the nati es o r when they got in the way often hunted them downshyas they would beasts But not on ly did tbe native Aust ralians reject agriculture in some areas th ey appeared [0 shun every technical cO llvenience On the island o f Tasman ia in the extreme south of Australia where the natives became extinct soon after European settlement began they seemed to have forgotten every art of their ancestors bows boats even how to kindle fi rc In Arnhem Land in the extreme north they used boomerangs to make musi c but no longer as weapons for th e hunt Progress which the European discoverers of Australia believed in fervently seemed to have gone into reverse Australia was not only on the exact opposite side of the world from England it was a topsy-turvy place where everythi ng was upside down

We can hOever be certain that if aborigines rejected agriculture o r other practices Europeans considered progressive it must have been for good reasons TIle aborigines did not lack the knowledge necessary to switch from fo raging to farming had they so wished When they gathered wild yams or the root known as

James COO K from Captain Cooks Journal During his First Voyage Round the World

nardoo they ensured that enough of the plant remained in the ground to grow back In many regions too they used fire to control the grazi ng grounds of kangaroos and concentrate Ihem for hunting a common technique among herders to manage pasture and among tillers to renew the soil Along the Murray and Darling Rivers aborigines even watered and weeded wild cro ps and policed their boundaries against human and animal pred ators (sec Map 20

The abo rigi nal Australians could also have systematically planted and irrigated crops farmed the grubs they liked to eat pen ned kangashyroos and even tried to domestica te them (Kangaroos are can tankerous creatures but people do make pets o f them Breeding selected speci shymen s would probably produce a domestic strain in a few generations ) In the far no rth of Australia aboriginal communities traded with the farming cultures of New Guinea So even if they hadnt developed agrishyculture on th eir own they could have lea rned it fro m o utsi ders If the aborigines did not farm it must have been because they did not want to In short they were doing well without it Simil ar cases all over the world support this conclusion Where wild foods are abundant there is no in shycentive to do mesticate them Of course people o ften adopt p ractices that d o them no good We can concede this general principle but case by case we stiJI han t ( 0 know why

Preagricultura l Settlements

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Under some conditions people can settle in one place without the trouble of farmshying Archaeological evidence in the region we now ca ll the Middle East shows this After the Ice Age ended about 15000 lJCE a frontier zone between forest and grassland stretched across the eastern sho re of the Mediterranean and what are now Iran eastern Turkey and Iraq (see Map 22) The forests were full of acorns pistachios and almonds which gatherers ground into flour and paste The grassshylands bred vast quantjties of wild grass with edible seeds These foods could all he

34 I C H A P TER 2

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warehoused between harvests and had the additional advantage of maturing at di fferent times Dense herds of gazelle in the gra sslands prov ided more nutrition for hunters to bring home Food was so plentiful that foragers did not have to move around much to fi nd it

By abou t 14000 to 15000 years ago permanent sen lements a rose th roughout the region clusters of dwelli ngs with stone wa lls or those made of wood on stone foundations or cue from soft stone and roofed with reeds The foragers who lived in th ese sedentary communities apparently kept to themselves Villages had dis shytinctive iden tit ies and habits wh ich almost amounted to badges of identity Some favored gazelle toe bones for jewelry some preferred fox teeth and partridge legs These people married within their own communities (a practi ce known as en shydogamy) judging from th e evidence of inherited physical characteristics For ex shyample in some villages people were retatimiddotely short while in others they had d istinctive dental patterns These settlers cut what look like plans of their fields on limestone slabs which suggests that they were terri torial- that they had a sense of possession that Captain Cook would have recognized

Out of the Mud Far mIng and Herding A fter tne Ice Age 35

In sum the lives of preagricultural settlers were so much like the lives of the early fa rmers who succeeded them that when anhaeologists first found the forshyagers villages in the 1930s they assumed the inhabitants were farmers Bue the setshylied foragers were 3ctuaHy better off than farmers Their rema ins on the whole show better health and nourishme nt than the fa rming peoples who followed later in the sa me region A diet rich in seeds and nuts had ground down their teeth but- unl ike the farmers-they have none of the streaked tooth -enamel common among people who suffer from food shortages

Simi la r evidence of preagricultural settlements exists in other places Take a few conspicuous examples The Jomon (JOHM-mehn ) people of central Honshu Island in Japan hved in permanent vi llages 13000 years ago feeding themselves by fishing il nd gathering acorns and chestnuts They made pots fo r display in elaboshyrate shapes modeled on flames and serpents an d lacquered them with tree sap Their potters were in a sense magicians transforming clay into objects of prestige and ritua l In the Egyp tim Sahara lit Nabta Playa about forty plant species inclu shyding sorghum a type of cereal grass grew alongside hearths and pit oven~ evi shydence of settled life from about 10000 years ago In other pa rts of (en tral Sahara in the same period that had plenty of water and a cookr climate than now foragers fou nd sorghum and millet another cereal grass At Gobekli Tepe (goh- BEHK-lee TEH-pchl a hilltop site in so utheast Turkey co ntemporaries who lived mainly by gathering wild wheat he ed seven -ton pillars from li mestone They reerected them in a sunken chamber in their village and decorated them with carvings of snakes boar gazelles cra nes and symbols that look suspiciously like writing

What was life li ke in these earliest settl ements Small permanent houses sugshygest that nuclear families-parents and children-predominated though so me sites clearty have communal work areas for grinding seeds and nuts As for who did the work the most stunn ing find ing of recent archaeology in the Middle East sugshygests that work was probably shared behleen the sexes The way skeletons are musshycled suggests th at women did slightly more kneeling (and therefore slightly more gr inding) than men and men did more throwing (and therefore more hunting) than women But both sexes did both activit ies Male and female bodies began to reconverge after a long period during which they bad evolved to look differently As food product ion replaced hunting and gathering wa r and child rearing became the main sex-specific jobs in society The convergence between th e physical feashytures of men and women seems still to be in progress today Indeed it seems to be accelerating as men and women share more and morc tasks and the need for heavshyily muscled or big framed bod ies di minishes along wi th physica ll y demanding jobs in much of the world

The Disadvantages of Farming

Prernrming comm unities do not simply progress to fann ing If foraging produces abundance and sec urity it does not necessarily follow that farming can deliver more of the same The consequences of adopting agriculture are by no means all positive In the early stages of moving from foraging to fa rm ing the food supply actually becomes less reliable because people depend on a relatively small range of fa rmed foods or even on a si ngle species As a result a community becomes vulnerable to ecological disasters Famine becomes more likely as diet narrows Moreover when people have 0 plant and grow food as weDas gather it they have to use up more energy to get the sa me amount of nourishment (Although domesmiddot ticated food s once harvested tend to be easier to process for eating) The need to

lomon pottery Ten thousand years ago the Jomon potters of Japan produced the worlds earliest knOvn earthenware vessels Other pottel)-makmg peoples also practled farm ing but the Jomon people were sedentary foragers--l lvlng in permamiddot nent or long-term settlements but managing the environment in mInimal ways and relyIng on abunshydant wild foods including nuts seeds acorns some 70 marine animal Spec ies and land mamshymals---eatmg no just boar deer and hare but also wolves Wildcats f lYing squIrrel s and mon keys

Overuse deforms bones ArchaeolO8) can reconmiddot struc t how ancient peop le b(gthaved by measuring the deformities In their skeletons The woman hose toe th is was lived In a commuMy of eady sedentary foragers In what is now Syria She evIshydently spent much of her tIme kneeling presumshyably to grlFld the acorns and kernels of Wild wheat on whIch her people re lied for food

36 I C H A P T ER 2

Early Forager Settlements (All dales are approximate)

15000 yea rs ago 14000-15000

yea rs ago 13000 years ago 10000 years ago

l

World emerges from the Ice Age Permanent settlements appear In Middle East

Honshu Island Japan

Nabta Playa Egypt GObekh Tepe Turkey

organize labor encourages inequalities and explo itation Concentrashytions of domesticated animals spread disease such as smallpox measles rubella ch icken pox influenza and tuberculosis

So the problem is really the opposite of what Cook supposed It is fanners behavior not fo ragers that is strange Husba nd ry is not a step along a march of improvement because in some ways it makes life worse No one has PU l the problem better than the histo rian of agronomy Jack L Harlan

people who do not farm do about eveq1hing that farmers do but they do lot work as hard They understand thllifc cycles of plants kno the seashysons of the year and when and where the natural plant food resources can he

Jack Harlan from Crops and Man

Chukchi herder The choice between huntmg and herding otten depends on local and historical Clrmiddot cumstances Remdeermiddotherding is an anCient pracmiddot tlce In muc h of northern Euragtla whereas irl North America the can bou have remained wild In e~treme norlheast Asia close to America the Chukchi long resisted the example of neighboring peo ple and preferred hunting 10 herding In the last two or Illree cenlurles however they have adopted the herdsman s vocat ion shown here

hareswd in great abundance with the least eff() rt There is evidence that thl diet of g-athshyering peoples was better than that of cultivators that slarvation was rare that there was a lower incidence of chronic disease and not nearly so many cavities in their teeth

The question must be raised Whr furm Vhy work harder for food less nut rishytious md a supply more capricious Why invite famine plague ~poundtilcnce and crowded living conditions 1

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

Part of what is surprising about agriculture is that it is so common Not only has almost th e entire human world adopted 1t many peoples ca me to it indepenshydently of one anot her Scholars used to su ppose that it was so extraordinary it must have begun in some particular spo t and that diffusion spread it from there- carried by migrants or conquerors or transmitted by t rade o r im itated The last 40 years of research have shown on the contrary that the transition to

food product io n happened over and over agai n in a range of regions and a variety of environments with d ifferen t foodstuffs and di fferent techn iques The most obv ious co ntrast in environ ments is betwee n herders and tillers Herd ing develops where plan ts a re tOO spa rse or indigestible to sustain human life but a nim als can convert these pla nts into meat-an energy SO UTee tha t people can access by eating th e anim als Tilling deshyvelops where th e soil is suitable or enough ecologica l di shyversity ex ists to susta in plant husbandry o r mi xed farming of plants and animals

Herders Environments

[n three regions of the Earth-tundra the evergreen foresls of no rthern Eurasia and great grasslands- il is not possible to grow enough humanly d igest ible plant foods to keep large numbers of people alive [n the

tund ra and evergreen forests average temperatures arc too low the growing sea shyson too short the surface soil too vulnerable to frost and the subso il in some areas too froze n In these environments thert~ are only two options People can remain foragers- an d primari ly hu nters seeking the fa t-ri ch species rypical of stich zones The [nu it in the North American Arctic for example hunt seal and walrus Or people can become herders like the Sami and Samoyeds of north ern Europe and northwest Asia who live off rei ndeer

Out of the Mud Farming and H erding After the Ice Age I 37

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 FORAGERS AND FARMERS COMPARED

FORAGERS FARMERS

Food procurers Food producers

hUn and gather husbandry (breed animals cultivate crops)

Fit into nature Chanampe nature

little environmental impact herders some environmental impact tillers massive environment impact

Manaampethe landscape Nature remade and reimagined

Dependence on wild animals and plants Interdependence between humans plants and animals

animals and plants exploited and domeslicated

Stable food supply Unstable food supply

nomadic fOfltlgcrs move in response 10 environmental small range of farmed foods increases vulnerability change sedentary fo ragers vulnerable to changes of climate to ecological disasters

Stable popUlation

relatively little labor needed population COlltrol avalable mainly by managed lactatioll

Expandinamp population

breeding livestock and cultivating plants leads to increased food supply increased population concentrations of domesticated animals spread disease

Stable society

kinship and age fi x ind ividuals place in sodery sexes usually share labor by spedalidng in difterent economic tasks

Radically changed unstable society

need to control labor and food distribution leads to social inequalititS work shared between the sexes increased reliance on female labor ~trong nates dewlop with powerful elites complex technologies

Similarly the soils of the world s vast grassla nds- known as prairie in North America pampa in South America steppe in Eurasia and the Sahel (sah-HEHL) in Africa- have for most of history been unfavorable for tillage (sce Map 23) The sad is mostly too difficu lt to turn without a steel plow Except for patches of excepshytionally favorable soil herding has been the only possible fo rm of husbandry in these areas The peoples of the Eurasian and Africa n grasslands were probably herdi ng by about 5000 acE Native American grassland dwellers of the New World on the othe r hand retained a foraging way of life because available species-bison various types of antelope-were (or the lIlost part more abun shydant for the hunt and less suitable fo r herding

For those who choose it herding has three special consequences First it imposshyes a mobile way of life The proportion of the population ho follow the herdsshyand in som e cases it is the enri re popu lation-cannot seuJe into permanent

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38 I CHAP TER 2

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villages Herder peoples are not ul1iLling or unable to build permanently or on a large sca le The Scythians for instance people of the -estern Asian steppe who first domesticated the horse and invented th e wheel and axle about 6000 to 7OCX years ago built impressive stone structures Bul these wefe underground tombs dwellings fo r the dead while the living inhabited temporary camps Some herding societies in Asia and Africa have become rich enough to fou nd ci ties fo r elites OT for specialists working outside of food production such as craftsmen or miners Indeed as we shall see (Chap ter 13) in the thirteenth century CF a city of thi s type Karakorum in Mongolia was one of the most admired cities in the world On the whole howshyever herding does no t favo r the development of cities o r the kind of culture that cities nourish such as monumental buildings large-scale inst itutions fo r education and the arts and ind ustrial technology

Second since herde rs breed from animal s that naturally share their grassland habitats thei r herds consist of such creatures as cattl e sheep horses goats-milkshyyielding stock To get the fu ll benefit fro m their auimals herdin g peoples have to eat dai ry products To modern milk-fed Americans this may sound perfeclly no rshyma l But it required a modification of human evolution Most people in most part s of the world do not natural1 ) produce lactase the substance that enables them to d igest milk after infancy They respond to dairy products wit h distaste or even intol erance The Masai of Kenya in East Africa get 80 percent of their energy

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

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4NT ARCTI CA

intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

bull bullbull

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE A Case in Point Aboriginal Australians Preagricultural Settlements The Disadvantages of Fa rming

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS Herders Environments Tillers Environments

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE Europe Africa Asia The Pac ific Islands The Americas

SO WHY DID FARMING START Population Pressure The Outcome of Abundance The Power of Politics Cu lt Agriculture Climatic Instability Agriculture by Accident Production As an Outgrowth of Procurement

IN ERSP CT1VEmiddot Saskinamp Stability

n August 1770 the Bri tish navigator Captain James Cook reached the north

coast of Australia on the first of his spectacular voyages of exploration that

charted the lands and limits of the Pacific Ocean Ncar Cape York hc ___-~

paused at an island he named Possession Island For although his

stated purpose was scientific he was also an officer of the Royal Navy

with orders to extend the British Empire To Cooks mind the island

though inhabIted was wa iting to be grabbed The natives could not be

said to possess it because they had left no marks of possession on its soil

A wealth of plants that they could hae domesticated-fruits proper IQr

the support of mann-was growing wild Yet Cook wrote the people know nothshy

ing of cultivation It seems strange He was puzzling over one of the most pershy

plexing problems of history- the- diffe rence between forage rs and farmers food

procurers and food producers

Food is the most precious of resources Nothing Ill happen without it To most people in most societies for most of the time food is and always has been the most important thing in the world Change~ in how we get food and whether we get it arc among histors big changes During the global warming that fo ll owed the Ice Age hUSbandry-breeding animals and cultivating crops-began to replace hunting and gathering and introduced the biggest cha nge of all

THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURE

Husbandry happened in two distinct ways involving different tpes of environshyments and different levels of environmental intervention In some environments people could exploi t creatures that had a he rd instinct by managing the herds rather than by hunting them Breeding enhanced qualities that evolution did not necessa rily favor such as docility size and yield of meat m il k eggs and fat On the negative side close contact between humans and animals often allowed disease-bearing organisms to thrive th reatening human lives and health and sometimes unleashing plagues Otherwi se however animal husbHlIdry barely affectcd the environment Herds on the whole kept to their traditional patterns of migration and people continued to accompany them-driving the beasts now rather than follOving them Domest icated animals remained recognizably the hei rs of their wild ancestors and the landscapes through which they traveled did not change much except that the herds feeding and manure probably

32 I CHAPTER 2

encouraged the grasses they ate to flourish at the expense of othe r plant species

In other environments however plant husbandry involved massive human intervention In the long run

WHY ARE settled foragers better off than farmers tillage of the soil changed the world mo re than any previshyous innovation by Homo sapiens From postglacial m ud W HAT K INDS of environments are suited to herding people coaxed what we now call civilization-a way of

WHAT KINDS of environments were suited to early agricu lture life based on rad ically modifying the environment Inshy

W H ERE D ID farm ing start and what were t he fi rst crops stead of merely t rying to manage the landscape nature

GIVEN THE d isadvantages why did people iarm provided farmers recarved it with fields and boundaries

The rice fields of Bali in IndoneSia are among the most proo uct ive in the world usrng variet ies of rice and techniques for farming it thal are about 1000 years old Irrigation channels maintained and administered by farmers cooperatives distrrbute water everl ly among the terraces Though oflgirla l ly a lowlarld crop fa voring swampy conditions rice adapts perfec tly ro upland enVIronments and to terrace farmrng

di tches and irrigation ca nals They stamped the land with a new look a geometrical order Agric ul ture enabled humans to see the world in a new way-to imagine that magic and science had the power to change nature Such power in turn changed peoples sense of where they fit into the panorama of life on Earth Now they could become lords or in more modest moments or cultures stewards of creation

Together farm ing and herding revolutionized humans place in their ecosysshyterm Instead of merely dependi ng on other life forms to sustain us we forged a new relationship of interdependence with th ose species we eat We rely on them for food they rely on us for th eir reproduction Domesticated animals would not exist without humans Husbandr was the firs t human challenge to evolution Instead of evolvi ng species through natural selection) fa rming and herding proceed by what might be called unnatural selection-sorting and selecting by human hands for human needs according to human agendas In other words e breed livestock and cultivate plants

Herding and tilling also changed human societies By feeding people on a vastshyly greater scale agricu lture allowed societies to get hugely bigger than ever before We can only guess at the absolute figures but in areas where farming has replaced foraging in modern ti mes population has increased fifty- or even a hundredfol d Larger populations demanded new fo rms of cont rol of labor and food distribu shytion which Il1 turn nurtured strong states and powerful elites Society became more volatile and apparently less stable

In almost every case for reasons we still do not understand when people begin to practice agriculture th e pace of change quickens immeasurably and cu shymulat ively States an d civilizations do not seem to last for long Soc ieties that we think of as being most evo lved turn out to be least fitted for survival Compared with the relat ive stability of forager communities soci eties that depend on agr ishyculture are prone to lurch and coll apse History becomes a path picked amon g their ru ins

Still for Captain Cook and for most people who haye thought about it ever since it was indeed strange that people who had the opportunity to practice agrishyculture should not take advantage of it The advantages of agri culture seem so ob shyvious The farmer can select the best specimens of edible crops and creatures collect th em in the most co nvenient places and pastures crossbreed the livestock and hybridize the plants to improve size yi eld or flavo r By these methods sm all farming socie ties grow into comm unities and build up large populations Usually they go on to create ci ties and develop ever more complex technologies To Cook and his contemporaries in Europe who believed that progress was inevitable and that the same kind of changes are bound to happen everywhere peoples who dung to foraging seemed baffling

Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 33

A Case in Point Aborigina l Australians

Cook and others at the time saw only two explanations for why foragers sllch as the aborigines (AB-eh-rihj- ih-neez) in Australia would reject agriculture They were either stupid o r subhuman Indeed early European painters in Aust ralia depicted aborigines as apelike creatures grimaci ng oddl) and crawling in trees The colo nists s impl y ignored the nati es o r when they got in the way often hunted them downshyas they would beasts But not on ly did tbe native Aust ralians reject agriculture in some areas th ey appeared [0 shun every technical cO llvenience On the island o f Tasman ia in the extreme south of Australia where the natives became extinct soon after European settlement began they seemed to have forgotten every art of their ancestors bows boats even how to kindle fi rc In Arnhem Land in the extreme north they used boomerangs to make musi c but no longer as weapons for th e hunt Progress which the European discoverers of Australia believed in fervently seemed to have gone into reverse Australia was not only on the exact opposite side of the world from England it was a topsy-turvy place where everythi ng was upside down

We can hOever be certain that if aborigines rejected agriculture o r other practices Europeans considered progressive it must have been for good reasons TIle aborigines did not lack the knowledge necessary to switch from fo raging to farming had they so wished When they gathered wild yams or the root known as

James COO K from Captain Cooks Journal During his First Voyage Round the World

nardoo they ensured that enough of the plant remained in the ground to grow back In many regions too they used fire to control the grazi ng grounds of kangaroos and concentrate Ihem for hunting a common technique among herders to manage pasture and among tillers to renew the soil Along the Murray and Darling Rivers aborigines even watered and weeded wild cro ps and policed their boundaries against human and animal pred ators (sec Map 20

The abo rigi nal Australians could also have systematically planted and irrigated crops farmed the grubs they liked to eat pen ned kangashyroos and even tried to domestica te them (Kangaroos are can tankerous creatures but people do make pets o f them Breeding selected speci shymen s would probably produce a domestic strain in a few generations ) In the far no rth of Australia aboriginal communities traded with the farming cultures of New Guinea So even if they hadnt developed agrishyculture on th eir own they could have lea rned it fro m o utsi ders If the aborigines did not farm it must have been because they did not want to In short they were doing well without it Simil ar cases all over the world support this conclusion Where wild foods are abundant there is no in shycentive to do mesticate them Of course people o ften adopt p ractices that d o them no good We can concede this general principle but case by case we stiJI han t ( 0 know why

Preagricultura l Settlements

PA C IF IC

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Under some conditions people can settle in one place without the trouble of farmshying Archaeological evidence in the region we now ca ll the Middle East shows this After the Ice Age ended about 15000 lJCE a frontier zone between forest and grassland stretched across the eastern sho re of the Mediterranean and what are now Iran eastern Turkey and Iraq (see Map 22) The forests were full of acorns pistachios and almonds which gatherers ground into flour and paste The grassshylands bred vast quantjties of wild grass with edible seeds These foods could all he

34 I C H A P TER 2

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Preagricultural Settlements in the Middle East

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warehoused between harvests and had the additional advantage of maturing at di fferent times Dense herds of gazelle in the gra sslands prov ided more nutrition for hunters to bring home Food was so plentiful that foragers did not have to move around much to fi nd it

By abou t 14000 to 15000 years ago permanent sen lements a rose th roughout the region clusters of dwelli ngs with stone wa lls or those made of wood on stone foundations or cue from soft stone and roofed with reeds The foragers who lived in th ese sedentary communities apparently kept to themselves Villages had dis shytinctive iden tit ies and habits wh ich almost amounted to badges of identity Some favored gazelle toe bones for jewelry some preferred fox teeth and partridge legs These people married within their own communities (a practi ce known as en shydogamy) judging from th e evidence of inherited physical characteristics For ex shyample in some villages people were retatimiddotely short while in others they had d istinctive dental patterns These settlers cut what look like plans of their fields on limestone slabs which suggests that they were terri torial- that they had a sense of possession that Captain Cook would have recognized

Out of the Mud Far mIng and Herding A fter tne Ice Age 35

In sum the lives of preagricultural settlers were so much like the lives of the early fa rmers who succeeded them that when anhaeologists first found the forshyagers villages in the 1930s they assumed the inhabitants were farmers Bue the setshylied foragers were 3ctuaHy better off than farmers Their rema ins on the whole show better health and nourishme nt than the fa rming peoples who followed later in the sa me region A diet rich in seeds and nuts had ground down their teeth but- unl ike the farmers-they have none of the streaked tooth -enamel common among people who suffer from food shortages

Simi la r evidence of preagricultural settlements exists in other places Take a few conspicuous examples The Jomon (JOHM-mehn ) people of central Honshu Island in Japan hved in permanent vi llages 13000 years ago feeding themselves by fishing il nd gathering acorns and chestnuts They made pots fo r display in elaboshyrate shapes modeled on flames and serpents an d lacquered them with tree sap Their potters were in a sense magicians transforming clay into objects of prestige and ritua l In the Egyp tim Sahara lit Nabta Playa about forty plant species inclu shyding sorghum a type of cereal grass grew alongside hearths and pit oven~ evi shydence of settled life from about 10000 years ago In other pa rts of (en tral Sahara in the same period that had plenty of water and a cookr climate than now foragers fou nd sorghum and millet another cereal grass At Gobekli Tepe (goh- BEHK-lee TEH-pchl a hilltop site in so utheast Turkey co ntemporaries who lived mainly by gathering wild wheat he ed seven -ton pillars from li mestone They reerected them in a sunken chamber in their village and decorated them with carvings of snakes boar gazelles cra nes and symbols that look suspiciously like writing

What was life li ke in these earliest settl ements Small permanent houses sugshygest that nuclear families-parents and children-predominated though so me sites clearty have communal work areas for grinding seeds and nuts As for who did the work the most stunn ing find ing of recent archaeology in the Middle East sugshygests that work was probably shared behleen the sexes The way skeletons are musshycled suggests th at women did slightly more kneeling (and therefore slightly more gr inding) than men and men did more throwing (and therefore more hunting) than women But both sexes did both activit ies Male and female bodies began to reconverge after a long period during which they bad evolved to look differently As food product ion replaced hunting and gathering wa r and child rearing became the main sex-specific jobs in society The convergence between th e physical feashytures of men and women seems still to be in progress today Indeed it seems to be accelerating as men and women share more and morc tasks and the need for heavshyily muscled or big framed bod ies di minishes along wi th physica ll y demanding jobs in much of the world

The Disadvantages of Farming

Prernrming comm unities do not simply progress to fann ing If foraging produces abundance and sec urity it does not necessarily follow that farming can deliver more of the same The consequences of adopting agriculture are by no means all positive In the early stages of moving from foraging to fa rm ing the food supply actually becomes less reliable because people depend on a relatively small range of fa rmed foods or even on a si ngle species As a result a community becomes vulnerable to ecological disasters Famine becomes more likely as diet narrows Moreover when people have 0 plant and grow food as weDas gather it they have to use up more energy to get the sa me amount of nourishment (Although domesmiddot ticated food s once harvested tend to be easier to process for eating) The need to

lomon pottery Ten thousand years ago the Jomon potters of Japan produced the worlds earliest knOvn earthenware vessels Other pottel)-makmg peoples also practled farm ing but the Jomon people were sedentary foragers--l lvlng in permamiddot nent or long-term settlements but managing the environment in mInimal ways and relyIng on abunshydant wild foods including nuts seeds acorns some 70 marine animal Spec ies and land mamshymals---eatmg no just boar deer and hare but also wolves Wildcats f lYing squIrrel s and mon keys

Overuse deforms bones ArchaeolO8) can reconmiddot struc t how ancient peop le b(gthaved by measuring the deformities In their skeletons The woman hose toe th is was lived In a commuMy of eady sedentary foragers In what is now Syria She evIshydently spent much of her tIme kneeling presumshyably to grlFld the acorns and kernels of Wild wheat on whIch her people re lied for food

36 I C H A P T ER 2

Early Forager Settlements (All dales are approximate)

15000 yea rs ago 14000-15000

yea rs ago 13000 years ago 10000 years ago

l

World emerges from the Ice Age Permanent settlements appear In Middle East

Honshu Island Japan

Nabta Playa Egypt GObekh Tepe Turkey

organize labor encourages inequalities and explo itation Concentrashytions of domesticated animals spread disease such as smallpox measles rubella ch icken pox influenza and tuberculosis

So the problem is really the opposite of what Cook supposed It is fanners behavior not fo ragers that is strange Husba nd ry is not a step along a march of improvement because in some ways it makes life worse No one has PU l the problem better than the histo rian of agronomy Jack L Harlan

people who do not farm do about eveq1hing that farmers do but they do lot work as hard They understand thllifc cycles of plants kno the seashysons of the year and when and where the natural plant food resources can he

Jack Harlan from Crops and Man

Chukchi herder The choice between huntmg and herding otten depends on local and historical Clrmiddot cumstances Remdeermiddotherding is an anCient pracmiddot tlce In muc h of northern Euragtla whereas irl North America the can bou have remained wild In e~treme norlheast Asia close to America the Chukchi long resisted the example of neighboring peo ple and preferred hunting 10 herding In the last two or Illree cenlurles however they have adopted the herdsman s vocat ion shown here

hareswd in great abundance with the least eff() rt There is evidence that thl diet of g-athshyering peoples was better than that of cultivators that slarvation was rare that there was a lower incidence of chronic disease and not nearly so many cavities in their teeth

The question must be raised Whr furm Vhy work harder for food less nut rishytious md a supply more capricious Why invite famine plague ~poundtilcnce and crowded living conditions 1

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

Part of what is surprising about agriculture is that it is so common Not only has almost th e entire human world adopted 1t many peoples ca me to it indepenshydently of one anot her Scholars used to su ppose that it was so extraordinary it must have begun in some particular spo t and that diffusion spread it from there- carried by migrants or conquerors or transmitted by t rade o r im itated The last 40 years of research have shown on the contrary that the transition to

food product io n happened over and over agai n in a range of regions and a variety of environments with d ifferen t foodstuffs and di fferent techn iques The most obv ious co ntrast in environ ments is betwee n herders and tillers Herd ing develops where plan ts a re tOO spa rse or indigestible to sustain human life but a nim als can convert these pla nts into meat-an energy SO UTee tha t people can access by eating th e anim als Tilling deshyvelops where th e soil is suitable or enough ecologica l di shyversity ex ists to susta in plant husbandry o r mi xed farming of plants and animals

Herders Environments

[n three regions of the Earth-tundra the evergreen foresls of no rthern Eurasia and great grasslands- il is not possible to grow enough humanly d igest ible plant foods to keep large numbers of people alive [n the

tund ra and evergreen forests average temperatures arc too low the growing sea shyson too short the surface soil too vulnerable to frost and the subso il in some areas too froze n In these environments thert~ are only two options People can remain foragers- an d primari ly hu nters seeking the fa t-ri ch species rypical of stich zones The [nu it in the North American Arctic for example hunt seal and walrus Or people can become herders like the Sami and Samoyeds of north ern Europe and northwest Asia who live off rei ndeer

Out of the Mud Farming and H erding After the Ice Age I 37

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 FORAGERS AND FARMERS COMPARED

FORAGERS FARMERS

Food procurers Food producers

hUn and gather husbandry (breed animals cultivate crops)

Fit into nature Chanampe nature

little environmental impact herders some environmental impact tillers massive environment impact

Manaampethe landscape Nature remade and reimagined

Dependence on wild animals and plants Interdependence between humans plants and animals

animals and plants exploited and domeslicated

Stable food supply Unstable food supply

nomadic fOfltlgcrs move in response 10 environmental small range of farmed foods increases vulnerability change sedentary fo ragers vulnerable to changes of climate to ecological disasters

Stable popUlation

relatively little labor needed population COlltrol avalable mainly by managed lactatioll

Expandinamp population

breeding livestock and cultivating plants leads to increased food supply increased population concentrations of domesticated animals spread disease

Stable society

kinship and age fi x ind ividuals place in sodery sexes usually share labor by spedalidng in difterent economic tasks

Radically changed unstable society

need to control labor and food distribution leads to social inequalititS work shared between the sexes increased reliance on female labor ~trong nates dewlop with powerful elites complex technologies

Similarly the soils of the world s vast grassla nds- known as prairie in North America pampa in South America steppe in Eurasia and the Sahel (sah-HEHL) in Africa- have for most of history been unfavorable for tillage (sce Map 23) The sad is mostly too difficu lt to turn without a steel plow Except for patches of excepshytionally favorable soil herding has been the only possible fo rm of husbandry in these areas The peoples of the Eurasian and Africa n grasslands were probably herdi ng by about 5000 acE Native American grassland dwellers of the New World on the othe r hand retained a foraging way of life because available species-bison various types of antelope-were (or the lIlost part more abun shydant for the hunt and less suitable fo r herding

For those who choose it herding has three special consequences First it imposshyes a mobile way of life The proportion of the population ho follow the herdsshyand in som e cases it is the enri re popu lation-cannot seuJe into permanent

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38 I CHAP TER 2

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villages Herder peoples are not ul1iLling or unable to build permanently or on a large sca le The Scythians for instance people of the -estern Asian steppe who first domesticated the horse and invented th e wheel and axle about 6000 to 7OCX years ago built impressive stone structures Bul these wefe underground tombs dwellings fo r the dead while the living inhabited temporary camps Some herding societies in Asia and Africa have become rich enough to fou nd ci ties fo r elites OT for specialists working outside of food production such as craftsmen or miners Indeed as we shall see (Chap ter 13) in the thirteenth century CF a city of thi s type Karakorum in Mongolia was one of the most admired cities in the world On the whole howshyever herding does no t favo r the development of cities o r the kind of culture that cities nourish such as monumental buildings large-scale inst itutions fo r education and the arts and ind ustrial technology

Second since herde rs breed from animal s that naturally share their grassland habitats thei r herds consist of such creatures as cattl e sheep horses goats-milkshyyielding stock To get the fu ll benefit fro m their auimals herdin g peoples have to eat dai ry products To modern milk-fed Americans this may sound perfeclly no rshyma l But it required a modification of human evolution Most people in most part s of the world do not natural1 ) produce lactase the substance that enables them to d igest milk after infancy They respond to dairy products wit h distaste or even intol erance The Masai of Kenya in East Africa get 80 percent of their energy

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

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intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

32 I CHAPTER 2

encouraged the grasses they ate to flourish at the expense of othe r plant species

In other environments however plant husbandry involved massive human intervention In the long run

WHY ARE settled foragers better off than farmers tillage of the soil changed the world mo re than any previshyous innovation by Homo sapiens From postglacial m ud W HAT K INDS of environments are suited to herding people coaxed what we now call civilization-a way of

WHAT KINDS of environments were suited to early agricu lture life based on rad ically modifying the environment Inshy

W H ERE D ID farm ing start and what were t he fi rst crops stead of merely t rying to manage the landscape nature

GIVEN THE d isadvantages why did people iarm provided farmers recarved it with fields and boundaries

The rice fields of Bali in IndoneSia are among the most proo uct ive in the world usrng variet ies of rice and techniques for farming it thal are about 1000 years old Irrigation channels maintained and administered by farmers cooperatives distrrbute water everl ly among the terraces Though oflgirla l ly a lowlarld crop fa voring swampy conditions rice adapts perfec tly ro upland enVIronments and to terrace farmrng

di tches and irrigation ca nals They stamped the land with a new look a geometrical order Agric ul ture enabled humans to see the world in a new way-to imagine that magic and science had the power to change nature Such power in turn changed peoples sense of where they fit into the panorama of life on Earth Now they could become lords or in more modest moments or cultures stewards of creation

Together farm ing and herding revolutionized humans place in their ecosysshyterm Instead of merely dependi ng on other life forms to sustain us we forged a new relationship of interdependence with th ose species we eat We rely on them for food they rely on us for th eir reproduction Domesticated animals would not exist without humans Husbandr was the firs t human challenge to evolution Instead of evolvi ng species through natural selection) fa rming and herding proceed by what might be called unnatural selection-sorting and selecting by human hands for human needs according to human agendas In other words e breed livestock and cultivate plants

Herding and tilling also changed human societies By feeding people on a vastshyly greater scale agricu lture allowed societies to get hugely bigger than ever before We can only guess at the absolute figures but in areas where farming has replaced foraging in modern ti mes population has increased fifty- or even a hundredfol d Larger populations demanded new fo rms of cont rol of labor and food distribu shytion which Il1 turn nurtured strong states and powerful elites Society became more volatile and apparently less stable

In almost every case for reasons we still do not understand when people begin to practice agriculture th e pace of change quickens immeasurably and cu shymulat ively States an d civilizations do not seem to last for long Soc ieties that we think of as being most evo lved turn out to be least fitted for survival Compared with the relat ive stability of forager communities soci eties that depend on agr ishyculture are prone to lurch and coll apse History becomes a path picked amon g their ru ins

Still for Captain Cook and for most people who haye thought about it ever since it was indeed strange that people who had the opportunity to practice agrishyculture should not take advantage of it The advantages of agri culture seem so ob shyvious The farmer can select the best specimens of edible crops and creatures collect th em in the most co nvenient places and pastures crossbreed the livestock and hybridize the plants to improve size yi eld or flavo r By these methods sm all farming socie ties grow into comm unities and build up large populations Usually they go on to create ci ties and develop ever more complex technologies To Cook and his contemporaries in Europe who believed that progress was inevitable and that the same kind of changes are bound to happen everywhere peoples who dung to foraging seemed baffling

Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 33

A Case in Point Aborigina l Australians

Cook and others at the time saw only two explanations for why foragers sllch as the aborigines (AB-eh-rihj- ih-neez) in Australia would reject agriculture They were either stupid o r subhuman Indeed early European painters in Aust ralia depicted aborigines as apelike creatures grimaci ng oddl) and crawling in trees The colo nists s impl y ignored the nati es o r when they got in the way often hunted them downshyas they would beasts But not on ly did tbe native Aust ralians reject agriculture in some areas th ey appeared [0 shun every technical cO llvenience On the island o f Tasman ia in the extreme south of Australia where the natives became extinct soon after European settlement began they seemed to have forgotten every art of their ancestors bows boats even how to kindle fi rc In Arnhem Land in the extreme north they used boomerangs to make musi c but no longer as weapons for th e hunt Progress which the European discoverers of Australia believed in fervently seemed to have gone into reverse Australia was not only on the exact opposite side of the world from England it was a topsy-turvy place where everythi ng was upside down

We can hOever be certain that if aborigines rejected agriculture o r other practices Europeans considered progressive it must have been for good reasons TIle aborigines did not lack the knowledge necessary to switch from fo raging to farming had they so wished When they gathered wild yams or the root known as

James COO K from Captain Cooks Journal During his First Voyage Round the World

nardoo they ensured that enough of the plant remained in the ground to grow back In many regions too they used fire to control the grazi ng grounds of kangaroos and concentrate Ihem for hunting a common technique among herders to manage pasture and among tillers to renew the soil Along the Murray and Darling Rivers aborigines even watered and weeded wild cro ps and policed their boundaries against human and animal pred ators (sec Map 20

The abo rigi nal Australians could also have systematically planted and irrigated crops farmed the grubs they liked to eat pen ned kangashyroos and even tried to domestica te them (Kangaroos are can tankerous creatures but people do make pets o f them Breeding selected speci shymen s would probably produce a domestic strain in a few generations ) In the far no rth of Australia aboriginal communities traded with the farming cultures of New Guinea So even if they hadnt developed agrishyculture on th eir own they could have lea rned it fro m o utsi ders If the aborigines did not farm it must have been because they did not want to In short they were doing well without it Simil ar cases all over the world support this conclusion Where wild foods are abundant there is no in shycentive to do mesticate them Of course people o ften adopt p ractices that d o them no good We can concede this general principle but case by case we stiJI han t ( 0 know why

Preagricultura l Settlements

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Under some conditions people can settle in one place without the trouble of farmshying Archaeological evidence in the region we now ca ll the Middle East shows this After the Ice Age ended about 15000 lJCE a frontier zone between forest and grassland stretched across the eastern sho re of the Mediterranean and what are now Iran eastern Turkey and Iraq (see Map 22) The forests were full of acorns pistachios and almonds which gatherers ground into flour and paste The grassshylands bred vast quantjties of wild grass with edible seeds These foods could all he

34 I C H A P TER 2

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warehoused between harvests and had the additional advantage of maturing at di fferent times Dense herds of gazelle in the gra sslands prov ided more nutrition for hunters to bring home Food was so plentiful that foragers did not have to move around much to fi nd it

By abou t 14000 to 15000 years ago permanent sen lements a rose th roughout the region clusters of dwelli ngs with stone wa lls or those made of wood on stone foundations or cue from soft stone and roofed with reeds The foragers who lived in th ese sedentary communities apparently kept to themselves Villages had dis shytinctive iden tit ies and habits wh ich almost amounted to badges of identity Some favored gazelle toe bones for jewelry some preferred fox teeth and partridge legs These people married within their own communities (a practi ce known as en shydogamy) judging from th e evidence of inherited physical characteristics For ex shyample in some villages people were retatimiddotely short while in others they had d istinctive dental patterns These settlers cut what look like plans of their fields on limestone slabs which suggests that they were terri torial- that they had a sense of possession that Captain Cook would have recognized

Out of the Mud Far mIng and Herding A fter tne Ice Age 35

In sum the lives of preagricultural settlers were so much like the lives of the early fa rmers who succeeded them that when anhaeologists first found the forshyagers villages in the 1930s they assumed the inhabitants were farmers Bue the setshylied foragers were 3ctuaHy better off than farmers Their rema ins on the whole show better health and nourishme nt than the fa rming peoples who followed later in the sa me region A diet rich in seeds and nuts had ground down their teeth but- unl ike the farmers-they have none of the streaked tooth -enamel common among people who suffer from food shortages

Simi la r evidence of preagricultural settlements exists in other places Take a few conspicuous examples The Jomon (JOHM-mehn ) people of central Honshu Island in Japan hved in permanent vi llages 13000 years ago feeding themselves by fishing il nd gathering acorns and chestnuts They made pots fo r display in elaboshyrate shapes modeled on flames and serpents an d lacquered them with tree sap Their potters were in a sense magicians transforming clay into objects of prestige and ritua l In the Egyp tim Sahara lit Nabta Playa about forty plant species inclu shyding sorghum a type of cereal grass grew alongside hearths and pit oven~ evi shydence of settled life from about 10000 years ago In other pa rts of (en tral Sahara in the same period that had plenty of water and a cookr climate than now foragers fou nd sorghum and millet another cereal grass At Gobekli Tepe (goh- BEHK-lee TEH-pchl a hilltop site in so utheast Turkey co ntemporaries who lived mainly by gathering wild wheat he ed seven -ton pillars from li mestone They reerected them in a sunken chamber in their village and decorated them with carvings of snakes boar gazelles cra nes and symbols that look suspiciously like writing

What was life li ke in these earliest settl ements Small permanent houses sugshygest that nuclear families-parents and children-predominated though so me sites clearty have communal work areas for grinding seeds and nuts As for who did the work the most stunn ing find ing of recent archaeology in the Middle East sugshygests that work was probably shared behleen the sexes The way skeletons are musshycled suggests th at women did slightly more kneeling (and therefore slightly more gr inding) than men and men did more throwing (and therefore more hunting) than women But both sexes did both activit ies Male and female bodies began to reconverge after a long period during which they bad evolved to look differently As food product ion replaced hunting and gathering wa r and child rearing became the main sex-specific jobs in society The convergence between th e physical feashytures of men and women seems still to be in progress today Indeed it seems to be accelerating as men and women share more and morc tasks and the need for heavshyily muscled or big framed bod ies di minishes along wi th physica ll y demanding jobs in much of the world

The Disadvantages of Farming

Prernrming comm unities do not simply progress to fann ing If foraging produces abundance and sec urity it does not necessarily follow that farming can deliver more of the same The consequences of adopting agriculture are by no means all positive In the early stages of moving from foraging to fa rm ing the food supply actually becomes less reliable because people depend on a relatively small range of fa rmed foods or even on a si ngle species As a result a community becomes vulnerable to ecological disasters Famine becomes more likely as diet narrows Moreover when people have 0 plant and grow food as weDas gather it they have to use up more energy to get the sa me amount of nourishment (Although domesmiddot ticated food s once harvested tend to be easier to process for eating) The need to

lomon pottery Ten thousand years ago the Jomon potters of Japan produced the worlds earliest knOvn earthenware vessels Other pottel)-makmg peoples also practled farm ing but the Jomon people were sedentary foragers--l lvlng in permamiddot nent or long-term settlements but managing the environment in mInimal ways and relyIng on abunshydant wild foods including nuts seeds acorns some 70 marine animal Spec ies and land mamshymals---eatmg no just boar deer and hare but also wolves Wildcats f lYing squIrrel s and mon keys

Overuse deforms bones ArchaeolO8) can reconmiddot struc t how ancient peop le b(gthaved by measuring the deformities In their skeletons The woman hose toe th is was lived In a commuMy of eady sedentary foragers In what is now Syria She evIshydently spent much of her tIme kneeling presumshyably to grlFld the acorns and kernels of Wild wheat on whIch her people re lied for food

36 I C H A P T ER 2

Early Forager Settlements (All dales are approximate)

15000 yea rs ago 14000-15000

yea rs ago 13000 years ago 10000 years ago

l

World emerges from the Ice Age Permanent settlements appear In Middle East

Honshu Island Japan

Nabta Playa Egypt GObekh Tepe Turkey

organize labor encourages inequalities and explo itation Concentrashytions of domesticated animals spread disease such as smallpox measles rubella ch icken pox influenza and tuberculosis

So the problem is really the opposite of what Cook supposed It is fanners behavior not fo ragers that is strange Husba nd ry is not a step along a march of improvement because in some ways it makes life worse No one has PU l the problem better than the histo rian of agronomy Jack L Harlan

people who do not farm do about eveq1hing that farmers do but they do lot work as hard They understand thllifc cycles of plants kno the seashysons of the year and when and where the natural plant food resources can he

Jack Harlan from Crops and Man

Chukchi herder The choice between huntmg and herding otten depends on local and historical Clrmiddot cumstances Remdeermiddotherding is an anCient pracmiddot tlce In muc h of northern Euragtla whereas irl North America the can bou have remained wild In e~treme norlheast Asia close to America the Chukchi long resisted the example of neighboring peo ple and preferred hunting 10 herding In the last two or Illree cenlurles however they have adopted the herdsman s vocat ion shown here

hareswd in great abundance with the least eff() rt There is evidence that thl diet of g-athshyering peoples was better than that of cultivators that slarvation was rare that there was a lower incidence of chronic disease and not nearly so many cavities in their teeth

The question must be raised Whr furm Vhy work harder for food less nut rishytious md a supply more capricious Why invite famine plague ~poundtilcnce and crowded living conditions 1

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

Part of what is surprising about agriculture is that it is so common Not only has almost th e entire human world adopted 1t many peoples ca me to it indepenshydently of one anot her Scholars used to su ppose that it was so extraordinary it must have begun in some particular spo t and that diffusion spread it from there- carried by migrants or conquerors or transmitted by t rade o r im itated The last 40 years of research have shown on the contrary that the transition to

food product io n happened over and over agai n in a range of regions and a variety of environments with d ifferen t foodstuffs and di fferent techn iques The most obv ious co ntrast in environ ments is betwee n herders and tillers Herd ing develops where plan ts a re tOO spa rse or indigestible to sustain human life but a nim als can convert these pla nts into meat-an energy SO UTee tha t people can access by eating th e anim als Tilling deshyvelops where th e soil is suitable or enough ecologica l di shyversity ex ists to susta in plant husbandry o r mi xed farming of plants and animals

Herders Environments

[n three regions of the Earth-tundra the evergreen foresls of no rthern Eurasia and great grasslands- il is not possible to grow enough humanly d igest ible plant foods to keep large numbers of people alive [n the

tund ra and evergreen forests average temperatures arc too low the growing sea shyson too short the surface soil too vulnerable to frost and the subso il in some areas too froze n In these environments thert~ are only two options People can remain foragers- an d primari ly hu nters seeking the fa t-ri ch species rypical of stich zones The [nu it in the North American Arctic for example hunt seal and walrus Or people can become herders like the Sami and Samoyeds of north ern Europe and northwest Asia who live off rei ndeer

Out of the Mud Farming and H erding After the Ice Age I 37

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 FORAGERS AND FARMERS COMPARED

FORAGERS FARMERS

Food procurers Food producers

hUn and gather husbandry (breed animals cultivate crops)

Fit into nature Chanampe nature

little environmental impact herders some environmental impact tillers massive environment impact

Manaampethe landscape Nature remade and reimagined

Dependence on wild animals and plants Interdependence between humans plants and animals

animals and plants exploited and domeslicated

Stable food supply Unstable food supply

nomadic fOfltlgcrs move in response 10 environmental small range of farmed foods increases vulnerability change sedentary fo ragers vulnerable to changes of climate to ecological disasters

Stable popUlation

relatively little labor needed population COlltrol avalable mainly by managed lactatioll

Expandinamp population

breeding livestock and cultivating plants leads to increased food supply increased population concentrations of domesticated animals spread disease

Stable society

kinship and age fi x ind ividuals place in sodery sexes usually share labor by spedalidng in difterent economic tasks

Radically changed unstable society

need to control labor and food distribution leads to social inequalititS work shared between the sexes increased reliance on female labor ~trong nates dewlop with powerful elites complex technologies

Similarly the soils of the world s vast grassla nds- known as prairie in North America pampa in South America steppe in Eurasia and the Sahel (sah-HEHL) in Africa- have for most of history been unfavorable for tillage (sce Map 23) The sad is mostly too difficu lt to turn without a steel plow Except for patches of excepshytionally favorable soil herding has been the only possible fo rm of husbandry in these areas The peoples of the Eurasian and Africa n grasslands were probably herdi ng by about 5000 acE Native American grassland dwellers of the New World on the othe r hand retained a foraging way of life because available species-bison various types of antelope-were (or the lIlost part more abun shydant for the hunt and less suitable fo r herding

For those who choose it herding has three special consequences First it imposshyes a mobile way of life The proportion of the population ho follow the herdsshyand in som e cases it is the enri re popu lation-cannot seuJe into permanent

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38 I CHAP TER 2

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villages Herder peoples are not ul1iLling or unable to build permanently or on a large sca le The Scythians for instance people of the -estern Asian steppe who first domesticated the horse and invented th e wheel and axle about 6000 to 7OCX years ago built impressive stone structures Bul these wefe underground tombs dwellings fo r the dead while the living inhabited temporary camps Some herding societies in Asia and Africa have become rich enough to fou nd ci ties fo r elites OT for specialists working outside of food production such as craftsmen or miners Indeed as we shall see (Chap ter 13) in the thirteenth century CF a city of thi s type Karakorum in Mongolia was one of the most admired cities in the world On the whole howshyever herding does no t favo r the development of cities o r the kind of culture that cities nourish such as monumental buildings large-scale inst itutions fo r education and the arts and ind ustrial technology

Second since herde rs breed from animal s that naturally share their grassland habitats thei r herds consist of such creatures as cattl e sheep horses goats-milkshyyielding stock To get the fu ll benefit fro m their auimals herdin g peoples have to eat dai ry products To modern milk-fed Americans this may sound perfeclly no rshyma l But it required a modification of human evolution Most people in most part s of the world do not natural1 ) produce lactase the substance that enables them to d igest milk after infancy They respond to dairy products wit h distaste or even intol erance The Masai of Kenya in East Africa get 80 percent of their energy

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

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intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 33

A Case in Point Aborigina l Australians

Cook and others at the time saw only two explanations for why foragers sllch as the aborigines (AB-eh-rihj- ih-neez) in Australia would reject agriculture They were either stupid o r subhuman Indeed early European painters in Aust ralia depicted aborigines as apelike creatures grimaci ng oddl) and crawling in trees The colo nists s impl y ignored the nati es o r when they got in the way often hunted them downshyas they would beasts But not on ly did tbe native Aust ralians reject agriculture in some areas th ey appeared [0 shun every technical cO llvenience On the island o f Tasman ia in the extreme south of Australia where the natives became extinct soon after European settlement began they seemed to have forgotten every art of their ancestors bows boats even how to kindle fi rc In Arnhem Land in the extreme north they used boomerangs to make musi c but no longer as weapons for th e hunt Progress which the European discoverers of Australia believed in fervently seemed to have gone into reverse Australia was not only on the exact opposite side of the world from England it was a topsy-turvy place where everythi ng was upside down

We can hOever be certain that if aborigines rejected agriculture o r other practices Europeans considered progressive it must have been for good reasons TIle aborigines did not lack the knowledge necessary to switch from fo raging to farming had they so wished When they gathered wild yams or the root known as

James COO K from Captain Cooks Journal During his First Voyage Round the World

nardoo they ensured that enough of the plant remained in the ground to grow back In many regions too they used fire to control the grazi ng grounds of kangaroos and concentrate Ihem for hunting a common technique among herders to manage pasture and among tillers to renew the soil Along the Murray and Darling Rivers aborigines even watered and weeded wild cro ps and policed their boundaries against human and animal pred ators (sec Map 20

The abo rigi nal Australians could also have systematically planted and irrigated crops farmed the grubs they liked to eat pen ned kangashyroos and even tried to domestica te them (Kangaroos are can tankerous creatures but people do make pets o f them Breeding selected speci shymen s would probably produce a domestic strain in a few generations ) In the far no rth of Australia aboriginal communities traded with the farming cultures of New Guinea So even if they hadnt developed agrishyculture on th eir own they could have lea rned it fro m o utsi ders If the aborigines did not farm it must have been because they did not want to In short they were doing well without it Simil ar cases all over the world support this conclusion Where wild foods are abundant there is no in shycentive to do mesticate them Of course people o ften adopt p ractices that d o them no good We can concede this general principle but case by case we stiJI han t ( 0 know why

Preagricultura l Settlements

PA C IF IC

o C E A N

IN 0 IA N o C E AN

Australia

+ - Zwland

AustraliaMgtmiddot

Under some conditions people can settle in one place without the trouble of farmshying Archaeological evidence in the region we now ca ll the Middle East shows this After the Ice Age ended about 15000 lJCE a frontier zone between forest and grassland stretched across the eastern sho re of the Mediterranean and what are now Iran eastern Turkey and Iraq (see Map 22) The forests were full of acorns pistachios and almonds which gatherers ground into flour and paste The grassshylands bred vast quantjties of wild grass with edible seeds These foods could all he

34 I C H A P TER 2

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Black Sea

IR AN

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t-- fEG YPT

I (1

5 a h a r a

A r a bi an bull P e ni ns u l a NJb PLygt bull0

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I N 0 I A N

o C E A N

Preagricultural Settlements in the Middle East

-- ~--~

bull fo~t

bull gf3lsla nd

TU R KEY modern-daycountry

bull pf llgllcultua l sett lement d~rlbed on page 35

lit O1he r prea9r icu ltural l ~n l ~men t l

a rlcierlt coast lines

warehoused between harvests and had the additional advantage of maturing at di fferent times Dense herds of gazelle in the gra sslands prov ided more nutrition for hunters to bring home Food was so plentiful that foragers did not have to move around much to fi nd it

By abou t 14000 to 15000 years ago permanent sen lements a rose th roughout the region clusters of dwelli ngs with stone wa lls or those made of wood on stone foundations or cue from soft stone and roofed with reeds The foragers who lived in th ese sedentary communities apparently kept to themselves Villages had dis shytinctive iden tit ies and habits wh ich almost amounted to badges of identity Some favored gazelle toe bones for jewelry some preferred fox teeth and partridge legs These people married within their own communities (a practi ce known as en shydogamy) judging from th e evidence of inherited physical characteristics For ex shyample in some villages people were retatimiddotely short while in others they had d istinctive dental patterns These settlers cut what look like plans of their fields on limestone slabs which suggests that they were terri torial- that they had a sense of possession that Captain Cook would have recognized

Out of the Mud Far mIng and Herding A fter tne Ice Age 35

In sum the lives of preagricultural settlers were so much like the lives of the early fa rmers who succeeded them that when anhaeologists first found the forshyagers villages in the 1930s they assumed the inhabitants were farmers Bue the setshylied foragers were 3ctuaHy better off than farmers Their rema ins on the whole show better health and nourishme nt than the fa rming peoples who followed later in the sa me region A diet rich in seeds and nuts had ground down their teeth but- unl ike the farmers-they have none of the streaked tooth -enamel common among people who suffer from food shortages

Simi la r evidence of preagricultural settlements exists in other places Take a few conspicuous examples The Jomon (JOHM-mehn ) people of central Honshu Island in Japan hved in permanent vi llages 13000 years ago feeding themselves by fishing il nd gathering acorns and chestnuts They made pots fo r display in elaboshyrate shapes modeled on flames and serpents an d lacquered them with tree sap Their potters were in a sense magicians transforming clay into objects of prestige and ritua l In the Egyp tim Sahara lit Nabta Playa about forty plant species inclu shyding sorghum a type of cereal grass grew alongside hearths and pit oven~ evi shydence of settled life from about 10000 years ago In other pa rts of (en tral Sahara in the same period that had plenty of water and a cookr climate than now foragers fou nd sorghum and millet another cereal grass At Gobekli Tepe (goh- BEHK-lee TEH-pchl a hilltop site in so utheast Turkey co ntemporaries who lived mainly by gathering wild wheat he ed seven -ton pillars from li mestone They reerected them in a sunken chamber in their village and decorated them with carvings of snakes boar gazelles cra nes and symbols that look suspiciously like writing

What was life li ke in these earliest settl ements Small permanent houses sugshygest that nuclear families-parents and children-predominated though so me sites clearty have communal work areas for grinding seeds and nuts As for who did the work the most stunn ing find ing of recent archaeology in the Middle East sugshygests that work was probably shared behleen the sexes The way skeletons are musshycled suggests th at women did slightly more kneeling (and therefore slightly more gr inding) than men and men did more throwing (and therefore more hunting) than women But both sexes did both activit ies Male and female bodies began to reconverge after a long period during which they bad evolved to look differently As food product ion replaced hunting and gathering wa r and child rearing became the main sex-specific jobs in society The convergence between th e physical feashytures of men and women seems still to be in progress today Indeed it seems to be accelerating as men and women share more and morc tasks and the need for heavshyily muscled or big framed bod ies di minishes along wi th physica ll y demanding jobs in much of the world

The Disadvantages of Farming

Prernrming comm unities do not simply progress to fann ing If foraging produces abundance and sec urity it does not necessarily follow that farming can deliver more of the same The consequences of adopting agriculture are by no means all positive In the early stages of moving from foraging to fa rm ing the food supply actually becomes less reliable because people depend on a relatively small range of fa rmed foods or even on a si ngle species As a result a community becomes vulnerable to ecological disasters Famine becomes more likely as diet narrows Moreover when people have 0 plant and grow food as weDas gather it they have to use up more energy to get the sa me amount of nourishment (Although domesmiddot ticated food s once harvested tend to be easier to process for eating) The need to

lomon pottery Ten thousand years ago the Jomon potters of Japan produced the worlds earliest knOvn earthenware vessels Other pottel)-makmg peoples also practled farm ing but the Jomon people were sedentary foragers--l lvlng in permamiddot nent or long-term settlements but managing the environment in mInimal ways and relyIng on abunshydant wild foods including nuts seeds acorns some 70 marine animal Spec ies and land mamshymals---eatmg no just boar deer and hare but also wolves Wildcats f lYing squIrrel s and mon keys

Overuse deforms bones ArchaeolO8) can reconmiddot struc t how ancient peop le b(gthaved by measuring the deformities In their skeletons The woman hose toe th is was lived In a commuMy of eady sedentary foragers In what is now Syria She evIshydently spent much of her tIme kneeling presumshyably to grlFld the acorns and kernels of Wild wheat on whIch her people re lied for food

36 I C H A P T ER 2

Early Forager Settlements (All dales are approximate)

15000 yea rs ago 14000-15000

yea rs ago 13000 years ago 10000 years ago

l

World emerges from the Ice Age Permanent settlements appear In Middle East

Honshu Island Japan

Nabta Playa Egypt GObekh Tepe Turkey

organize labor encourages inequalities and explo itation Concentrashytions of domesticated animals spread disease such as smallpox measles rubella ch icken pox influenza and tuberculosis

So the problem is really the opposite of what Cook supposed It is fanners behavior not fo ragers that is strange Husba nd ry is not a step along a march of improvement because in some ways it makes life worse No one has PU l the problem better than the histo rian of agronomy Jack L Harlan

people who do not farm do about eveq1hing that farmers do but they do lot work as hard They understand thllifc cycles of plants kno the seashysons of the year and when and where the natural plant food resources can he

Jack Harlan from Crops and Man

Chukchi herder The choice between huntmg and herding otten depends on local and historical Clrmiddot cumstances Remdeermiddotherding is an anCient pracmiddot tlce In muc h of northern Euragtla whereas irl North America the can bou have remained wild In e~treme norlheast Asia close to America the Chukchi long resisted the example of neighboring peo ple and preferred hunting 10 herding In the last two or Illree cenlurles however they have adopted the herdsman s vocat ion shown here

hareswd in great abundance with the least eff() rt There is evidence that thl diet of g-athshyering peoples was better than that of cultivators that slarvation was rare that there was a lower incidence of chronic disease and not nearly so many cavities in their teeth

The question must be raised Whr furm Vhy work harder for food less nut rishytious md a supply more capricious Why invite famine plague ~poundtilcnce and crowded living conditions 1

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

Part of what is surprising about agriculture is that it is so common Not only has almost th e entire human world adopted 1t many peoples ca me to it indepenshydently of one anot her Scholars used to su ppose that it was so extraordinary it must have begun in some particular spo t and that diffusion spread it from there- carried by migrants or conquerors or transmitted by t rade o r im itated The last 40 years of research have shown on the contrary that the transition to

food product io n happened over and over agai n in a range of regions and a variety of environments with d ifferen t foodstuffs and di fferent techn iques The most obv ious co ntrast in environ ments is betwee n herders and tillers Herd ing develops where plan ts a re tOO spa rse or indigestible to sustain human life but a nim als can convert these pla nts into meat-an energy SO UTee tha t people can access by eating th e anim als Tilling deshyvelops where th e soil is suitable or enough ecologica l di shyversity ex ists to susta in plant husbandry o r mi xed farming of plants and animals

Herders Environments

[n three regions of the Earth-tundra the evergreen foresls of no rthern Eurasia and great grasslands- il is not possible to grow enough humanly d igest ible plant foods to keep large numbers of people alive [n the

tund ra and evergreen forests average temperatures arc too low the growing sea shyson too short the surface soil too vulnerable to frost and the subso il in some areas too froze n In these environments thert~ are only two options People can remain foragers- an d primari ly hu nters seeking the fa t-ri ch species rypical of stich zones The [nu it in the North American Arctic for example hunt seal and walrus Or people can become herders like the Sami and Samoyeds of north ern Europe and northwest Asia who live off rei ndeer

Out of the Mud Farming and H erding After the Ice Age I 37

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 FORAGERS AND FARMERS COMPARED

FORAGERS FARMERS

Food procurers Food producers

hUn and gather husbandry (breed animals cultivate crops)

Fit into nature Chanampe nature

little environmental impact herders some environmental impact tillers massive environment impact

Manaampethe landscape Nature remade and reimagined

Dependence on wild animals and plants Interdependence between humans plants and animals

animals and plants exploited and domeslicated

Stable food supply Unstable food supply

nomadic fOfltlgcrs move in response 10 environmental small range of farmed foods increases vulnerability change sedentary fo ragers vulnerable to changes of climate to ecological disasters

Stable popUlation

relatively little labor needed population COlltrol avalable mainly by managed lactatioll

Expandinamp population

breeding livestock and cultivating plants leads to increased food supply increased population concentrations of domesticated animals spread disease

Stable society

kinship and age fi x ind ividuals place in sodery sexes usually share labor by spedalidng in difterent economic tasks

Radically changed unstable society

need to control labor and food distribution leads to social inequalititS work shared between the sexes increased reliance on female labor ~trong nates dewlop with powerful elites complex technologies

Similarly the soils of the world s vast grassla nds- known as prairie in North America pampa in South America steppe in Eurasia and the Sahel (sah-HEHL) in Africa- have for most of history been unfavorable for tillage (sce Map 23) The sad is mostly too difficu lt to turn without a steel plow Except for patches of excepshytionally favorable soil herding has been the only possible fo rm of husbandry in these areas The peoples of the Eurasian and Africa n grasslands were probably herdi ng by about 5000 acE Native American grassland dwellers of the New World on the othe r hand retained a foraging way of life because available species-bison various types of antelope-were (or the lIlost part more abun shydant for the hunt and less suitable fo r herding

For those who choose it herding has three special consequences First it imposshyes a mobile way of life The proportion of the population ho follow the herdsshyand in som e cases it is the enri re popu lation-cannot seuJe into permanent

--

38 I CHAP TER 2

lt ()

N 0 R A M E R

IP ralre ~ T-

- r- laquo bull- ATlANTIC

PA C IFIC ~- I DC E A No C E A shyN ~

Mh Herders Environments

1 undr~

evergreen fo rests

o gr~sslinds

Sol hunlell ind herders dlsu ibld On piges 3amp-38

KEN YA modem-day COIntry

www prenhat tcomarmesto _maps

SOU AMER I CA

bull

villages Herder peoples are not ul1iLling or unable to build permanently or on a large sca le The Scythians for instance people of the -estern Asian steppe who first domesticated the horse and invented th e wheel and axle about 6000 to 7OCX years ago built impressive stone structures Bul these wefe underground tombs dwellings fo r the dead while the living inhabited temporary camps Some herding societies in Asia and Africa have become rich enough to fou nd ci ties fo r elites OT for specialists working outside of food production such as craftsmen or miners Indeed as we shall see (Chap ter 13) in the thirteenth century CF a city of thi s type Karakorum in Mongolia was one of the most admired cities in the world On the whole howshyever herding does no t favo r the development of cities o r the kind of culture that cities nourish such as monumental buildings large-scale inst itutions fo r education and the arts and ind ustrial technology

Second since herde rs breed from animal s that naturally share their grassland habitats thei r herds consist of such creatures as cattl e sheep horses goats-milkshyyielding stock To get the fu ll benefit fro m their auimals herdin g peoples have to eat dai ry products To modern milk-fed Americans this may sound perfeclly no rshyma l But it required a modification of human evolution Most people in most part s of the world do not natural1 ) produce lactase the substance that enables them to d igest milk after infancy They respond to dairy products wit h distaste or even intol erance The Masai of Kenya in East Africa get 80 percent of their energy

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

-c

~ ~r - E u R

E St ep peU R 0 P ---6 [ -~

-shy~ c_

R I C A

h e

Il ~ KENYA

A 5 I A

MONGOlIA

A 5 I A

PACIFIC

o C E A N

IN D I A N

o C E A N bull

--~

4NT ARCTI CA

intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

34 I C H A P TER 2

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warehoused between harvests and had the additional advantage of maturing at di fferent times Dense herds of gazelle in the gra sslands prov ided more nutrition for hunters to bring home Food was so plentiful that foragers did not have to move around much to fi nd it

By abou t 14000 to 15000 years ago permanent sen lements a rose th roughout the region clusters of dwelli ngs with stone wa lls or those made of wood on stone foundations or cue from soft stone and roofed with reeds The foragers who lived in th ese sedentary communities apparently kept to themselves Villages had dis shytinctive iden tit ies and habits wh ich almost amounted to badges of identity Some favored gazelle toe bones for jewelry some preferred fox teeth and partridge legs These people married within their own communities (a practi ce known as en shydogamy) judging from th e evidence of inherited physical characteristics For ex shyample in some villages people were retatimiddotely short while in others they had d istinctive dental patterns These settlers cut what look like plans of their fields on limestone slabs which suggests that they were terri torial- that they had a sense of possession that Captain Cook would have recognized

Out of the Mud Far mIng and Herding A fter tne Ice Age 35

In sum the lives of preagricultural settlers were so much like the lives of the early fa rmers who succeeded them that when anhaeologists first found the forshyagers villages in the 1930s they assumed the inhabitants were farmers Bue the setshylied foragers were 3ctuaHy better off than farmers Their rema ins on the whole show better health and nourishme nt than the fa rming peoples who followed later in the sa me region A diet rich in seeds and nuts had ground down their teeth but- unl ike the farmers-they have none of the streaked tooth -enamel common among people who suffer from food shortages

Simi la r evidence of preagricultural settlements exists in other places Take a few conspicuous examples The Jomon (JOHM-mehn ) people of central Honshu Island in Japan hved in permanent vi llages 13000 years ago feeding themselves by fishing il nd gathering acorns and chestnuts They made pots fo r display in elaboshyrate shapes modeled on flames and serpents an d lacquered them with tree sap Their potters were in a sense magicians transforming clay into objects of prestige and ritua l In the Egyp tim Sahara lit Nabta Playa about forty plant species inclu shyding sorghum a type of cereal grass grew alongside hearths and pit oven~ evi shydence of settled life from about 10000 years ago In other pa rts of (en tral Sahara in the same period that had plenty of water and a cookr climate than now foragers fou nd sorghum and millet another cereal grass At Gobekli Tepe (goh- BEHK-lee TEH-pchl a hilltop site in so utheast Turkey co ntemporaries who lived mainly by gathering wild wheat he ed seven -ton pillars from li mestone They reerected them in a sunken chamber in their village and decorated them with carvings of snakes boar gazelles cra nes and symbols that look suspiciously like writing

What was life li ke in these earliest settl ements Small permanent houses sugshygest that nuclear families-parents and children-predominated though so me sites clearty have communal work areas for grinding seeds and nuts As for who did the work the most stunn ing find ing of recent archaeology in the Middle East sugshygests that work was probably shared behleen the sexes The way skeletons are musshycled suggests th at women did slightly more kneeling (and therefore slightly more gr inding) than men and men did more throwing (and therefore more hunting) than women But both sexes did both activit ies Male and female bodies began to reconverge after a long period during which they bad evolved to look differently As food product ion replaced hunting and gathering wa r and child rearing became the main sex-specific jobs in society The convergence between th e physical feashytures of men and women seems still to be in progress today Indeed it seems to be accelerating as men and women share more and morc tasks and the need for heavshyily muscled or big framed bod ies di minishes along wi th physica ll y demanding jobs in much of the world

The Disadvantages of Farming

Prernrming comm unities do not simply progress to fann ing If foraging produces abundance and sec urity it does not necessarily follow that farming can deliver more of the same The consequences of adopting agriculture are by no means all positive In the early stages of moving from foraging to fa rm ing the food supply actually becomes less reliable because people depend on a relatively small range of fa rmed foods or even on a si ngle species As a result a community becomes vulnerable to ecological disasters Famine becomes more likely as diet narrows Moreover when people have 0 plant and grow food as weDas gather it they have to use up more energy to get the sa me amount of nourishment (Although domesmiddot ticated food s once harvested tend to be easier to process for eating) The need to

lomon pottery Ten thousand years ago the Jomon potters of Japan produced the worlds earliest knOvn earthenware vessels Other pottel)-makmg peoples also practled farm ing but the Jomon people were sedentary foragers--l lvlng in permamiddot nent or long-term settlements but managing the environment in mInimal ways and relyIng on abunshydant wild foods including nuts seeds acorns some 70 marine animal Spec ies and land mamshymals---eatmg no just boar deer and hare but also wolves Wildcats f lYing squIrrel s and mon keys

Overuse deforms bones ArchaeolO8) can reconmiddot struc t how ancient peop le b(gthaved by measuring the deformities In their skeletons The woman hose toe th is was lived In a commuMy of eady sedentary foragers In what is now Syria She evIshydently spent much of her tIme kneeling presumshyably to grlFld the acorns and kernels of Wild wheat on whIch her people re lied for food

36 I C H A P T ER 2

Early Forager Settlements (All dales are approximate)

15000 yea rs ago 14000-15000

yea rs ago 13000 years ago 10000 years ago

l

World emerges from the Ice Age Permanent settlements appear In Middle East

Honshu Island Japan

Nabta Playa Egypt GObekh Tepe Turkey

organize labor encourages inequalities and explo itation Concentrashytions of domesticated animals spread disease such as smallpox measles rubella ch icken pox influenza and tuberculosis

So the problem is really the opposite of what Cook supposed It is fanners behavior not fo ragers that is strange Husba nd ry is not a step along a march of improvement because in some ways it makes life worse No one has PU l the problem better than the histo rian of agronomy Jack L Harlan

people who do not farm do about eveq1hing that farmers do but they do lot work as hard They understand thllifc cycles of plants kno the seashysons of the year and when and where the natural plant food resources can he

Jack Harlan from Crops and Man

Chukchi herder The choice between huntmg and herding otten depends on local and historical Clrmiddot cumstances Remdeermiddotherding is an anCient pracmiddot tlce In muc h of northern Euragtla whereas irl North America the can bou have remained wild In e~treme norlheast Asia close to America the Chukchi long resisted the example of neighboring peo ple and preferred hunting 10 herding In the last two or Illree cenlurles however they have adopted the herdsman s vocat ion shown here

hareswd in great abundance with the least eff() rt There is evidence that thl diet of g-athshyering peoples was better than that of cultivators that slarvation was rare that there was a lower incidence of chronic disease and not nearly so many cavities in their teeth

The question must be raised Whr furm Vhy work harder for food less nut rishytious md a supply more capricious Why invite famine plague ~poundtilcnce and crowded living conditions 1

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

Part of what is surprising about agriculture is that it is so common Not only has almost th e entire human world adopted 1t many peoples ca me to it indepenshydently of one anot her Scholars used to su ppose that it was so extraordinary it must have begun in some particular spo t and that diffusion spread it from there- carried by migrants or conquerors or transmitted by t rade o r im itated The last 40 years of research have shown on the contrary that the transition to

food product io n happened over and over agai n in a range of regions and a variety of environments with d ifferen t foodstuffs and di fferent techn iques The most obv ious co ntrast in environ ments is betwee n herders and tillers Herd ing develops where plan ts a re tOO spa rse or indigestible to sustain human life but a nim als can convert these pla nts into meat-an energy SO UTee tha t people can access by eating th e anim als Tilling deshyvelops where th e soil is suitable or enough ecologica l di shyversity ex ists to susta in plant husbandry o r mi xed farming of plants and animals

Herders Environments

[n three regions of the Earth-tundra the evergreen foresls of no rthern Eurasia and great grasslands- il is not possible to grow enough humanly d igest ible plant foods to keep large numbers of people alive [n the

tund ra and evergreen forests average temperatures arc too low the growing sea shyson too short the surface soil too vulnerable to frost and the subso il in some areas too froze n In these environments thert~ are only two options People can remain foragers- an d primari ly hu nters seeking the fa t-ri ch species rypical of stich zones The [nu it in the North American Arctic for example hunt seal and walrus Or people can become herders like the Sami and Samoyeds of north ern Europe and northwest Asia who live off rei ndeer

Out of the Mud Farming and H erding After the Ice Age I 37

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 FORAGERS AND FARMERS COMPARED

FORAGERS FARMERS

Food procurers Food producers

hUn and gather husbandry (breed animals cultivate crops)

Fit into nature Chanampe nature

little environmental impact herders some environmental impact tillers massive environment impact

Manaampethe landscape Nature remade and reimagined

Dependence on wild animals and plants Interdependence between humans plants and animals

animals and plants exploited and domeslicated

Stable food supply Unstable food supply

nomadic fOfltlgcrs move in response 10 environmental small range of farmed foods increases vulnerability change sedentary fo ragers vulnerable to changes of climate to ecological disasters

Stable popUlation

relatively little labor needed population COlltrol avalable mainly by managed lactatioll

Expandinamp population

breeding livestock and cultivating plants leads to increased food supply increased population concentrations of domesticated animals spread disease

Stable society

kinship and age fi x ind ividuals place in sodery sexes usually share labor by spedalidng in difterent economic tasks

Radically changed unstable society

need to control labor and food distribution leads to social inequalititS work shared between the sexes increased reliance on female labor ~trong nates dewlop with powerful elites complex technologies

Similarly the soils of the world s vast grassla nds- known as prairie in North America pampa in South America steppe in Eurasia and the Sahel (sah-HEHL) in Africa- have for most of history been unfavorable for tillage (sce Map 23) The sad is mostly too difficu lt to turn without a steel plow Except for patches of excepshytionally favorable soil herding has been the only possible fo rm of husbandry in these areas The peoples of the Eurasian and Africa n grasslands were probably herdi ng by about 5000 acE Native American grassland dwellers of the New World on the othe r hand retained a foraging way of life because available species-bison various types of antelope-were (or the lIlost part more abun shydant for the hunt and less suitable fo r herding

For those who choose it herding has three special consequences First it imposshyes a mobile way of life The proportion of the population ho follow the herdsshyand in som e cases it is the enri re popu lation-cannot seuJe into permanent

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38 I CHAP TER 2

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villages Herder peoples are not ul1iLling or unable to build permanently or on a large sca le The Scythians for instance people of the -estern Asian steppe who first domesticated the horse and invented th e wheel and axle about 6000 to 7OCX years ago built impressive stone structures Bul these wefe underground tombs dwellings fo r the dead while the living inhabited temporary camps Some herding societies in Asia and Africa have become rich enough to fou nd ci ties fo r elites OT for specialists working outside of food production such as craftsmen or miners Indeed as we shall see (Chap ter 13) in the thirteenth century CF a city of thi s type Karakorum in Mongolia was one of the most admired cities in the world On the whole howshyever herding does no t favo r the development of cities o r the kind of culture that cities nourish such as monumental buildings large-scale inst itutions fo r education and the arts and ind ustrial technology

Second since herde rs breed from animal s that naturally share their grassland habitats thei r herds consist of such creatures as cattl e sheep horses goats-milkshyyielding stock To get the fu ll benefit fro m their auimals herdin g peoples have to eat dai ry products To modern milk-fed Americans this may sound perfeclly no rshyma l But it required a modification of human evolution Most people in most part s of the world do not natural1 ) produce lactase the substance that enables them to d igest milk after infancy They respond to dairy products wit h distaste or even intol erance The Masai of Kenya in East Africa get 80 percent of their energy

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

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intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

Out of the Mud Far mIng and Herding A fter tne Ice Age 35

In sum the lives of preagricultural settlers were so much like the lives of the early fa rmers who succeeded them that when anhaeologists first found the forshyagers villages in the 1930s they assumed the inhabitants were farmers Bue the setshylied foragers were 3ctuaHy better off than farmers Their rema ins on the whole show better health and nourishme nt than the fa rming peoples who followed later in the sa me region A diet rich in seeds and nuts had ground down their teeth but- unl ike the farmers-they have none of the streaked tooth -enamel common among people who suffer from food shortages

Simi la r evidence of preagricultural settlements exists in other places Take a few conspicuous examples The Jomon (JOHM-mehn ) people of central Honshu Island in Japan hved in permanent vi llages 13000 years ago feeding themselves by fishing il nd gathering acorns and chestnuts They made pots fo r display in elaboshyrate shapes modeled on flames and serpents an d lacquered them with tree sap Their potters were in a sense magicians transforming clay into objects of prestige and ritua l In the Egyp tim Sahara lit Nabta Playa about forty plant species inclu shyding sorghum a type of cereal grass grew alongside hearths and pit oven~ evi shydence of settled life from about 10000 years ago In other pa rts of (en tral Sahara in the same period that had plenty of water and a cookr climate than now foragers fou nd sorghum and millet another cereal grass At Gobekli Tepe (goh- BEHK-lee TEH-pchl a hilltop site in so utheast Turkey co ntemporaries who lived mainly by gathering wild wheat he ed seven -ton pillars from li mestone They reerected them in a sunken chamber in their village and decorated them with carvings of snakes boar gazelles cra nes and symbols that look suspiciously like writing

What was life li ke in these earliest settl ements Small permanent houses sugshygest that nuclear families-parents and children-predominated though so me sites clearty have communal work areas for grinding seeds and nuts As for who did the work the most stunn ing find ing of recent archaeology in the Middle East sugshygests that work was probably shared behleen the sexes The way skeletons are musshycled suggests th at women did slightly more kneeling (and therefore slightly more gr inding) than men and men did more throwing (and therefore more hunting) than women But both sexes did both activit ies Male and female bodies began to reconverge after a long period during which they bad evolved to look differently As food product ion replaced hunting and gathering wa r and child rearing became the main sex-specific jobs in society The convergence between th e physical feashytures of men and women seems still to be in progress today Indeed it seems to be accelerating as men and women share more and morc tasks and the need for heavshyily muscled or big framed bod ies di minishes along wi th physica ll y demanding jobs in much of the world

The Disadvantages of Farming

Prernrming comm unities do not simply progress to fann ing If foraging produces abundance and sec urity it does not necessarily follow that farming can deliver more of the same The consequences of adopting agriculture are by no means all positive In the early stages of moving from foraging to fa rm ing the food supply actually becomes less reliable because people depend on a relatively small range of fa rmed foods or even on a si ngle species As a result a community becomes vulnerable to ecological disasters Famine becomes more likely as diet narrows Moreover when people have 0 plant and grow food as weDas gather it they have to use up more energy to get the sa me amount of nourishment (Although domesmiddot ticated food s once harvested tend to be easier to process for eating) The need to

lomon pottery Ten thousand years ago the Jomon potters of Japan produced the worlds earliest knOvn earthenware vessels Other pottel)-makmg peoples also practled farm ing but the Jomon people were sedentary foragers--l lvlng in permamiddot nent or long-term settlements but managing the environment in mInimal ways and relyIng on abunshydant wild foods including nuts seeds acorns some 70 marine animal Spec ies and land mamshymals---eatmg no just boar deer and hare but also wolves Wildcats f lYing squIrrel s and mon keys

Overuse deforms bones ArchaeolO8) can reconmiddot struc t how ancient peop le b(gthaved by measuring the deformities In their skeletons The woman hose toe th is was lived In a commuMy of eady sedentary foragers In what is now Syria She evIshydently spent much of her tIme kneeling presumshyably to grlFld the acorns and kernels of Wild wheat on whIch her people re lied for food

36 I C H A P T ER 2

Early Forager Settlements (All dales are approximate)

15000 yea rs ago 14000-15000

yea rs ago 13000 years ago 10000 years ago

l

World emerges from the Ice Age Permanent settlements appear In Middle East

Honshu Island Japan

Nabta Playa Egypt GObekh Tepe Turkey

organize labor encourages inequalities and explo itation Concentrashytions of domesticated animals spread disease such as smallpox measles rubella ch icken pox influenza and tuberculosis

So the problem is really the opposite of what Cook supposed It is fanners behavior not fo ragers that is strange Husba nd ry is not a step along a march of improvement because in some ways it makes life worse No one has PU l the problem better than the histo rian of agronomy Jack L Harlan

people who do not farm do about eveq1hing that farmers do but they do lot work as hard They understand thllifc cycles of plants kno the seashysons of the year and when and where the natural plant food resources can he

Jack Harlan from Crops and Man

Chukchi herder The choice between huntmg and herding otten depends on local and historical Clrmiddot cumstances Remdeermiddotherding is an anCient pracmiddot tlce In muc h of northern Euragtla whereas irl North America the can bou have remained wild In e~treme norlheast Asia close to America the Chukchi long resisted the example of neighboring peo ple and preferred hunting 10 herding In the last two or Illree cenlurles however they have adopted the herdsman s vocat ion shown here

hareswd in great abundance with the least eff() rt There is evidence that thl diet of g-athshyering peoples was better than that of cultivators that slarvation was rare that there was a lower incidence of chronic disease and not nearly so many cavities in their teeth

The question must be raised Whr furm Vhy work harder for food less nut rishytious md a supply more capricious Why invite famine plague ~poundtilcnce and crowded living conditions 1

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

Part of what is surprising about agriculture is that it is so common Not only has almost th e entire human world adopted 1t many peoples ca me to it indepenshydently of one anot her Scholars used to su ppose that it was so extraordinary it must have begun in some particular spo t and that diffusion spread it from there- carried by migrants or conquerors or transmitted by t rade o r im itated The last 40 years of research have shown on the contrary that the transition to

food product io n happened over and over agai n in a range of regions and a variety of environments with d ifferen t foodstuffs and di fferent techn iques The most obv ious co ntrast in environ ments is betwee n herders and tillers Herd ing develops where plan ts a re tOO spa rse or indigestible to sustain human life but a nim als can convert these pla nts into meat-an energy SO UTee tha t people can access by eating th e anim als Tilling deshyvelops where th e soil is suitable or enough ecologica l di shyversity ex ists to susta in plant husbandry o r mi xed farming of plants and animals

Herders Environments

[n three regions of the Earth-tundra the evergreen foresls of no rthern Eurasia and great grasslands- il is not possible to grow enough humanly d igest ible plant foods to keep large numbers of people alive [n the

tund ra and evergreen forests average temperatures arc too low the growing sea shyson too short the surface soil too vulnerable to frost and the subso il in some areas too froze n In these environments thert~ are only two options People can remain foragers- an d primari ly hu nters seeking the fa t-ri ch species rypical of stich zones The [nu it in the North American Arctic for example hunt seal and walrus Or people can become herders like the Sami and Samoyeds of north ern Europe and northwest Asia who live off rei ndeer

Out of the Mud Farming and H erding After the Ice Age I 37

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 FORAGERS AND FARMERS COMPARED

FORAGERS FARMERS

Food procurers Food producers

hUn and gather husbandry (breed animals cultivate crops)

Fit into nature Chanampe nature

little environmental impact herders some environmental impact tillers massive environment impact

Manaampethe landscape Nature remade and reimagined

Dependence on wild animals and plants Interdependence between humans plants and animals

animals and plants exploited and domeslicated

Stable food supply Unstable food supply

nomadic fOfltlgcrs move in response 10 environmental small range of farmed foods increases vulnerability change sedentary fo ragers vulnerable to changes of climate to ecological disasters

Stable popUlation

relatively little labor needed population COlltrol avalable mainly by managed lactatioll

Expandinamp population

breeding livestock and cultivating plants leads to increased food supply increased population concentrations of domesticated animals spread disease

Stable society

kinship and age fi x ind ividuals place in sodery sexes usually share labor by spedalidng in difterent economic tasks

Radically changed unstable society

need to control labor and food distribution leads to social inequalititS work shared between the sexes increased reliance on female labor ~trong nates dewlop with powerful elites complex technologies

Similarly the soils of the world s vast grassla nds- known as prairie in North America pampa in South America steppe in Eurasia and the Sahel (sah-HEHL) in Africa- have for most of history been unfavorable for tillage (sce Map 23) The sad is mostly too difficu lt to turn without a steel plow Except for patches of excepshytionally favorable soil herding has been the only possible fo rm of husbandry in these areas The peoples of the Eurasian and Africa n grasslands were probably herdi ng by about 5000 acE Native American grassland dwellers of the New World on the othe r hand retained a foraging way of life because available species-bison various types of antelope-were (or the lIlost part more abun shydant for the hunt and less suitable fo r herding

For those who choose it herding has three special consequences First it imposshyes a mobile way of life The proportion of the population ho follow the herdsshyand in som e cases it is the enri re popu lation-cannot seuJe into permanent

--

38 I CHAP TER 2

lt ()

N 0 R A M E R

IP ralre ~ T-

- r- laquo bull- ATlANTIC

PA C IFIC ~- I DC E A No C E A shyN ~

Mh Herders Environments

1 undr~

evergreen fo rests

o gr~sslinds

Sol hunlell ind herders dlsu ibld On piges 3amp-38

KEN YA modem-day COIntry

www prenhat tcomarmesto _maps

SOU AMER I CA

bull

villages Herder peoples are not ul1iLling or unable to build permanently or on a large sca le The Scythians for instance people of the -estern Asian steppe who first domesticated the horse and invented th e wheel and axle about 6000 to 7OCX years ago built impressive stone structures Bul these wefe underground tombs dwellings fo r the dead while the living inhabited temporary camps Some herding societies in Asia and Africa have become rich enough to fou nd ci ties fo r elites OT for specialists working outside of food production such as craftsmen or miners Indeed as we shall see (Chap ter 13) in the thirteenth century CF a city of thi s type Karakorum in Mongolia was one of the most admired cities in the world On the whole howshyever herding does no t favo r the development of cities o r the kind of culture that cities nourish such as monumental buildings large-scale inst itutions fo r education and the arts and ind ustrial technology

Second since herde rs breed from animal s that naturally share their grassland habitats thei r herds consist of such creatures as cattl e sheep horses goats-milkshyyielding stock To get the fu ll benefit fro m their auimals herdin g peoples have to eat dai ry products To modern milk-fed Americans this may sound perfeclly no rshyma l But it required a modification of human evolution Most people in most part s of the world do not natural1 ) produce lactase the substance that enables them to d igest milk after infancy They respond to dairy products wit h distaste or even intol erance The Masai of Kenya in East Africa get 80 percent of their energy

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

-c

~ ~r - E u R

E St ep peU R 0 P ---6 [ -~

-shy~ c_

R I C A

h e

Il ~ KENYA

A 5 I A

MONGOlIA

A 5 I A

PACIFIC

o C E A N

IN D I A N

o C E A N bull

--~

4NT ARCTI CA

intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

36 I C H A P T ER 2

Early Forager Settlements (All dales are approximate)

15000 yea rs ago 14000-15000

yea rs ago 13000 years ago 10000 years ago

l

World emerges from the Ice Age Permanent settlements appear In Middle East

Honshu Island Japan

Nabta Playa Egypt GObekh Tepe Turkey

organize labor encourages inequalities and explo itation Concentrashytions of domesticated animals spread disease such as smallpox measles rubella ch icken pox influenza and tuberculosis

So the problem is really the opposite of what Cook supposed It is fanners behavior not fo ragers that is strange Husba nd ry is not a step along a march of improvement because in some ways it makes life worse No one has PU l the problem better than the histo rian of agronomy Jack L Harlan

people who do not farm do about eveq1hing that farmers do but they do lot work as hard They understand thllifc cycles of plants kno the seashysons of the year and when and where the natural plant food resources can he

Jack Harlan from Crops and Man

Chukchi herder The choice between huntmg and herding otten depends on local and historical Clrmiddot cumstances Remdeermiddotherding is an anCient pracmiddot tlce In muc h of northern Euragtla whereas irl North America the can bou have remained wild In e~treme norlheast Asia close to America the Chukchi long resisted the example of neighboring peo ple and preferred hunting 10 herding In the last two or Illree cenlurles however they have adopted the herdsman s vocat ion shown here

hareswd in great abundance with the least eff() rt There is evidence that thl diet of g-athshyering peoples was better than that of cultivators that slarvation was rare that there was a lower incidence of chronic disease and not nearly so many cavities in their teeth

The question must be raised Whr furm Vhy work harder for food less nut rishytious md a supply more capricious Why invite famine plague ~poundtilcnce and crowded living conditions 1

HUSBANDRY IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

Part of what is surprising about agriculture is that it is so common Not only has almost th e entire human world adopted 1t many peoples ca me to it indepenshydently of one anot her Scholars used to su ppose that it was so extraordinary it must have begun in some particular spo t and that diffusion spread it from there- carried by migrants or conquerors or transmitted by t rade o r im itated The last 40 years of research have shown on the contrary that the transition to

food product io n happened over and over agai n in a range of regions and a variety of environments with d ifferen t foodstuffs and di fferent techn iques The most obv ious co ntrast in environ ments is betwee n herders and tillers Herd ing develops where plan ts a re tOO spa rse or indigestible to sustain human life but a nim als can convert these pla nts into meat-an energy SO UTee tha t people can access by eating th e anim als Tilling deshyvelops where th e soil is suitable or enough ecologica l di shyversity ex ists to susta in plant husbandry o r mi xed farming of plants and animals

Herders Environments

[n three regions of the Earth-tundra the evergreen foresls of no rthern Eurasia and great grasslands- il is not possible to grow enough humanly d igest ible plant foods to keep large numbers of people alive [n the

tund ra and evergreen forests average temperatures arc too low the growing sea shyson too short the surface soil too vulnerable to frost and the subso il in some areas too froze n In these environments thert~ are only two options People can remain foragers- an d primari ly hu nters seeking the fa t-ri ch species rypical of stich zones The [nu it in the North American Arctic for example hunt seal and walrus Or people can become herders like the Sami and Samoyeds of north ern Europe and northwest Asia who live off rei ndeer

Out of the Mud Farming and H erding After the Ice Age I 37

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 FORAGERS AND FARMERS COMPARED

FORAGERS FARMERS

Food procurers Food producers

hUn and gather husbandry (breed animals cultivate crops)

Fit into nature Chanampe nature

little environmental impact herders some environmental impact tillers massive environment impact

Manaampethe landscape Nature remade and reimagined

Dependence on wild animals and plants Interdependence between humans plants and animals

animals and plants exploited and domeslicated

Stable food supply Unstable food supply

nomadic fOfltlgcrs move in response 10 environmental small range of farmed foods increases vulnerability change sedentary fo ragers vulnerable to changes of climate to ecological disasters

Stable popUlation

relatively little labor needed population COlltrol avalable mainly by managed lactatioll

Expandinamp population

breeding livestock and cultivating plants leads to increased food supply increased population concentrations of domesticated animals spread disease

Stable society

kinship and age fi x ind ividuals place in sodery sexes usually share labor by spedalidng in difterent economic tasks

Radically changed unstable society

need to control labor and food distribution leads to social inequalititS work shared between the sexes increased reliance on female labor ~trong nates dewlop with powerful elites complex technologies

Similarly the soils of the world s vast grassla nds- known as prairie in North America pampa in South America steppe in Eurasia and the Sahel (sah-HEHL) in Africa- have for most of history been unfavorable for tillage (sce Map 23) The sad is mostly too difficu lt to turn without a steel plow Except for patches of excepshytionally favorable soil herding has been the only possible fo rm of husbandry in these areas The peoples of the Eurasian and Africa n grasslands were probably herdi ng by about 5000 acE Native American grassland dwellers of the New World on the othe r hand retained a foraging way of life because available species-bison various types of antelope-were (or the lIlost part more abun shydant for the hunt and less suitable fo r herding

For those who choose it herding has three special consequences First it imposshyes a mobile way of life The proportion of the population ho follow the herdsshyand in som e cases it is the enri re popu lation-cannot seuJe into permanent

--

38 I CHAP TER 2

lt ()

N 0 R A M E R

IP ralre ~ T-

- r- laquo bull- ATlANTIC

PA C IFIC ~- I DC E A No C E A shyN ~

Mh Herders Environments

1 undr~

evergreen fo rests

o gr~sslinds

Sol hunlell ind herders dlsu ibld On piges 3amp-38

KEN YA modem-day COIntry

www prenhat tcomarmesto _maps

SOU AMER I CA

bull

villages Herder peoples are not ul1iLling or unable to build permanently or on a large sca le The Scythians for instance people of the -estern Asian steppe who first domesticated the horse and invented th e wheel and axle about 6000 to 7OCX years ago built impressive stone structures Bul these wefe underground tombs dwellings fo r the dead while the living inhabited temporary camps Some herding societies in Asia and Africa have become rich enough to fou nd ci ties fo r elites OT for specialists working outside of food production such as craftsmen or miners Indeed as we shall see (Chap ter 13) in the thirteenth century CF a city of thi s type Karakorum in Mongolia was one of the most admired cities in the world On the whole howshyever herding does no t favo r the development of cities o r the kind of culture that cities nourish such as monumental buildings large-scale inst itutions fo r education and the arts and ind ustrial technology

Second since herde rs breed from animal s that naturally share their grassland habitats thei r herds consist of such creatures as cattl e sheep horses goats-milkshyyielding stock To get the fu ll benefit fro m their auimals herdin g peoples have to eat dai ry products To modern milk-fed Americans this may sound perfeclly no rshyma l But it required a modification of human evolution Most people in most part s of the world do not natural1 ) produce lactase the substance that enables them to d igest milk after infancy They respond to dairy products wit h distaste or even intol erance The Masai of Kenya in East Africa get 80 percent of their energy

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

-c

~ ~r - E u R

E St ep peU R 0 P ---6 [ -~

-shy~ c_

R I C A

h e

Il ~ KENYA

A 5 I A

MONGOlIA

A 5 I A

PACIFIC

o C E A N

IN D I A N

o C E A N bull

--~

4NT ARCTI CA

intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

Out of the Mud Farming and H erding After the Ice Age I 37

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 FORAGERS AND FARMERS COMPARED

FORAGERS FARMERS

Food procurers Food producers

hUn and gather husbandry (breed animals cultivate crops)

Fit into nature Chanampe nature

little environmental impact herders some environmental impact tillers massive environment impact

Manaampethe landscape Nature remade and reimagined

Dependence on wild animals and plants Interdependence between humans plants and animals

animals and plants exploited and domeslicated

Stable food supply Unstable food supply

nomadic fOfltlgcrs move in response 10 environmental small range of farmed foods increases vulnerability change sedentary fo ragers vulnerable to changes of climate to ecological disasters

Stable popUlation

relatively little labor needed population COlltrol avalable mainly by managed lactatioll

Expandinamp population

breeding livestock and cultivating plants leads to increased food supply increased population concentrations of domesticated animals spread disease

Stable society

kinship and age fi x ind ividuals place in sodery sexes usually share labor by spedalidng in difterent economic tasks

Radically changed unstable society

need to control labor and food distribution leads to social inequalititS work shared between the sexes increased reliance on female labor ~trong nates dewlop with powerful elites complex technologies

Similarly the soils of the world s vast grassla nds- known as prairie in North America pampa in South America steppe in Eurasia and the Sahel (sah-HEHL) in Africa- have for most of history been unfavorable for tillage (sce Map 23) The sad is mostly too difficu lt to turn without a steel plow Except for patches of excepshytionally favorable soil herding has been the only possible fo rm of husbandry in these areas The peoples of the Eurasian and Africa n grasslands were probably herdi ng by about 5000 acE Native American grassland dwellers of the New World on the othe r hand retained a foraging way of life because available species-bison various types of antelope-were (or the lIlost part more abun shydant for the hunt and less suitable fo r herding

For those who choose it herding has three special consequences First it imposshyes a mobile way of life The proportion of the population ho follow the herdsshyand in som e cases it is the enri re popu lation-cannot seuJe into permanent

--

38 I CHAP TER 2

lt ()

N 0 R A M E R

IP ralre ~ T-

- r- laquo bull- ATlANTIC

PA C IFIC ~- I DC E A No C E A shyN ~

Mh Herders Environments

1 undr~

evergreen fo rests

o gr~sslinds

Sol hunlell ind herders dlsu ibld On piges 3amp-38

KEN YA modem-day COIntry

www prenhat tcomarmesto _maps

SOU AMER I CA

bull

villages Herder peoples are not ul1iLling or unable to build permanently or on a large sca le The Scythians for instance people of the -estern Asian steppe who first domesticated the horse and invented th e wheel and axle about 6000 to 7OCX years ago built impressive stone structures Bul these wefe underground tombs dwellings fo r the dead while the living inhabited temporary camps Some herding societies in Asia and Africa have become rich enough to fou nd ci ties fo r elites OT for specialists working outside of food production such as craftsmen or miners Indeed as we shall see (Chap ter 13) in the thirteenth century CF a city of thi s type Karakorum in Mongolia was one of the most admired cities in the world On the whole howshyever herding does no t favo r the development of cities o r the kind of culture that cities nourish such as monumental buildings large-scale inst itutions fo r education and the arts and ind ustrial technology

Second since herde rs breed from animal s that naturally share their grassland habitats thei r herds consist of such creatures as cattl e sheep horses goats-milkshyyielding stock To get the fu ll benefit fro m their auimals herdin g peoples have to eat dai ry products To modern milk-fed Americans this may sound perfeclly no rshyma l But it required a modification of human evolution Most people in most part s of the world do not natural1 ) produce lactase the substance that enables them to d igest milk after infancy They respond to dairy products wit h distaste or even intol erance The Masai of Kenya in East Africa get 80 percent of their energy

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

-c

~ ~r - E u R

E St ep peU R 0 P ---6 [ -~

-shy~ c_

R I C A

h e

Il ~ KENYA

A 5 I A

MONGOlIA

A 5 I A

PACIFIC

o C E A N

IN D I A N

o C E A N bull

--~

4NT ARCTI CA

intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

--

38 I CHAP TER 2

lt ()

N 0 R A M E R

IP ralre ~ T-

- r- laquo bull- ATlANTIC

PA C IFIC ~- I DC E A No C E A shyN ~

Mh Herders Environments

1 undr~

evergreen fo rests

o gr~sslinds

Sol hunlell ind herders dlsu ibld On piges 3amp-38

KEN YA modem-day COIntry

www prenhat tcomarmesto _maps

SOU AMER I CA

bull

villages Herder peoples are not ul1iLling or unable to build permanently or on a large sca le The Scythians for instance people of the -estern Asian steppe who first domesticated the horse and invented th e wheel and axle about 6000 to 7OCX years ago built impressive stone structures Bul these wefe underground tombs dwellings fo r the dead while the living inhabited temporary camps Some herding societies in Asia and Africa have become rich enough to fou nd ci ties fo r elites OT for specialists working outside of food production such as craftsmen or miners Indeed as we shall see (Chap ter 13) in the thirteenth century CF a city of thi s type Karakorum in Mongolia was one of the most admired cities in the world On the whole howshyever herding does no t favo r the development of cities o r the kind of culture that cities nourish such as monumental buildings large-scale inst itutions fo r education and the arts and ind ustrial technology

Second since herde rs breed from animal s that naturally share their grassland habitats thei r herds consist of such creatures as cattl e sheep horses goats-milkshyyielding stock To get the fu ll benefit fro m their auimals herdin g peoples have to eat dai ry products To modern milk-fed Americans this may sound perfeclly no rshyma l But it required a modification of human evolution Most people in most part s of the world do not natural1 ) produce lactase the substance that enables them to d igest milk after infancy They respond to dairy products wit h distaste or even intol erance The Masai of Kenya in East Africa get 80 percent of their energy

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

-c

~ ~r - E u R

E St ep peU R 0 P ---6 [ -~

-shy~ c_

R I C A

h e

Il ~ KENYA

A 5 I A

MONGOlIA

A 5 I A

PACIFIC

o C E A N

IN D I A N

o C E A N bull

--~

4NT ARCTI CA

intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

--Out of the Mud Farming and Herding After the Ice Age I 39

-c

~ ~r - E u R

E St ep peU R 0 P ---6 [ -~

-shy~ c_

R I C A

h e

Il ~ KENYA

A 5 I A

MONGOlIA

A 5 I A

PACIFIC

o C E A N

IN D I A N

o C E A N bull

--~

4NT ARCTI CA

intake from milk Their Kikuyu neighbors who arc tilters detest th e stuff People from the step pes of Eurasia invented an amazing variety of milk produ cts includshying butter yoghurt and cheese

Thi rd the herders diet relying heav iJy on meat milk and blood lacks variety compared to diets of people in more ecologically diverse environments This does not mean that the herders di et is nutritionally deficient If you eat organ meats drink an imal blood and prepare dairy products in a variety of ways to harness beneficial bacteria you can get everything the buman body needs including adeshyqua te vitamin C But this does not mean that herding peoples although they often express contempt for fa rmers despise the crops farmers grow On the cont rar) herders highly prize cultivated plants and import them at great cost or take them as tri bute or booty The same goes for the products of the sedentary industr ies that only farming folk have land or leisure for o r which are possible onl y in tree-rich environments such as wood products silk linen and cation

Violence between herders and farmers was common until about 300 yea rs ago or so when the war technology of sedentary societies left herd ing societies unable to compete Conflict arose not from herders hatred of fa rmers cult ure but from a desire to share its benefits O n the other hand farmers have not no rshymally had to depend on herding cultures for me-at or dairy products Typically they can farm their own animals feeding them on the waste Ot surplus of their

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

40 I CHAP T ER 2

Maui Humans need ~Itamin C but the meat and dairY products from herds do not supply much of It SO people in herding cultures eat hall( lgested plants from animals stomachs and organ meats such as the hver In which vitamin C tends to get concentrated Fresh bl00d--drawn here from the vems of a call by Masal women in Kenya-is also a useful source of the vitamm Drmkmg blood conshyfers an added advantage nomaas can draw It Irom their anImals on the hoot~ Without slaughleflflg them or halt ing the migrations 01 their flocks

crops or by grazing them between their tilla ge Or they can graze sheep or goats upla nd at higher altitudes above their fields Therefore in herder-settler warfare the herders have typically been aggressive and the settlers defensive

Tillers Environments

In the tundra nonhern Eurasian evergreen fo rests and great grasslan d~

tilli ng isnt an option Husbandry is restricted to herding But numerous oth er environments are suited to farming The ti rst essential prerequisite for farming was so il loose enough for a di bble- a pointed stick for poking holes in the ground- to work At first this was the only technology availshyable Where th e sad had to be cut or turned- where fo r instance the soil was heavy clay or dense or sticky loam-agriculture had to wai t for the sli ghtly mort advanced technology of the spade and the plow

EquaUy necessary prerequisites (or agriculture were sufficient water by rain or flood or irrigation to grow the crop enough sun to ripen it and some way to nourish the soil This last was generally the hardest to ensure because farming can exhaust even the richest soils fa irly rapidly Flooding and layering with silt or dredging and dressing new topsoil is needed to reshyplace nutrients Altern atively farmers can add fertilizer ash from burned wood lea f mold from forest cleari ngs guano (bird dung) from bird colonies if there are any nearby mined potasht manure from domesticated animals or night soil if all else fa ils for human excretion is poor fert ili zer

Ve can divide environments suited to early agriculture into three broad types swampy wetlands uplands and all uvial plains where flood shy

ing rivers or lakes renew the topsoil (Cleared woodl ands and irrigated drylands are also suitable fo r agriculture but as far as we know farm ing never originated in these envi ronmen ts Rather outsiders brought it to these areas from somt place else ) Each of the three types developed with plltuLiar characteri stics and special shyized crops It is worth looking al each in turn (see Map 24 on pages 48--49)

SWAMPLAND Swamp is no longer much in demand for fa rming Nowa+ days in the Western world if we want to turn bog into fa rmland we drain it But it had advan tages carly on Swamp soil is rich moist and eas) to work with simshyple technology At least one staple grows well in wa terlogged land-rice We still do not know where or when rice was first culti vated or even whether any of these wetl and varieties preceded the dryland rice that has gradually become more popshyul ar around the world Most evidence however suggests tbat peo ple were producshying ri ce at sites on the lower Ganges River in India and in parts of southeast Asia some 8000 years ago and in paddies in the Yangtze River valley in China not long afterward

Where rice is unavailable swampland cultivators can adapt the land fo r other crops by dredgi ng earth-which the can do by hand in suitable conditions-and by building up mounds Not only can they plant the mounds they can also farm water-dwelli ng creatures and plants in the ditches between mounds In the western highlands of New Guinea the first agriculture we know of started fuU y 9000 years ago in th e boggy valley bottoms Drains ditches and mounds still exist in the Kuk swamp there Mo re extensive earthworks were in place by 6000 BCE The crops

-Loam a mixture of sand clay Sil l and organiC matter t PotaSh various compounds containi ng potassium

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

O ut o f the Mud Farm ing a nd Herding After the Ice Age 41

o MAKING CONNECTIONS 0 _- -- --shyHERDERS AND TILLERS COMPARED

HERDERS TILLERS

Environment Environment

tundra evergreen forests of northern Eurasia swampy middotetlands alluvial plains temporal forests grasslands uplands irrigated deserts some uplands

Way of life Way of life

mobi l settkd

Diet Diet

reliance on meat milk and blood sometimes supplemented reliance on cultivated plants supplemented br meat and by lt ultivatcd plants from tillers dairy from Ihei r own anil11ls

Culture Culture

does not favor developm ent of cities tends to become urban ith large+scale institutions large-scale institutions industry

~CSire for goods fro m fanni ng cultures need for txtemive gra zing land

industry

I possessic auitudc to land

~ mutual incomprehension and d(monization

+violence hetween herders and tillers

have vanished- biodegraded into nothingness-but the first farmers probabl r planted taro the most easily cultivated indigenous native root Modern varieties of taro exh ibit signs of long domestication A diverse group of plants-native bashynanas ya ms and other tubers the sago palm and pandanus nuts-was probably added earl ) At some poi nt pigs arrived on the island However a fierce and o n present evidence unresolvable scholarl y controversy rages over when thai was

Having a variety of crops made New Guineas agricult ure exccptionally susshytainable Variety may also help explain why farming has remained a small -sca le enterprise there th at nu merous politically independent villages and not a large centralized state conduct New Guinea necr generated the big Slates and cities that grew up hhere the range ofavailable crops was narrower and agricultu re more fragile It may sound paradoxical that the most advantageous crop range produces the most modest results but it makes sense One of the pressures that dr ives fa rmshying peoples to expand their terr ito ry is fear that a cro p will faii The mo re ter ritory you cont rol the morc surplus you can warehouse the more manpower yo u comshymand and the more productie your fields Moreover if you farm an environment

- Palldall us pa lmmiddot ll ke tree or shrub

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

42 I C HAPTER 2

with a narrow range of food sources yo u can diversify on ly by conquering other peoples habitats The hi story of New Guinea has been as violent as that of ot her parts of the world bu t its wars have always been local and the resulting territorial adjustments sma ll Empire-building wa s unknown on the island until European colon izers got there in the late nineteenth century

We know of no other swamps that peo ple adapted so early but Illa ny later civshyilizations arose from similar so rts of ooze We do not know much about the origins of Bantu agriculture in West Africa but it is more likely to have begun in th e swamp than in the fo rest Swampland is suited to the native ylIIns on which Ban tu farming first relied Waterlogged la nd is also th e favorite habitat of the other mainshystay of Bantu t radition the oil palm The earliest archaeological evidence of farmshying based on yams and oil palms dates from about 5000 )ears ago in swam py valJey bottoms of Cameroon above the fo rest level

Swampland also contributed to the agriculture that began along the Amazon River in South America 4000 o r 5000 years ago At firs t the crops were probably richly d iverse supplemented by farming turtles and mollusks middot Later however from about 500 CE fa rmers increasingly focllsed on biller manioc also known as cassava o r yucca which has the great advantage of bei ng po isonous to predators Human consumers ca n process the poison out Q lmec civilizat ion which as we shall see in Chapter 3 was eno rmously influen tial in the histo ry of Mesoamerica was founded in swamps thick with ma ngrove t rees about 3000 years ago

UPLANDS like swamp lands regions of bigh altitude are not places that peo ple today consider good for farmi ng Farmers have usually left these regions to the herdsme n a nd native upland creatures such as sheep goats yaks and lla shymas There arc three reasons for th is First as altitude increases cold and the scorching effects of solar rad iatio n in the thill atmosphere dim inish the var iety of viable plants Second slopes are subject to erosion (although this has a secshyondary benefit beca use rdatively rich soils co llect in vall e) bottoms) Finally slopes in general arc hard to work once you have come to rei) on plows but th is does not stop people who do not usc plows from farming them Nonetheless in highlands suitable fo r pla nt foods-and not for livestock-plant husbandry or mixed fa rming d id develop

The Andes HighlanJs usually contai n many d ifferent microcl imates at vari shyous altitud es and in valleys where su n Jld rain can vary tremendo usly wit hi n a short space Some of the wo rlds earliest farming therefore happened a l surprisshyin gly high alt itudes Evide nce of mi xed farming survives from be tween about 12000 and 7000 yea rs ago ncar Lake Titicaca (tee-tee-kah-kah) elevation 13000 feet in th e An des of So uth America Here in the cave of Pacha machay bones of domest icated ll amas cover those of hunted vicwias (vee- KOON- yahs) and gtlanaco (gwa-NAH-koh )t The Jomesticated animals fed on quilloa (kee-NOH-ah) an exshytremely hardy grainlike food that resembles some kinds of grass It grows at h igh altitudes thanks to a bitter soapy coating that cuts out solar radiation The llamas ingested the lea fy part and deposited the seeds in their ma nure Their corrals thereshyfo re became nurseries for a food fit (or humans to grow and eat

The earliest known experi ments in domesticating the potQ(O probably ocshycurred at about the Same time in the sa me area-between 12000 and 7000 years ago Potatoes were ideal for mount ain agricu ltu re Not only were some naturally

middotMollusks vil r ious invertebrates such as mussets ctams snalts and oysters

tVicuna and guanaco animals retated to the llama

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

Out of t he M ud Far ming a nd Herding After the Ice Age j 4 3

occurri ng varieties of potato hardy enough to grow at altitudes of up to 14000 fect they also provided total nutrition Etltcn In sufticient quantities porashytoes provide everything the human body needs to survive ~Ioreover the high-altitude varieties have a hidden advantage Vlltgtreas wild kinds of lowland potatoes are poisonous and need careful processing to be(ome edible the concentration of poison in potatoes diminishes the higher you cl imb There is an obvious evolutionary reason for this The poison is there to deter predators wh ich are most numershyous at low altitudes

Thc potato gave Andcan moun tain dwellers the samc capaci ty to support la rge populations as peoplcs of the valleys and plains where a parallel story began in the cen tral coastal regio n of wh at is now Peru There around 10000 years ago farmers

Tile valley 01 CUlCO Peru the homeland of the Inca grew sweet potaro tube rs similar to modern variet ies_ If agriculture did indeed (Chapter 15) Potatoes-which were fi rst cultivated

prod uce sweet potatoes they would have IO be counted as the New Worlds earlishy In the Andes at least 7000 years ailo and spread

est farmed crop Once both regio ns had the capacity to feed dense populll tions from there 10 the rest of the world-remairl a staple irl th iS legiOrl They ale the only food that-if eatenAndea n history became a story of high land- lowland warfare punctuated by the In suffiCient quant lt ies--conta ins aU the nutrients

rise and fall of mountain -based empires necessary to sustain tlfe SUi table varieties of potashytoeuros f lOUri sh at over 13000 feet above sea le~e l

Mesoamerica The Mesoamerican highlands which st retch from central In mountain climates they can be freeze-dried for Mexico to Central Arner ic and are less high and less steep than those of the year-round nullil ion

Andes produced their On kind of highland -adapted food a tri nity of maize beans and squash This combination grows well together and when ea ten toshyge ther provides almost complete nu trition The ea rliest sur viving specime ns of cultivated maize a re 6000 years old People in Mesoamerica developed maize fro m a wild grass known as teosin te (TEE-eh -SIN-tee) which is st ill found in the state of Oaxaca (wah-H AH-kah ) in cen tral Mexico along with the wild anshycestors of modern domesti cated bea ns (see Figure 20 By working out how long it would take wild species to mu tate botanists estimate that people do messhyticat ed beans about 9000 years ago The earliest domesticated squash es date from about sallie period and are found at the same site as teosinte and wild beans at Guila Naqu itz (wee- LAH nah ~KEETS) in Oaxaca The fact that their wild ancestors have disappea red suggests that farming here might have started with sq uashes when gatherers of wild beans and gra ins needed to provide food for ti mes of drought Squash grows well during arid spells severe enough to withe r teosin te and blight beans so it would have provided a food reserve that people did no t need to store

The Old World The Old World had no potatoes qu inoa or even maize for highland farmers to work with The hardiest staples available in most of Eurasia and Africa were rye and barley Surprisi ngly however people in lowlands fi rst doshymesticated bo th of lhem in wha t are now jordan and Sy ria probably about 10000 years ago Rye germinates at just a coupl e degrees above freezing but its drawbacks made it more popular as a win ter crop in wheat-growing lowla nds than as a mounshytain stapte Its yield is lower and it is less nutritious than other grains Rye is also extremely vul nerable to fu ngllS infection Barley did not ful fLll its potential to be an Old World equivalent of quinoa or potatoes until the sixth cent urycE when it beshycame the staple food of a farming society in Tibet (Chapter 10)

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

44 C H A PTE R 2

fiGURE 21 TEOSINTE AND MAIZE The form of I~ si rlte from which early farmers m Mesoamerica developed mime no longer exiSts But the diagram Illustrates th e stages through which Mesoameshyricans may have bred teoslllle into maize until they developed the characteristic thick dense ly packed cobs famihar today Unlike teosinte maize cannot germ mate Wi thout human help PermiSSion of The UniefSly of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology

The only other Old World grain with similar potential was Ethiopias indigeshynou s grass called teff Tho ugh its tiny grains make teff labo rio us to cultivate a nd process it was su ited to the regions fertile soil and temperate climate above 7200 feet Although fa rmers in Eth iopia cultivated teff at least 5000 years ago they never had to rely o n il absolutely Some varieties of miller-the name of a huge range of grasses whose seeds humans can digest- had superior yiel ds Over time m illet disshyplaced teff which never becam e a m ajo r stuple outside Ethiop ia

ALLUVIAL PLAINS Alt hough swamps and rain -fed hi ghla nds have pro shy

duced spec tacularly successful agriculture fa rmers get tb e best help fro m nature in alluvial plains fiat lands wh ere river-borne or lake-borne mud renews the topso il If people can channel the flood s to keep crops from bei ng swept away on these plain s aUuvium (sediment and other organ ic matter) resto res nutrients and compensates for lack of rai n Alluvial soils in arid cli mates sustained as we shall see in the next chapter so me of the worlds most productive economies until late in the second millennium B Cpound Whea t and ba rley grew in the black earth th at lines Egypts Ni le the floodplains of the lower Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan People fir st farmed millet on allu vial soils in a so mewhat coole r moister climate in Ch ina in the croo k o f the Ye J1 0w River and th e Guanzho ng (gwan g-joe ) basin around 7000 yea rs ago And in the warm moist climate of Indochina in wha t is

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

Out of the Mud Farming and Herd ing After the Ice A ge I 4 5

now Cambodia th ree crops of rice a year could grow Oil

soil that the annual counter flow of the Mekong River cre shyated The Mekong becomes so torrent ial that the deltashywhere the river enters the sea-cannot funnel its flow and water is forced back upTlver

Smaller patches of all uvium deposited by floods nour shyished the worlds earliest known fully farming economies Among the first was Jericho on the river Jordan in modern Israel Today the Jordan valley looks inhospitable desert crusted with salt and sodium Ten thousand years ago howshyever Jericho overlooked an alluiai fan that trickling streams washed down fro m the Judaean hills filling the river as it crept south from the Sea of Galilee The river Jordan was th ic k with sil t The banks it deposited formed the biblical jungle of Jericho from where lions padded to raid the sheepfolds Here stood rich wheat fields creating the landscape said in the Bible to Tefl-the staple grai n of early Ethiopian clv l lizashy

tion-femains unique to the region where it is st i ll resemble the garden of the Lord Desert people such as the Israelites led by harvested regularly But as the picture shows i t

Joshua were excluded and were tempted to conquer it more closely resembles wild grasses than mooern In Jericho the ri tual focus of li fe was a cult of skulls which were cut from hlgh-Y leldlllg food grains The starchy ears are t iny

and require much laoo to mill So il ke many trashybodies exhumed after burial ree nfl eshed with plaster and given eyes of cowrie dit ional staples teft faces the threat of ext inction shells from the Red Sea This cult was par t of a way of life Je richo shared with today from the compet it ion of commercial hybrids

si mi lar settlements dotted around the regio n At ]erf al Ahma r (jehrf ahl-A Hshy or genetically modified variet ies promoted by powshy

mahr) 300 miles to the northeast lies a fa rming settlement of the same era with erfu l corporat ions

a bui ld ing used both to store grain and for ritually decapit ating corpses In much the same period between about 9000 and

11000 years ago farming towns also appeared in Anatolia in Turkey catalhiiyiik (chah-tahl-hoo-YOOK) the most spectacular of them stood on an alluvial plain th at the river carsamba flooded Nourished by wheat and beans the people fill ed an urban area of thirty-two acres Walkways across fl at roofs not streets as we define them linked a honeycomb of dwellings The houses built of mud bricks were identical (see Figure 22) The wall panels doorways hearths ovens and even the bricks were a standard shape and size You can still see where the occupants swept their rubb ish- chips of bone and shiny black flakes of volcanic glass called obsidian- into their hearths

catalh Uyiik was not an isolated phe nomenon A wall painting there depicts what may be another simi la r urban settlement Even earlier sites smaller than catalh iiyilk but on the same order communicated with the Jordan valleyshyvillages like cayonu (CHEYE-oh-noo) which builders of skull piles who performed sacri fices on polished stone slabs inhab ited By exchanging craft products-weapons metal shywork and pots-for pr imary materials such as cowrie shells from the Red Sea tim ber from th e Taurus Mountains in Anatolia and copper from beyond the Tigri s the in habishy Jericho Skull No one knows why people in JeriCho In the eighth mil lennium

BC-E bull kept sk ul ls pa inted them with plaster and Inserted cowrie shells into thetants of ~atalhiiyilk became rich by the standards of the eye sockets SuI these decorated skul ls have in a sense helped the dead to

time Archeologists have unearthed such treasures as fine survive Some 01 i he skulls even show tl aces 01 palni ed hair and mustac hes blades and mirrors made from local obsidian and products Ashmolean Museum Oxfotd England UK

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

46 I CHAPTER 2

of the copper-smelting technology that these people gradu ally developed

Yet the in habitants of ltatalhiiyiik never got safely beyond the mercy of nature They worshipped images of its strength bulls with monstrous horns and

protruding tongues crouchi ng leopards who guard goddesses lea ning 00 grain

bins fu ming volcanoes gia nt boar with laugh ing jaws and bristling backs This is surely fanners art animated by fear of the wild and

loathing of the savage Most people d ied in their late twenties or early thirties Their corpses

were ritually fed to vu ltures and jackals-as surshyviv ing pain tings show-before their bo nes were

bUlied in co mmunal graves ltatalhu yOk lasted for nearly 2000 years remarkshy

able lo ngevity by the standards of later cities It became doomed as the waters th at supplied it dried up Even in

its time of greatest prosperity its space was limited and its resource base restricted Bu t along with Jericho and other setshy

FIGURE 22 -rATALHUVOK The houses of CatalshyhOy[ik were linked not by streets as we know them blJt by roo ftop walkways from wh ich people preshysumably used ladders to reacn dlffererlt levels The diagram reconstructs part of QatalhOyOk on the baSIS of archaeological findings Wali paintshyIngs there Show that other settlements in the reshygion were constluctelti on si milar principles SchematiC (ecomlfUClon of houses ilnd Shflfles from Level VI a CatallQyuk by James MeJaart Reprinted by permission of the Caalhoyuk R85Iearch PrOfect

dements of the era it pointed to th e future showing how farm shying despite all it s short-term disadvantages and the sacrifices it demanded could sustain life th rough hard times

THE SPREAD OF AGRICULTURE

The development of food production in diverse environments with different foods and different tech niques points to an important conclusion It was not a unique occurrence-a one-of-a-kind accident or a st roke of ge nius Rather fa rming was an ordinary and fairly frequent process that could therefore be open to a variety of explanations

Where we can be sure agri culture developed independently we can see that early food producers focused on what they could grow or raise most easily in their particular environment Examples include livestock herds in central Eurasia wheat and barley in the Midd le East sweet potatoes quinoa and potatoes in the Andean region the squash-maize-beans trinity in Mesoamerica millet in China and rice in southeast Asia_In New Guinea agriculture was based on taro in Ethiopia on teff and in -Vest Africa on yams and oil palms Nevertheless connections between neighboring regions were unquestionably Important In spreading husbandry Some crops ere undoubtedly transferred from the p laces they originated to other regions (see Map 24)

Europe

It seems likely (though the ev idence is slight and subject to reinterpretation) that migrants from Asia colonized Europe They brought their farming materials and knowledge with them as well as their Indo-European languages from wh ich most of Europes present languages descend Colonization was a gradual process beginshyning about 6000 years ago Early fa nners may have cleared some land but probably did not undertake large-scale deforestation Later well -documented cases from

EG YP T

IRAN

T U RI- fM M EK (ST1

Original Tillers Environments Early Crop Sites and the Spread of Agriculture

bull swa mpland

8~lJtJoin-bull uplands - ~ JshyflOQdplalros

llMIu na tve people

MEX ICO modern-day country bullbull pla(e described

~

= on pages 40-50 I SOl) ati

spread of agricullure N 0 f ~ )

l R T ~ ~__~__~____ ~_____

A M E R ICA

J

) 5

PA CI FIC

o C E A N

A

Early Crop Sites

Crop Environment Earliest Sites

qun~ uplands high Andes Peru 12000-7000 yean go

potato uplands high Andes Peru t 2000-7000 years ago0 c sweet polalo (enlal (OaSI Peru 10000 yeas ago0

l wheal floodplains Jerho on river Jordan 10000 years ago

l ~ Jordan Syria 10000 yean ago ~ l barl ey uplands Jordan Syria 10OOCIyeanago

8 ~~ swamp New Guinea 9000 years ago

0 beans uplands Qa~lt(a Me~ito 9000 years ago ~ Il ~uj~h uplands Qultea Meocko 9000 years ago

flee swamp Ganges River valley 8000 yeall ago~ India southeltst Asilt Yangtze River valley (hina

It millet floodplainS Gang River ~alley 7000 years ago igtf)India southu S Asa C--Yan gtze River vaHey (hina -= -~ -shy ma ize uplands Qa~a( Me~i(o amp000 years ago ~ ~

( ya ms Iw mp C merOQn We-sl Africa 5000 years ago

oil palm dales swamp (ameroon Well Alra 5000 yea rs ago

lteft upl nds Eth io pia f S At 5000 ye ars agoshy biller manioc swamp Amazon Soulh Amerlca 1500 years it90 (cal~~a yucca)

Il

Approll Eartlest Domestication

obullbull

~

ATLANT I C

o ( E A N

C

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EU RASIA

R 0 P E -- -~~~int - ---- t

A 5 I A JAPANtiNsn T1RET I Y tt

f CHINAPA K[ STA~ ~t

a r a INDI

lt-- ----3 ndocnl n ~

~ CMtBODlA -t P A C I F IC

RIC A o C E A NETHIOPI A -

gtN

INDIA N

o C f AN

bull

NA~ - AUSTRALIA LESOTHO

bull

lt ltshy

49

50 I CHAPTER 2

o ther fo rest enviro nments suggest that ea rly agriculturists in Europe fou nd trees useful and even revered them So large-scale deforestation more likely occurred natshyurally perhaps through tree diseases Between 4500 and 5000 years ago for in shystance in northern Europe the broad-leaved fores t receded creating areas that were well suited to farming When the woodland grew back after a few hundred years fa rmers unquest io nably cu t it back

Asia

Similar migrations probably spread fa rming to parts of Central Asia so uth of the stepshypeland The fanning that developed in alluvial environments in Anatolia and the Jorshydan valley colonized or converted every viable partofthe region by 8000 o r 9000 years ago At altitudes above IBoo fee t inhabitants of sites east of the Zagros Mountains (in what is now Lran ) replaced their wild grains with cultivated va rieties Then too by about 6000 yea rs ago comprehensive irrigation systems for farming crisscrossed (he oases in southern Turkmen istan which had a moister climate than it has now

In the Indian subcontinent the sudden emergence of well -built villages in the same period was probably the result of outside in fl uence No i n tennediat~ pha~e

betw~en foraging and farming occurred no period when foragers led settled lives IIle can trace the spread of farmin g from southwest Asia by way of Baluchistan (southern PakistIll ) Here remnan ts o f domestic barley and wheat in mud b ricks a nd the bones of domestic goats confirm the presence of agriculture about 9000 years ago This is (Iso the site of the worlds earliest surviving cotton thread strung thro ugh a copper bead about 7500 years Olga

The Americas

In much of Non h America the spread of maize northwards from its birthplace in censhyIral Mexico marked the transmission of agriculture It was a process that took tho ushysa nds of years and demanded the dedopment of new varielies as the crop crossed

climate zones on its northward route The best estimate puts maize farming

(

EGY PT Sa hara

CAMEROOI t

~

IN 0 I A Iv A TLANTIC

o C fA N o C f AN

(appo )500 allt1

in the southwestern United States about 3000 years ago Meanwhile some North American peoples began to farm sunflowers and sumpwccd for their edible seeds and roots In South America the idea ofagriculture spread from o r across the high Andes through the upper Amazon basin

Africa

How agricult ure spread in Africa is less clear tha n in other regions People began to cult ivate sim ilar plant foods III th e Egyptian Sahara and in the Nile valley about 9000 years ago It therefore looks as if one region might have influenced the o ther A Ji ttle later wheat cultivatio n alo ng the Nile followed developments of a similar kind in the Jo rdan valley Between 4500 and 5000 years ago agriculture spread southward from West Afr ica along wilh Bantu languages We can trace the path from what arc now Cameroon and Nigeria in Vcst Afri ca southward and then eastwards across the expanding Sahara to the Nile vall ey before turn ing sout h aglin (sec Map 25)

The Pacific Islands

Scholars debate when agriculture originated in the Pacific Islands In particshyular we do 110t know how or when the sweet potato-which togeth er with the pig is

The Spread of Bantu Languages the basis of food production in most of the region-got there The most widely

Out of thE Mud Farming a nd Herding A fter the Ice Age I 5 1

respected theory sees agriculture as th e result of diffusion from New Guinca It ~clS a slow process requiring many adaptations as it spread The Spread of Agriculture across the ocean with seaborne migrants (All dates are approximate)

SO WHY DID FARMING START 9000 years ago

Knowing or guessing about how food production sta rted does not tell us why it started Why despite the short-term difficultiesdid some peoshyples originate fa nning and others adopt it Though scholars ferociously 8 000-9000 years ago

advocate rivaJ ex-planations we do not have to choose among them Difshyferent explanations or different combinations of the same explanations may have applied in d ifferent places Nor do we have to go through all

6000 years ago

the theories We can group them under seven manageable headings

Population Pressure 4500shy5000 years ago

The firs t group of theo ries explains agricul ture as a response to stress from po pulatio n growth and overexploita1io n o f wild foods Exa m- 3000 years ago pies incl ude hunting game to extinction aDd overgathering plants grubs and m ollusks Logically population sho uld not grow if reshysources are getting scarce Bu an thropological studies of con temposhyrary cultures making the transition to agricultu re in Botswana and Lesotho ill so uthern Africa support the theory Apparently once fa rming starts peo ple cannot abandon it without catast rophe A ratchet effect makes it imposs ishyble while population rises to go back to less intensive ways of getting food As an explanati on however for why agriculture arose in the fir st place population presshysure does not match the facts of chronology Population s certainly grew in the most dedi cated fa rming cultures but in most places growth was more probably ltI

consequ ence o f agriculture than a cause

The Outcome of Abundance

A group of theories has arisen in direct opposit io n to stress theory These clai m that husbandry was a resu]t of abundance Far ming it is said was a by-product of the leisure of fishermen in sou theast Asia who devoted their spare time to experimenting with plants 01 hill dweUers in northern Iraq whose habi tat was peculiarly rich in easily domesticated grasses and grazing herds invented it Or it was the natural result of concentrations of pockets of abundance in Central Asia in the post- Tee-Age era of globa l warmi ng As temperatures rose oases opened up where different species conshygregated peacefully Humans discovered they could domesticate animals that would otherwise be r ivals enemies or prey Abundance theory is a convincing description fo r why agriculture developed in some key areas but it does not explain why in good ti mes people would want to change how they got their food and take on extra work

The Power of Politics

Stress theory and abundance theory may apply to why agriculture arose in different areas bUllhey cannot be true simultaneousl) Therefore beyond the food supply it is worth conSidering possible polit ical or social or religio lls influences on food strategies After all food is fo r more than nourishment Food not on ly Sllstains the body it also confe rs power and prestige It ca n symbolize identity and generate ritushyals In hierarchically organ ized societies elites nearly always demand more food than they can eat not just to ensure their security but also to show off their wealth by squandering their waste

EVidence at agriculture In

Ind ian subcontinent farming spreads by diffUSIon in the Egyptian Sahara and Nile valley

f arming spreads from Jordan valley and Anatolia to central Asia south of the steppe

Migrants from Asia bring farm ing materials and knowledge wi th them to Europe

Bantu e~panSlon spreads farm ing from West Africa southward

Maize moves northward from Mexlco to southwestern United Siaies

52 I CHAP TER 2

Cult aariculture Chlmu goldsmiths (Chaper 141 produced this ceremOnial diSh wtllch depiru the succession of the seasons presided over by the censhytral f igure of the maize god and offerings of the cnaracterlst lc starches of tne Peruvian lowlandsshymaize cassava sweet potatoes By the t ime thiS object was made however around 1200 CE maize vafletles had been adapted for vaned environments includi ng uplands and temperate cirmates

In a society where leaders buy allegiance with food competit ive feasting can generate huge increases in demand eve n if population is static and supplies are seshycure Societies bound by feasting will aJways favo r intensive agriculture and masshysive storage Even in societies with looser (arms of leadership or with collective decisio n making feasting can be a powerful incen tive to boost food production and sto rage by fo rce if necessary Feast ing can celeb rate collective identity or ceshyment relations with o ther communities Then too people could p rocess most of the early domesticated plants into intoxicating drinks Iffarming began as a way to generate surpluses for feas ts alcohol must have had a special role

Cult Agriculture

Religion may well have been the inspiration fo r farming Planting may have origishynated as a fer til ity rite or irr igatio n as libatio n (a liq uid offering to the spirits or gods) or enclosure as an act of reverence for a sacred plant To plow or dibble and sow and irrigate can carry profound mean ing They can be understood as rites of birth and nurture of the god on wh om yO Ll are going to feed In exchange for labor- a kin d of sacrifICe- the god p rovides nourishment Most cultures have considered the power to make food grow to be a divine gift or curse o r a secret that a hero stole from the gods People have domesticated animals for use in sacrifice and prophecy as well as fo r food Many societ ies cult ivate plants that play a part at the altar rather than at the table Examples indude incense ecstat ic or hallucinatoshyry drugs th e sacrificial corn of some high Andean communities and wheat which in orthodox Christian traditions is the on ly permitted grain fo r the Eucharist And if religion inspi red agriculture alcohol as a drink that can ind uce ecstasy might have had a speci al appeal In short where crops are gods farm in g is worship

Climatic Instability

Global warming as we saw in Cha pter I presented some foragers with thousands of years of abundance But warming is unpredictable Sometim es it in tensifies causing spells of drought sometimes it goes into tem porary reverse causing little ice ages Its effects are uneven In the agrarian heartland of the M iddle East for example warmshying squeezed the environment of nut-bearing trees but favored some kinds of grassshyes The forest receded dramatically as the climate got drier and ho tter between about 13000 and 11000 years ago The new conditions encouraged people to rely more and more on grains for food and perhaps try TO find ways to increase the amount o f edible wheat Gatherers who knew the habits of their plants tended them ever more carefully It was perhaps a conservative even a conservationist strategy a way to keep old food stocks and lifestyles going under the impact of cli mate change

Agriculture by Accident

In the nineteenth century the most popular theor y of bow farmi ng started attribshyuted it to accident One ca n hardly open a nineteenth-cen tury book on the subject without encountering the myth of the primitive forager usuall y a wo man discovshyering agriculture by ohserving how seeds dropped b y accident germinated on fertilized soil The father of the theory of evol ution Charles Darwin (1809- 1882 see Chapter 25 ) himself thought something similar

The savage inhabitants of each land having found out by many and hard trials what plants were useful would after a time take the first step in cultivation by planting them near their usual abodes The next step in cultivation and this would require but little fo rethought would be to sow the seeds of useful plants and as the soil near

50 I CHAPTER 2

o ther fo rest enviro nments suggest that ea rly agriculturists in Europe fou nd trees useful and even revered them So large-scale deforestation more likely occurred natshyurally perhaps through tree diseases Between 4500 and 5000 years ago for in shystance in northern Europe the broad-leaved fores t receded creating areas that were well suited to farming When the woodland grew back after a few hundred years fa rmers unquest io nably cu t it back

Asia

Similar migrations probably spread fa rming to parts of Central Asia so uth of the stepshypeland The fanning that developed in alluvial environments in Anatolia and the Jorshydan valley colonized or converted every viable partofthe region by 8000 o r 9000 years ago At altitudes above IBoo fee t inhabitants of sites east of the Zagros Mountains (in what is now Lran ) replaced their wild grains with cultivated va rieties Then too by about 6000 yea rs ago comprehensive irrigation systems for farming crisscrossed (he oases in southern Turkmen istan which had a moister climate than it has now

In the Indian subcontinent the sudden emergence of well -built villages in the same period was probably the result of outside in fl uence No i n tennediat~ pha~e

betw~en foraging and farming occurred no period when foragers led settled lives IIle can trace the spread of farmin g from southwest Asia by way of Baluchistan (southern PakistIll ) Here remnan ts o f domestic barley and wheat in mud b ricks a nd the bones of domestic goats confirm the presence of agriculture about 9000 years ago This is (Iso the site of the worlds earliest surviving cotton thread strung thro ugh a copper bead about 7500 years Olga

The Americas

In much of Non h America the spread of maize northwards from its birthplace in censhyIral Mexico marked the transmission of agriculture It was a process that took tho ushysa nds of years and demanded the dedopment of new varielies as the crop crossed

climate zones on its northward route The best estimate puts maize farming

(

EGY PT Sa hara

CAMEROOI t

~

IN 0 I A Iv A TLANTIC

o C fA N o C f AN

(appo )500 allt1

in the southwestern United States about 3000 years ago Meanwhile some North American peoples began to farm sunflowers and sumpwccd for their edible seeds and roots In South America the idea ofagriculture spread from o r across the high Andes through the upper Amazon basin

Africa

How agricult ure spread in Africa is less clear tha n in other regions People began to cult ivate sim ilar plant foods III th e Egyptian Sahara and in the Nile valley about 9000 years ago It therefore looks as if one region might have influenced the o ther A Ji ttle later wheat cultivatio n alo ng the Nile followed developments of a similar kind in the Jo rdan valley Between 4500 and 5000 years ago agriculture spread southward from West Afr ica along wilh Bantu languages We can trace the path from what arc now Cameroon and Nigeria in Vcst Afri ca southward and then eastwards across the expanding Sahara to the Nile vall ey before turn ing sout h aglin (sec Map 25)

The Pacific Islands

Scholars debate when agriculture originated in the Pacific Islands In particshyular we do 110t know how or when the sweet potato-which togeth er with the pig is

The Spread of Bantu Languages the basis of food production in most of the region-got there The most widely

Out of thE Mud Farming a nd Herding A fter the Ice Age I 5 1

respected theory sees agriculture as th e result of diffusion from New Guinca It ~clS a slow process requiring many adaptations as it spread The Spread of Agriculture across the ocean with seaborne migrants (All dates are approximate)

SO WHY DID FARMING START 9000 years ago

Knowing or guessing about how food production sta rted does not tell us why it started Why despite the short-term difficultiesdid some peoshyples originate fa nning and others adopt it Though scholars ferociously 8 000-9000 years ago

advocate rivaJ ex-planations we do not have to choose among them Difshyferent explanations or different combinations of the same explanations may have applied in d ifferent places Nor do we have to go through all

6000 years ago

the theories We can group them under seven manageable headings

Population Pressure 4500shy5000 years ago

The firs t group of theo ries explains agricul ture as a response to stress from po pulatio n growth and overexploita1io n o f wild foods Exa m- 3000 years ago pies incl ude hunting game to extinction aDd overgathering plants grubs and m ollusks Logically population sho uld not grow if reshysources are getting scarce Bu an thropological studies of con temposhyrary cultures making the transition to agricultu re in Botswana and Lesotho ill so uthern Africa support the theory Apparently once fa rming starts peo ple cannot abandon it without catast rophe A ratchet effect makes it imposs ishyble while population rises to go back to less intensive ways of getting food As an explanati on however for why agriculture arose in the fir st place population presshysure does not match the facts of chronology Population s certainly grew in the most dedi cated fa rming cultures but in most places growth was more probably ltI

consequ ence o f agriculture than a cause

The Outcome of Abundance

A group of theories has arisen in direct opposit io n to stress theory These clai m that husbandry was a resu]t of abundance Far ming it is said was a by-product of the leisure of fishermen in sou theast Asia who devoted their spare time to experimenting with plants 01 hill dweUers in northern Iraq whose habi tat was peculiarly rich in easily domesticated grasses and grazing herds invented it Or it was the natural result of concentrations of pockets of abundance in Central Asia in the post- Tee-Age era of globa l warmi ng As temperatures rose oases opened up where different species conshygregated peacefully Humans discovered they could domesticate animals that would otherwise be r ivals enemies or prey Abundance theory is a convincing description fo r why agriculture developed in some key areas but it does not explain why in good ti mes people would want to change how they got their food and take on extra work

The Power of Politics

Stress theory and abundance theory may apply to why agriculture arose in different areas bUllhey cannot be true simultaneousl) Therefore beyond the food supply it is worth conSidering possible polit ical or social or religio lls influences on food strategies After all food is fo r more than nourishment Food not on ly Sllstains the body it also confe rs power and prestige It ca n symbolize identity and generate ritushyals In hierarchically organ ized societies elites nearly always demand more food than they can eat not just to ensure their security but also to show off their wealth by squandering their waste

EVidence at agriculture In

Ind ian subcontinent farming spreads by diffUSIon in the Egyptian Sahara and Nile valley

f arming spreads from Jordan valley and Anatolia to central Asia south of the steppe

Migrants from Asia bring farm ing materials and knowledge wi th them to Europe

Bantu e~panSlon spreads farm ing from West Africa southward

Maize moves northward from Mexlco to southwestern United Siaies

52 I CHAP TER 2

Cult aariculture Chlmu goldsmiths (Chaper 141 produced this ceremOnial diSh wtllch depiru the succession of the seasons presided over by the censhytral f igure of the maize god and offerings of the cnaracterlst lc starches of tne Peruvian lowlandsshymaize cassava sweet potatoes By the t ime thiS object was made however around 1200 CE maize vafletles had been adapted for vaned environments includi ng uplands and temperate cirmates

In a society where leaders buy allegiance with food competit ive feasting can generate huge increases in demand eve n if population is static and supplies are seshycure Societies bound by feasting will aJways favo r intensive agriculture and masshysive storage Even in societies with looser (arms of leadership or with collective decisio n making feasting can be a powerful incen tive to boost food production and sto rage by fo rce if necessary Feast ing can celeb rate collective identity or ceshyment relations with o ther communities Then too people could p rocess most of the early domesticated plants into intoxicating drinks Iffarming began as a way to generate surpluses for feas ts alcohol must have had a special role

Cult Agriculture

Religion may well have been the inspiration fo r farming Planting may have origishynated as a fer til ity rite or irr igatio n as libatio n (a liq uid offering to the spirits or gods) or enclosure as an act of reverence for a sacred plant To plow or dibble and sow and irrigate can carry profound mean ing They can be understood as rites of birth and nurture of the god on wh om yO Ll are going to feed In exchange for labor- a kin d of sacrifICe- the god p rovides nourishment Most cultures have considered the power to make food grow to be a divine gift or curse o r a secret that a hero stole from the gods People have domesticated animals for use in sacrifice and prophecy as well as fo r food Many societ ies cult ivate plants that play a part at the altar rather than at the table Examples indude incense ecstat ic or hallucinatoshyry drugs th e sacrificial corn of some high Andean communities and wheat which in orthodox Christian traditions is the on ly permitted grain fo r the Eucharist And if religion inspi red agriculture alcohol as a drink that can ind uce ecstasy might have had a speci al appeal In short where crops are gods farm in g is worship

Climatic Instability

Global warming as we saw in Cha pter I presented some foragers with thousands of years of abundance But warming is unpredictable Sometim es it in tensifies causing spells of drought sometimes it goes into tem porary reverse causing little ice ages Its effects are uneven In the agrarian heartland of the M iddle East for example warmshying squeezed the environment of nut-bearing trees but favored some kinds of grassshyes The forest receded dramatically as the climate got drier and ho tter between about 13000 and 11000 years ago The new conditions encouraged people to rely more and more on grains for food and perhaps try TO find ways to increase the amount o f edible wheat Gatherers who knew the habits of their plants tended them ever more carefully It was perhaps a conservative even a conservationist strategy a way to keep old food stocks and lifestyles going under the impact of cli mate change

Agriculture by Accident

In the nineteenth century the most popular theor y of bow farmi ng started attribshyuted it to accident One ca n hardly open a nineteenth-cen tury book on the subject without encountering the myth of the primitive forager usuall y a wo man discovshyering agriculture by ohserving how seeds dropped b y accident germinated on fertilized soil The father of the theory of evol ution Charles Darwin (1809- 1882 see Chapter 25 ) himself thought something similar

The savage inhabitants of each land having found out by many and hard trials what plants were useful would after a time take the first step in cultivation by planting them near their usual abodes The next step in cultivation and this would require but little fo rethought would be to sow the seeds of useful plants and as the soil near

Out of thE Mud Farming a nd Herding A fter the Ice Age I 5 1

respected theory sees agriculture as th e result of diffusion from New Guinca It ~clS a slow process requiring many adaptations as it spread The Spread of Agriculture across the ocean with seaborne migrants (All dates are approximate)

SO WHY DID FARMING START 9000 years ago

Knowing or guessing about how food production sta rted does not tell us why it started Why despite the short-term difficultiesdid some peoshyples originate fa nning and others adopt it Though scholars ferociously 8 000-9000 years ago

advocate rivaJ ex-planations we do not have to choose among them Difshyferent explanations or different combinations of the same explanations may have applied in d ifferent places Nor do we have to go through all

6000 years ago

the theories We can group them under seven manageable headings

Population Pressure 4500shy5000 years ago

The firs t group of theo ries explains agricul ture as a response to stress from po pulatio n growth and overexploita1io n o f wild foods Exa m- 3000 years ago pies incl ude hunting game to extinction aDd overgathering plants grubs and m ollusks Logically population sho uld not grow if reshysources are getting scarce Bu an thropological studies of con temposhyrary cultures making the transition to agricultu re in Botswana and Lesotho ill so uthern Africa support the theory Apparently once fa rming starts peo ple cannot abandon it without catast rophe A ratchet effect makes it imposs ishyble while population rises to go back to less intensive ways of getting food As an explanati on however for why agriculture arose in the fir st place population presshysure does not match the facts of chronology Population s certainly grew in the most dedi cated fa rming cultures but in most places growth was more probably ltI

consequ ence o f agriculture than a cause

The Outcome of Abundance

A group of theories has arisen in direct opposit io n to stress theory These clai m that husbandry was a resu]t of abundance Far ming it is said was a by-product of the leisure of fishermen in sou theast Asia who devoted their spare time to experimenting with plants 01 hill dweUers in northern Iraq whose habi tat was peculiarly rich in easily domesticated grasses and grazing herds invented it Or it was the natural result of concentrations of pockets of abundance in Central Asia in the post- Tee-Age era of globa l warmi ng As temperatures rose oases opened up where different species conshygregated peacefully Humans discovered they could domesticate animals that would otherwise be r ivals enemies or prey Abundance theory is a convincing description fo r why agriculture developed in some key areas but it does not explain why in good ti mes people would want to change how they got their food and take on extra work

The Power of Politics

Stress theory and abundance theory may apply to why agriculture arose in different areas bUllhey cannot be true simultaneousl) Therefore beyond the food supply it is worth conSidering possible polit ical or social or religio lls influences on food strategies After all food is fo r more than nourishment Food not on ly Sllstains the body it also confe rs power and prestige It ca n symbolize identity and generate ritushyals In hierarchically organ ized societies elites nearly always demand more food than they can eat not just to ensure their security but also to show off their wealth by squandering their waste

EVidence at agriculture In

Ind ian subcontinent farming spreads by diffUSIon in the Egyptian Sahara and Nile valley

f arming spreads from Jordan valley and Anatolia to central Asia south of the steppe

Migrants from Asia bring farm ing materials and knowledge wi th them to Europe

Bantu e~panSlon spreads farm ing from West Africa southward

Maize moves northward from Mexlco to southwestern United Siaies

52 I CHAP TER 2

Cult aariculture Chlmu goldsmiths (Chaper 141 produced this ceremOnial diSh wtllch depiru the succession of the seasons presided over by the censhytral f igure of the maize god and offerings of the cnaracterlst lc starches of tne Peruvian lowlandsshymaize cassava sweet potatoes By the t ime thiS object was made however around 1200 CE maize vafletles had been adapted for vaned environments includi ng uplands and temperate cirmates

In a society where leaders buy allegiance with food competit ive feasting can generate huge increases in demand eve n if population is static and supplies are seshycure Societies bound by feasting will aJways favo r intensive agriculture and masshysive storage Even in societies with looser (arms of leadership or with collective decisio n making feasting can be a powerful incen tive to boost food production and sto rage by fo rce if necessary Feast ing can celeb rate collective identity or ceshyment relations with o ther communities Then too people could p rocess most of the early domesticated plants into intoxicating drinks Iffarming began as a way to generate surpluses for feas ts alcohol must have had a special role

Cult Agriculture

Religion may well have been the inspiration fo r farming Planting may have origishynated as a fer til ity rite or irr igatio n as libatio n (a liq uid offering to the spirits or gods) or enclosure as an act of reverence for a sacred plant To plow or dibble and sow and irrigate can carry profound mean ing They can be understood as rites of birth and nurture of the god on wh om yO Ll are going to feed In exchange for labor- a kin d of sacrifICe- the god p rovides nourishment Most cultures have considered the power to make food grow to be a divine gift or curse o r a secret that a hero stole from the gods People have domesticated animals for use in sacrifice and prophecy as well as fo r food Many societ ies cult ivate plants that play a part at the altar rather than at the table Examples indude incense ecstat ic or hallucinatoshyry drugs th e sacrificial corn of some high Andean communities and wheat which in orthodox Christian traditions is the on ly permitted grain fo r the Eucharist And if religion inspi red agriculture alcohol as a drink that can ind uce ecstasy might have had a speci al appeal In short where crops are gods farm in g is worship

Climatic Instability

Global warming as we saw in Cha pter I presented some foragers with thousands of years of abundance But warming is unpredictable Sometim es it in tensifies causing spells of drought sometimes it goes into tem porary reverse causing little ice ages Its effects are uneven In the agrarian heartland of the M iddle East for example warmshying squeezed the environment of nut-bearing trees but favored some kinds of grassshyes The forest receded dramatically as the climate got drier and ho tter between about 13000 and 11000 years ago The new conditions encouraged people to rely more and more on grains for food and perhaps try TO find ways to increase the amount o f edible wheat Gatherers who knew the habits of their plants tended them ever more carefully It was perhaps a conservative even a conservationist strategy a way to keep old food stocks and lifestyles going under the impact of cli mate change

Agriculture by Accident

In the nineteenth century the most popular theor y of bow farmi ng started attribshyuted it to accident One ca n hardly open a nineteenth-cen tury book on the subject without encountering the myth of the primitive forager usuall y a wo man discovshyering agriculture by ohserving how seeds dropped b y accident germinated on fertilized soil The father of the theory of evol ution Charles Darwin (1809- 1882 see Chapter 25 ) himself thought something similar

The savage inhabitants of each land having found out by many and hard trials what plants were useful would after a time take the first step in cultivation by planting them near their usual abodes The next step in cultivation and this would require but little fo rethought would be to sow the seeds of useful plants and as the soil near

52 I CHAP TER 2

Cult aariculture Chlmu goldsmiths (Chaper 141 produced this ceremOnial diSh wtllch depiru the succession of the seasons presided over by the censhytral f igure of the maize god and offerings of the cnaracterlst lc starches of tne Peruvian lowlandsshymaize cassava sweet potatoes By the t ime thiS object was made however around 1200 CE maize vafletles had been adapted for vaned environments includi ng uplands and temperate cirmates

In a society where leaders buy allegiance with food competit ive feasting can generate huge increases in demand eve n if population is static and supplies are seshycure Societies bound by feasting will aJways favo r intensive agriculture and masshysive storage Even in societies with looser (arms of leadership or with collective decisio n making feasting can be a powerful incen tive to boost food production and sto rage by fo rce if necessary Feast ing can celeb rate collective identity or ceshyment relations with o ther communities Then too people could p rocess most of the early domesticated plants into intoxicating drinks Iffarming began as a way to generate surpluses for feas ts alcohol must have had a special role

Cult Agriculture

Religion may well have been the inspiration fo r farming Planting may have origishynated as a fer til ity rite or irr igatio n as libatio n (a liq uid offering to the spirits or gods) or enclosure as an act of reverence for a sacred plant To plow or dibble and sow and irrigate can carry profound mean ing They can be understood as rites of birth and nurture of the god on wh om yO Ll are going to feed In exchange for labor- a kin d of sacrifICe- the god p rovides nourishment Most cultures have considered the power to make food grow to be a divine gift or curse o r a secret that a hero stole from the gods People have domesticated animals for use in sacrifice and prophecy as well as fo r food Many societ ies cult ivate plants that play a part at the altar rather than at the table Examples indude incense ecstat ic or hallucinatoshyry drugs th e sacrificial corn of some high Andean communities and wheat which in orthodox Christian traditions is the on ly permitted grain fo r the Eucharist And if religion inspi red agriculture alcohol as a drink that can ind uce ecstasy might have had a speci al appeal In short where crops are gods farm in g is worship

Climatic Instability

Global warming as we saw in Cha pter I presented some foragers with thousands of years of abundance But warming is unpredictable Sometim es it in tensifies causing spells of drought sometimes it goes into tem porary reverse causing little ice ages Its effects are uneven In the agrarian heartland of the M iddle East for example warmshying squeezed the environment of nut-bearing trees but favored some kinds of grassshyes The forest receded dramatically as the climate got drier and ho tter between about 13000 and 11000 years ago The new conditions encouraged people to rely more and more on grains for food and perhaps try TO find ways to increase the amount o f edible wheat Gatherers who knew the habits of their plants tended them ever more carefully It was perhaps a conservative even a conservationist strategy a way to keep old food stocks and lifestyles going under the impact of cli mate change

Agriculture by Accident

In the nineteenth century the most popular theor y of bow farmi ng started attribshyuted it to accident One ca n hardly open a nineteenth-cen tury book on the subject without encountering the myth of the primitive forager usuall y a wo man discovshyering agriculture by ohserving how seeds dropped b y accident germinated on fertilized soil The father of the theory of evol ution Charles Darwin (1809- 1882 see Chapter 25 ) himself thought something similar

The savage inhabitants of each land having found out by many and hard trials what plants were useful would after a time take the first step in cultivation by planting them near their usual abodes The next step in cultivation and this would require but little fo rethought would be to sow the seeds of useful plants and as the soil near

Out of the MUd Farming and Herding A f ter the Ice A ge I 53

the hovels of the natives would often be in some degree manured improved varieties would sooner or later arise Or a wild and unusually good variety of a native plant might attract the atte ntion of some wise old savage and he would transplant it or sow its seed Transplanting any superior variety or sowing its seeds hardly implies more fore though t than mi ght be expected at an early nd rude period of civilisatioll2

Darwins reconstruction is plausible He makes accident interact with human action But this model leaves some unsolved problems Historians are never satisshyfied to fall back on what would or might have happened (though this may be necshyessary to help understand remote o r poorly documen ted periods) We want to know-and it is the histo rians job to try to tell us- what really did happen Asshysuming that anyth in g a savage does requires little fo rethought does no t fit with what we now know of httma n nature Cleverness occurs at ever) period of history and in every type o f soc iety- in New Guinea as well as in New York in antiquity as well as in modernit y

Production As an Outgrowth of Procurement

Still th e accident theory may be right in one respect Early practitioners may lIot have consciousty thought of food production as different strategy from fo raging It makes sense for inseance to see herding as a natural development o f some huntin g techniques such as improving a speci es by culling weak or old animals ma nagi ng grazing by setting fires driving herds down lanes to a place of slaughter or corshyralling them for the kill Similarly farming and gathering might have been parts of a single conti nuo us attempt to manage food sources It is hard to tell where a ile leaves o ff and the other begins Even the simplest hunter- gatherer society as arch aeologist Br ian Fagan has said knows fu ll well that seeds germinate when planted The Papago Native Americans of the Sonora Desert of Arizona drift in and o ut of an agrarian way of life as th e weather permits using patches of surface water to grow fast-maturing varieties of beans

The archaeological evidence has begun to yield clues to how gatherer commushynities of southwestern Asia tran sformed themselves into farming communities after the Ice Age Grasses on the who le are naturally too indigestible to be human food But the regio n produced wild barley and two kinds o f wheat--einko rn ( EYEN-koro l and COl mer (EH -mehr) We know people ate them because archaeshyologists have found actual remains that grinders of these grains processed from 14000 to 15000 years ago Kernels of these wheats are hard to free from their lough inedible covering so people who ate large amounts of them may have had an incentive to t ry to breed varieties that were easier to process At first the gathershyers beat sheaves of wheat with sticks where they grew and collected ed ible seeds in baskets as they fell Increasi ngly as time went on they cut stalh with flint sickles wh ich meant that fewer seeds fell when the wheat was harvested This new method suggests that people were selecting p referred seeds for replanting Modern experi shyments show that this process cou ld produce a self-propagating species within twenty years Alternati vely the new method itself might have encouraged cha nges in the species because heavier larger seeds would be more likely to fall to the ground at the point of harvesting Eventually new varieties would emerge but th e process would be much slower

Even earlier humans used a similar process with snails and other mollusks They are an efficiem food self-packaged in a shell for carryi ng and cooking Compared with th e large fo ur-legged beasts that are usually claimed as the fir st domesticated an imal food sources mollusks are readily managed People can gather marine varishyeties such as mussel s and clams in a natural rock pool 11 is possible to isolate land

Charles Darwin Cultivated plants Cereal and Cul inary Plants from The Variation of Plants and Antmals under DomestIcation

Einkurn is one of the few wild grasses that Yield kernels that humall stomachs can digest It W(lS a pri llcipal food source for the early sedelltary foragmg cu ltures of the Midd le East and olle of the fi rst species farmers adopted But its graills are hard 10 separate from their tough husks which helps expialll why farmers stro ve to produce new varret les of grain by selamption and hybrrdl lalion

Snails and other sheil-dwel ling mollusks are na shy

54 I CHAPTER 2

mollusks by enclosing a snail-rich spot with a di tch Moreover snails are grazers and do not need to be fed with foods that humans would otherwise eal themselves They can be herded without the use of fire any special equipmen l persona danger or the need to train leashed animals or dogs to help By culling small or undesirable types by hand the ea rly snail farmers could soon enjoy the benefi ts of selective breeding Shell mounds from [he late lee Age or soon thereafter contain varieties of snails that are bigger on average than todars so it looks as if the snail eaters were already selecting for size Sometim es large-scale consumption of mollusks preceded that of foods that the more elaborate technologies of rhe hunt obtained At Frankthi Cave in southern Greece a huge du mp of snail shells nearly 13000 years old was topped first by red deer bones with some snail shells and then nearly 4000 years later by tuna bones

IN PERSPECTIVE Seeking Stability tures fast foods--easl ly gathered and conveshy So gathering hunting herding and tillage which our conventional chronologies niently packaged Discarded shells- heaps that usually place one after the other were in fact complementary techniques to ob tain are found all o~er the world make a convenient

food They developed together over thousands of years in a period of relatively in shyrecord for archaeologists to study In Frankth cave in Greece hown here snail ealers piled huge tense climatic change The warming dr)ing effects of the post- Ice-Age gtorld mul shyresidues nearly 13DDD years ago Many anCient tiplied the opportunities and incentives for people to experiment with food mollusks were bigger than modern species wnlch

strategies in changing environments Foragers turned to farming and herding by suggests that people were already Mlectlng and encouragmg large varieties slow stages and one case at a time as relat ionships between people and other

species changed and accumulated little by little The naturalist David Rindos described early farming as a case of human- plant symbiosis in which species deshyveJoped together in mutual dependence and- in part at least--evolved rogether an unconscious relationship Eventually foodstuffs developed that needed human involvement to sunive and reproduce For instance emerging kinds of edible

grasses maize for example would not survive beshycause th~ir seeds would not fall to the gro und un shyCHRONOLOGY less a person took them out of their husks

(A ll d ates are apprOXlfTl(ltel The continuities in the worlds of the food p roshy

15000 BCE End of Ice Age curers and early food producers are in many ways 13000-14000 BCE First permanent settleme nts in Middle Eest more impressive th an the differences The settled

11 000 BCE Appearance of Jomon culture Japan way of life the art the religious cults even the kinds 10000-5000 BCE Mixed farming and potato cultivation develop of foods (although obtained by different mea ns) are

(South Amellca) often of the same order The similarities suggest a

9000- 7000 BU farmi ng towns appear in Anatolia and Egypt new way to look at the transiti on to agriculture We

8000 BCE Rye and barley cul tivat ion in Jordan and Syr ia farming can see it as an attempt to stabilize a worJd conshyspreads from Jordan and Analolia to Centra l Asia vulsed by climatic instability-a way to cope with 7000 BCE Tnnlty of maize beans and squash develops in Andes

farming spreads In Egypt ian Sahara and Nile valley environmental change that was happening too fast eVidence 01 agriculture in Ind ian subcont inent and to preserve ancient traditions In other words earliest evidence of agricul tu re in New GUinea the peoples who switched to herding or farmi ng

6000 BCE Rice cultivation In India southeast ASia and China and those who dung to hunting and ga theri ng4000 BCE Scythians domest icate the horse and Invent wheel and

shared a common conservative mentality Both axle IndomiddotEuropean languages spread as migrants from Asia colonize Europe millet farmed in Yellow wanted to keep what they had River ~a ll ey Chma Perhaps then we should stop th inking of the

5000-2000 BCE RIVer valley CIVilizations f lourish beginn ings of food productio n as a revolution 3000 BCpound Te ff cul t ivated In Ethiopia Bantu languages and th e overthrow of an existi ng stale of affa irs and

agriculture begm to spread southward Irom West Africa Its replacement by an ent irely different one earliest specim ens of cultivated maize (Mexico)

Rather we should th ink of it as a climacteric1000 BCpound Maize cul t ivation moves northward from Mexico to

(kleye-MAK-tehr-ihk)-a long period of critica l southwestern United Slates change in a world poised between different possishy

Out of t he Mud Farmlng and Herding After the Ice Age I 55

ble outcomes Indeed the concept of climacteric can be a useful way to undershystand change ] t is worth keeping il in mind throughout the rest of th is book as we confront o ther so -caned revolutions th at werc really uncertain slow and sometimes unconscious transitio ns Yet if early far mers m ot ivations were indeed co nservative in most cases they fai led to maintain the status quo On the con shytrary they inaugurated the spectacular cha n ges and challenges thai are the sub shyject of the nex t chapter

David Rlndos from SymbiOSIS Instability and the Ofgms and Spread of Agriculture A New Model

PROBLEMS AND PARALLELS 1 How was husbandry with its emphasis on unnatura l selecshy

t ion ~ the f irst human challenge to evolution

2 Why would some societ ies (such as the aborigines of Austra lia) wit h the abili ty to engage in agriculture continue to live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle What are t he d isadvantages of farmshyIng compared to foraging

3 What was l ife like In preagricultural settlements How did agrishyculture affect the pace of change in human soc iety Why were agricul tural sett lements less stable than foraging communit ies

4 Why was husbandry the fi rst human challenge to evolution What are the relative benefits of farming and herd ing Why was violence between farme rs and herders common unt il recently

bull James Cook from Captain Cooks Journal Durmg his First Round the World

bull Jack Harlan from Crops and Man

5 What were the prerequisites for early agricu lt ure Why were alshyluvial pla inS the most hospitable enVIronment for early agricu lshytural communities

6 Why d id farm ing start at d ifferent places and at diffe rent t imes around the world What are some of the riva l theories advocatshyed by scholars

7 Why is the beginning of food production more of a climacteric than a revolution

bull Charles Darwin Cultivated Plants Cereal and Cu linary Plants from The VafJalJOn of Ammas and Plants under DomeSJcation

bull David Rindos from middotmiddotSymblOsis Instabi li ty and the Ongins and Spread of Agriculture A New Modelmiddot

Please see the Pnmary Source CD-ROM for additional sources related to this chapter

READ ON

The lines of the argument are laid down in F Fernandezshy

Armesto Near a ThoTsand Tabb (2002 ) The m ethod of classishyfying events in environmental categories comes from F Fernandez-Armesto Civilizations (200 1) lndispensable for the study of the origins of the agriculture are J R Harlan Crops and Man (1992) B D Smith me Emergenccof Agriculture (1998 ) D Rindos The Origins ofAgriwlture (1987) and D R Harris cd The Origills lind Spread ofAgriCIIll1re and Pastoralism in Eurasia ( L996) K F Kiple and K C Ornelas cds Tile Cambridge World History ofFood (2000) is an enormous co mpendium

r G Simmons Clmlgiug the face of the earth n tt ure ellshyvironment history (1989) is a superb introduction to global environmental history as is B De Vries and J Goudsblom eds Mappae Mlilldi humans mId their Iwbiltlls in a long-terril socio-ecological perspecti ve (2004 )

T he quotation from Danvin comes from his work of l868 The Vtlrintion ofAnimals and Plants under Domestication

On feasts M Dietler and B Hayden Feasts archaeological and ethnographic perspective 011 food politics and power (200 1) is an im portant collection of essays

O Bar-Yosef and A Gopher eds (l99 1) The Natlfian Culttlre in the Levant is outstanding On y atalhuytik up- toshydate informat ions i s in M Ozdogan and N Basgelen cds ( 1999 ) The Neolithic in Turkey Tile Cradle ofCivilizntiolt and r Hodder Towa rds a Rejlexive Metllot in Archaeology (2 000 ) but the classic J Mellaart (ata l Hu)tlk (1967) is m Ote accessi shyble On Jericho tne classic wo rk is by Kenyon Diggillg lip Jeri shycho tlte results ofJericho excavations (1957)

Out of t he Mud Farmlng and Herding After the Ice Age I 55

ble outcomes Indeed the concept of climacteric can be a useful way to undershystand change ] t is worth keeping il in mind throughout the rest of th is book as we confront o ther so -caned revolutions th at werc really uncertain slow and sometimes unconscious transitio ns Yet if early far mers m ot ivations were indeed co nservative in most cases they fai led to maintain the status quo On the con shytrary they inaugurated the spectacular cha n ges and challenges thai are the sub shyject of the nex t chapter

David Rlndos from SymbiOSIS Instability and the Ofgms and Spread of Agriculture A New Model

PROBLEMS AND PARALLELS 1 How was husbandry with its emphasis on unnatura l selecshy

t ion ~ the f irst human challenge to evolution

2 Why would some societ ies (such as the aborigines of Austra lia) wit h the abili ty to engage in agriculture continue to live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle What are t he d isadvantages of farmshyIng compared to foraging

3 What was l ife like In preagricultural settlements How did agrishyculture affect the pace of change in human soc iety Why were agricul tural sett lements less stable than foraging communit ies

4 Why was husbandry the fi rst human challenge to evolution What are the relative benefits of farming and herd ing Why was violence between farme rs and herders common unt il recently

bull James Cook from Captain Cooks Journal Durmg his First Round the World

bull Jack Harlan from Crops and Man

5 What were the prerequisites for early agricu lt ure Why were alshyluvial pla inS the most hospitable enVIronment for early agricu lshytural communities

6 Why d id farm ing start at d ifferent places and at diffe rent t imes around the world What are some of the riva l theories advocatshyed by scholars

7 Why is the beginning of food production more of a climacteric than a revolution

bull Charles Darwin Cultivated Plants Cereal and Cu linary Plants from The VafJalJOn of Ammas and Plants under DomeSJcation

bull David Rindos from middotmiddotSymblOsis Instabi li ty and the Ongins and Spread of Agriculture A New Modelmiddot

Please see the Pnmary Source CD-ROM for additional sources related to this chapter

READ ON

The lines of the argument are laid down in F Fernandezshy

Armesto Near a ThoTsand Tabb (2002 ) The m ethod of classishyfying events in environmental categories comes from F Fernandez-Armesto Civilizations (200 1) lndispensable for the study of the origins of the agriculture are J R Harlan Crops and Man (1992) B D Smith me Emergenccof Agriculture (1998 ) D Rindos The Origins ofAgriwlture (1987) and D R Harris cd The Origills lind Spread ofAgriCIIll1re and Pastoralism in Eurasia ( L996) K F Kiple and K C Ornelas cds Tile Cambridge World History ofFood (2000) is an enormous co mpendium

r G Simmons Clmlgiug the face of the earth n tt ure ellshyvironment history (1989) is a superb introduction to global environmental history as is B De Vries and J Goudsblom eds Mappae Mlilldi humans mId their Iwbiltlls in a long-terril socio-ecological perspecti ve (2004 )

T he quotation from Danvin comes from his work of l868 The Vtlrintion ofAnimals and Plants under Domestication

On feasts M Dietler and B Hayden Feasts archaeological and ethnographic perspective 011 food politics and power (200 1) is an im portant collection of essays

O Bar-Yosef and A Gopher eds (l99 1) The Natlfian Culttlre in the Levant is outstanding On y atalhuytik up- toshydate informat ions i s in M Ozdogan and N Basgelen cds ( 1999 ) The Neolithic in Turkey Tile Cradle ofCivilizntiolt and r Hodder Towa rds a Rejlexive Metllot in Archaeology (2 000 ) but the classic J Mellaart (ata l Hu)tlk (1967) is m Ote accessi shyble On Jericho tne classic wo rk is by Kenyon Diggillg lip Jeri shycho tlte results ofJericho excavations (1957)