The Original Food Producers

Hunter-gatherers domesticated their environments long before agriculture

A common misconception when talking about hunter-gatherers is the assumption that, unlike cultures which practiced intensive cultivation of domesticated plant and animal resources, hunter-gatherers did not alter the landscape around them in any significant way.

This view is just plain wrong. They didn’t just live off the fat of the land; in many cases hunter-gatherers were as much food producers as were farmers. They just did it in a different way. For thousands of years before domesticated crops came on the scene, hunter-gatherers were actively engaged in the practice of resource management. They did not simply inhabit the landscape; rather, they actively shaped it in fundamental ways to suit their needs, as one anthropologist writes:

Once depicted as passive foragers who simply harvested available foods and raw materials from relatively pristine ecosystems, [hunter-gatherers] are now recognized as agents who actively modified and constructed local environments. [1]

Another adds (their emphasis):

[H]unter-gatherers actively manage their resources...We can firmly reject the stereotype of hunter-gatherers as passive "food collectors" in opposition to active, food-producing agriculturalists. [2]

One of the most remarkable examples of this is the Budj Bim site in Australia, now a UNESCO World heritage site and "one of the jewels of the crown of Australian archaeology.”

On a broad basalt plain formed by the eruption of the now-dormant Budj Bim volcano (formerly known as Mount Eccles) around 34,000 years ago in southeast Australia*, the inhabitants of the region constructed a vast complex of artificial wetlands which allowed them to catch fish, grow plants, and harvest and store kooyang (short-finned eels). Streams were variously dammed and diverted to create complex channels, weirs and dams to trap and store the eels in various pools for growing and harvesting. Funnels were woven out of river reeds and spear grass which allowed smaller eels to pass through to larger catchment areas to grow. Their reproduction cycle was observed, and as the eels reached maturity, baskets with holes of various sizes were used to trap the eels according to weight and size.

This artificially-created wetland ecosystem was so productive that it allowed the native Gunditjmara people to settle down and occupy Budj Bim full-time, constructing up to 300 stone dwellings in clusters of about a dozen or so out of basalt rocks for this purpose. [3] The output may have been enough to feed perhaps as many as 10,000 people at it's height. [4]

The first Australian government official to visit the Budj Bim site in the 1841 described the aquaculture system there as “resembling the work of civilized man,” but noted, with evident shock, that “on inspection I found [it] to be the work of the Aboriginal natives, purposefully constructed for catching eels.” [5] The swamplands were eventually drained and the system fell into disuse, exacerbated by the lack of burning which led to overgrowth. Wildfires in the area in 2019 revealed previously unknown sections of the 24,500-acre complex, including an 82-foot-long channel that had been obscured by thick brush. [6]

Remarkably, the oldest of these channels has been carbon dated by archaeologists to over 6,600 years ago, making it older than Stonehenge or the Egyptian Great Pyramids!

Between Mount Eccles and the sea in Victoria, Australia, on a lava plain laid down by a volcanic eruption about 30,000 years ago, are the archaeological remains of hundreds of dwellings. The structures cluster in groups of a dozen or so, some so large they are partitioned into apartments. People by the thousands settled across that expanse in these villages, members of settled tribes that jostled, fought, and forged lasting alliances.

The region around the villages was transformed into a vast, managed landscape, with streams and rivers variously dammed and diverted to create a labyrinthine yet integrated drainage system. The waterways, which extended for kilometers, are ancient, many dating back 8,000 years, with the system reaching its full glory 600 to 800 years ago. The canals were used to harvest wild game—a species of eel—with traps reaching a hundred meters long and constructed in some places of stone walls up to a meter high. The people also carved out artificial wetlands in which the young eels could thrive until they were large enough to eat, and caught the fish in such abundance that the excess could be preserved and stored for the off-season (pp. 122-123)

...At least five groups speaking different dialects of Gunditjmara, and quite likely other peoples of the region as well, constructed the expansive waterworks that made it possible for all of them to catch the fish. Their relationships were not without bloodshed. Sometimes wars broke out. But...the Australian tribes treated each other almost collegially, and with a clear mutual payoff: everyone's success relied on their labor to maintain the waterways. Eel harvesting was an international effort... (229)

Like all the Aborigines elsewhere in Australia, the people at Mount Eccles lacked domesticated food. This entire elaborate infrastructure was the brainchild of hunter-gatherers. And yet the homes look to have been permanent, and some may have been occupied year-round—the descendants of the original residents claim this was so. (pp. 122-123)

Elsewhere in the book, Moffett describes the observations of the Australian surveyor-general Thomas Mitchell, who in 1835 who observed the Wiradjuri people harvesting wild grasses (Pannicum) on a vast plain which to him looked like a "hayfield" in order to grind into flour and bake into a kind of bread. Moffett notes, "That Aborigines could make bread from wild grasses that looked, to the eyes of outsiders, like fields of cultivated grain shows that differentiating between settled hunter-gatherers and farmers is, essentially, nit-picking." (136)

Many of the practices used by the native peoples of Australia to manage the land were at least as sophisticated as those used by settled agricultural peoples (if not more so). These techniques have been extensively documented in the award-winning book Dark Emu, published by Bruce Pascoe in 2014. These techniques were neglected by English explorers who were accustomed to agricultural landscapes based solely around cereal crops and animal husbandry, and thus could not recognize the many subtle and clever ways the Aborigines manipulated the landscape around them. To them, such landscapes often just looked like untouched nature, but in fact, the entire continent was an ecosystem that had been deliberately managed by its inhabitants for over 35,000 years.

Pascoe was motivated to write Dark Emu when, while researching another book, "[H]e kept reading colonial accounts of Aboriginal people farming: irrigating, harvesting, living and prospering in large villages." [7] When the Aboriginal culture was suppressed by European settlers and supplanted by European agricultural techniques (sheep and cattle-raising, cereal crops like wheat and barley, etc.), much of this history was lost. To Europeans, Australia was simply terra nullius—no man's land—which justified their occupation and takeover.

Budj Bim (Mount Eccles) was not the only example of hunter-gatherers acting as "ecosystem engineers." Many groups around the world used irrigation long before plant domestication: "Hunter-gatherers have...influenced their environment...by intentionally shifting or controlling water flow and drainage by digging channels and constructing stonework in and around wetlands." For example, Kuk Swamp in New Guinea—which is also a UNESCO World heritage site—shows evidence of advanced irrigation and drainage channels dug as far back as 9,000 years ago. [8] Wikipedia notes:

Evidence for early agricultural drainage systems was found here, beginning about 9,000 years ago...A number of plants, including taro were grown, at what would have been the edge of its cultivable limit in the highlands. These ditches can be divided into three types: major disposal channels, large field ditches, and small field ditches. The major disposal channels were built to divert water from the fan flowing south and direct them toward the northeast areas. The large and small field ditches are more uniform, surrounding the perimeter of the planting areas. They connect with the major disposal channels. During this time, the people of Kuk Swamp transformed their landscape into an anthropogenic grassland suitable for agriculture.

Kuk Swamp (Wikipedia)

There is evidence of banana and sugar cane cultivation in these "managed grasslands" as far back as 6,900—6,400 years ago. The bananas grown at Kuk Swamp are the most significant group of banana domesticates, making New Guinea one of the earliest sites for plant domestication anywhere in the world. The hunter-gatherers of New Guinea also deliberately burned and disturbed tropical rain forests to promote the growth of "gap colonizers" like yam species and cleared forest patches with stone tools to promote the growth of useful plants as far back as 49,000 to 36,000 years ago based on an analysis of stone tools. [9]

Sophisticated aquaculture systems were not confined to Australasia either, but also occurred in the Americas. Long before domesticated crops, the Paiute in Owens Valley, California dug a grid irrigation channels to bring water down to the valley floor from the snows of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Unlike traditional forms of irrigation, however, the water was not diverted to fields of planted crops, but rather to wild seed plants. As one Paiute elder put it, “We looked at everything as a garden.” [10] The natives of Mesoamerica constructed highly productive "floating gardens" called chinampas in shallow lake beads which supported large populations. Signs of similar artificial mounds constructed in wetlands have been detected in Australia and elsewhere.

All sort of artifical constructions can be used to manage wild landscapes including traps, weirs, dams and game fences. Across the ancient Near East, people constructed stone walls called kites 12,000 years ago to corral herds of antelopes that they would hunt in great drives the spring and fall; settling in permanent base camps in the winter where they built stone houses and collected wild grasses. They also built dams and managed wetlands areas as seen, for example, in the Azraq Basin in Jordan close to where the first crops were domesticated. Wetlands would have also provided plentiful reeds for the weaving of wickerwork baskets, which may be why pottery developed so long after domestication. [11]

Even when it comes to animal domestication, the line between farmers, herders, and hunter-gatherer "wildlife resource managers" is not so clear. A vivid example comes from the islands of the New Guinea archipelago and Australia. Species of Australian possums (cuscus) are extensively exploited by the people in the region for food and fur. Recent studies of this animal's habitat show that it was deliberately introduced (and reintroduced) to various islands in the region by human settlers in order to "seed" resources for them to use later. These animals were apparently routinely captured and raised for this purpose. Unlike domesticated animals, they were not genetically altered, however.

Moreover, this practice occurred as far back as 8,000 years ago, long before animals like pigs were domesticated in the region, causing one writer to note: "Cuscus translocation is arguably the oldest-known example of animal management in history, preceding not only the Agricultural Revolution, but the earliest evidence of pig, cow, and sheep cultivation, as well. Since they were probably owned and traded, cuscuses may even represent the first livestock in documented history." [12] Similarly, long before pig domestication, people were transporting wild boars from the mainland to the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean and actively managing their populations for perhaps a thousand years before that. There is evidence of wild boar introduction and management in Japan, New Guinea and the Baltic region as well. [13]

These pre-agricultural peoples were all engaging in something biologists call niche construction. Niche construction is the deliberate and intentional alteration of the natural environment in order to enhance an organism's survival. [14]

Humans are not the only animals to practice niche construction. The most often-cited example is that of beavers, who gnaw trees and branches and use them to construct dams on streams and rivers to alter riparian ecosystems for their benefit. The building of nests, burrows, mounds, and other artifacts by animals can also be seen as examples of niche construction. One of the most fascinating examples are the "devil's gardens " made by Lemon ants in the Amazonian rain forest:

Lemon ants are small ant species scientifically known as Myrmelachista schumanni and are found in the Amazonian rainforests of Latin America...Lemon ants live in and around Duroia hirstula, a tree species that are also native to the rainforests of Latin America. Lemon ants are known for attacking any other plant species attempting to grow around Duroia hirstula trees by injecting formic acid into the plant stems and leaves. After 24 hours, these plants die off, leaving patches of forests in which Duroia hirstula trees are dominant...

Ancient people who inhabited the rainforests of Latin America believed that the occurrence of the Duroia hirstula as the sole plant species in a region was the work of an evil spirit known as “Chullachaki.” The evil spirit, whose description was a short and ugly mythical beast, was believed to inhabit these unique patches of forest with Duroia hirstula trees and therefore these patches of forest were known as devil’s gardens...The largest devil’s garden observed is estimated to be over 800 years old and occupies an area of 1,300 square meters and is made up of 328 trees.

What Is So Interesting About The Behavior Of Lemon Ants? (World Atlas)

The most ubiquitous and ancient method of human niche construction is burning. As one anthropologist notes, "[F]ire technology provides evidence that hunter-gathers are no less food *producers* than are farmers." In a similar vein, Colin Tudge descibes the use of fire by the native inhabitants of Australia, arguing that it is just as much a form of farming as is growing domesticated crops:

Australia's aborigines...deploy fire in several very astute ways, though primarily to freshen the vegetation in discrete patches and hence encourage small marsupials to recolonize and multiply and so provide the people with food. Australian aborigines do not farm in the conventional sense...[b]ut through their use of fire the native Australians have influenced the flora and fauna of the dry regions for the past 40,000 years.

The true logistic significance of such controlled burning has been summarized by Reese Jones of the Australian National University at Canberra. For the practices of Aborigines, he says, amount to "firestick farming." Astute deployment of fire raises hunter-gatherers from the ranks of superpredators to those of the game managers. Fire-raising is not simply a precursor of farming, or a tool of farming; it is a form of farming. Hence, the deployment of fire has brought about what must be seen as the most profound logistic transformation of all. [15]

Similarly, Jack Weatherford describes the many ways that Native Americans used fire to transform the landscape of North America:

Indians in different areas of North America burned the forest for various local reasons. In California the smoke killed the parasitic mistletoe that grew on the oak and mesquite. Indians from the Gulf Coast to the interior of Alaska used fire to reduce the number of irritating insects and other pests during the summer. In the Southern states, fire drove out the poisonous snakes such as the rattlesnake. What rattlesnakes remained could be seen more easily and thus avoided by the Indians walking through a forest cleared of underbrush...

The fire encouraged small new growth that then attracted large animals such as deer, which were unimpeded by small trees and bushes. To maximize their hunting, the Indians wanted large parklike forests of tall trees but open ground underneath. By keeping the forest free of undergrowth, the Indians kept it from becoming a jungle.

The Indians also burned the tall grasses of the prairies and plains. This created new growth and thus controlled the migration of the buffalo, but the burning of the plains also controlled the spread of forests. In some parts of the Missouri and Mississippi basins, the Indians used fire as a device for limiting the size of the forest and increasing the grazing area of the buffalo. This type of land management lured the buffalo closer to their villages and made the hunt much easier. The hunters could then devote more time to cultivating their crops in the fertile river valleys, rather than making long hunting treks across the open plains. The work of the Indians in controlling the forests and prairies gradually extended the range of the buffalo ever eastward toward the Atlantic...

In their annual burning of the forests, prairies, and plains, the Indians used fire in a controlled and systemic way that minimized the danger from large, uncontrolled fires set by lighting. By regularly destroying the dead lumber and clearing the undergrowth that dies each winter, they lessened the chance of uncontrolled fire that might consume their villages and croplands as well as the animals which they hunted. [16a]

Interestingly, in both Australia and western United States today, the lack of active landscape management by the current inhabitants of these regions has caused huge wildfires to form every season, creating persistent mass excavations and sowing chaos. This is becoming more and more acute due to a changing climate. One wonders if our intensive and "advanced" agricultural practices truly are "superior" to those of native hunters and gatherers.

The natives of the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States did not cultivate crops or keep domesticated animals, making them effectively hunters and gatherers. The technologies they used to exploit maritime resources were in some ways similar to the Australians at Budj Bim such as tidal "gardens" to encourage clam growth. Some of their angling technology was more advanced than that of Europeans at the time as Jack Weatherford documents in Native Roots: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World:

Men and women both participated in various methods of netting fish. The nets they used might be nothing more than small hand nets to scoop up fish such as smelt along the shoreline, or they could be larger ones attached to poles and used to scoop up salmon. Larger nets required the cooperation of dozens of people to spread them and haul them in. Some nets were made specifically for fishing at the mouths of rivers and others were used farther out at sea.

Native nets provoked one of the first technological changes in the fishing practices of non-Indians. Commercial fishermen coming into the area eagerly adopted the Indian gill nets, which the Indians manufactured with various sizes of mesh based on the size and type of fish they planned to snare...

The natives used a more permanent type of net to construct weirs, large underwater fences that guided and trapped the fish. The fishermen opened the weirs at high tide and then closed them at low tide, capturing thousands of fish in small estuaries and pools. The complexity of weirs and traps required the building of log dams and permanent stone foundations for them. The construction of these dams and weirs gave fishing among the coastal Indians a level of technological and engineering sophistication usually associated with agricultural people who must make terraces and irrigation systems for their crops. (p. 155)

The Indians built various types of structures to take advantage of the precise behaviors of specific fish, such as for collecting the annual herring spawn, which could be dried into a tasty food of high protein content. To harvest the millions of spawn, fishermen built rectangular frames that they suspended in the water and from which they hung kelp or tree branches to dangle below the water's surface. This submerged vegetable matter attracted the herring, which mistook the dangling leaves for natural vegetation and then deposited vast numbers of their eggs on them. The fishermen later retrieved their kelp or branches for drying in the sun, and hung more kelp on the same frames. (155)

The fishermen further manipulated the environment by cutting paths through the thick kelp jungles. Lazy salmon readily followed the path of least resistance, which meant that they eagerly swam through the cut paths rather than forging their own way through the thick kelp. Like the hedges and fences used to herd deer in the east or caribou in the north, the kelp paths led the salmon into small, confined areas where they provided easy prey for the waiting fishermen. [16b]

Just as in Australia, the European settlers of North America were oblivious to the many subtle ways the native inhabitants manipulated the landscape around them for their own ends. To Europeans, it looked like it was all just empty and unused land, but in fact the natives were deliberately managing the forests and grasslands in ways that mimiced natural ecosystems:

...the forests of America were not simply a natural resource that happened to be here waiting for use by anyone who arrived. The Indians had lived in and around the forests for millennia, and had carefully managed and shaped the forests through the years. They consciously followed practices that maximized the growth of trees and plants that they found useful, and minimized those that obstructed them. [17]

…Many of these practices are not obvious to outsiders. A classic example is the European newcomers’ observations of the parklike garry oak (Quercus garryana) woodlands around Victoria on the southern tip of Vancouver Island. They assumed that this “perfect Eden,” of oaks interspersed with sweeping meadows of blue camas and other spring-flowering plants, was natural. In fact, it was an anthropogenic environment, developed by the local Straits Salish peoples by periodic burning and intensive digging and “cultivating” of the camas, whose bulbs were a staple carbohydrate food.

Ironically, the Europeans immediately started to prohibit the firing of the landscape, and set the local indigenous peoples to constructing the beginnings of an urban center that would all but obliterate the meadows. The cessation of regular burning finally resulted in the camas being choked out by a tangled growth of shrubs. [18]

Unlike agriculture based around monocultures and cereal crops, there is evidence that such practices were fundamentally sustainable—producing reliable surpluses year after year. The natives developed a variety of cultural practices and behaviors that assured that the resource base would not be overharvested or degraded. It was the original Permaculture.

Although constraints against overexploitation sometimes broke down (as with overhunting during the fur trading era in North America), there is good evidence that hunter-gatherers were good managers of their resources...All along the [Pacific Northwest] coast are hundreds of streams and rivers in which salmon spawn. Aboriginal peoples had the technologies, in the form of weirs and traps, potentially capable of exterminating salmon runs in these streams in a single season. Yet, for millennia, the salmon runs were maintained, and were not depleted until Europeans entered the scene and began major forms of habitat modification and overharvesting of stocks in commercial ventures. Regulation by monitoring and ceremony were apparently essential features of indigenous systems of management, as they are in many parts of the world. [19]

To the south in the Amazon rain forests these practices took the form of agroforestry, or forest gardening, which is, "a farming system which supplies all or most of a family's basic material requirements from a small area of highly diverse tree, palm and vine crops and from short-term ground-level crops grown beneath these tree-crop canopies." [20]

Today if you fly over southwestern Amazonia, you can clearly see distinctive clumps of trees or "forest islands" which stand above the surrounding vegetation. Thousands of such islands dot the landscape of the Amazon Basin. For a long time these islands went unrecognized because was thought that the Amazon was pristine environment where "primitive" natives simply harvested what nature provided. Today, we know this view is incorrect. The extent to which the Amazon region was a managed ecosystem by its inhabitants is only now coming to light thanks to the work of dedicated archaeologists.

We now know that the Amazon rain forest is not a virgin ecology untouched by humans, but rather an "anthropogenic forest" centered around what is sometimes referred to as "polyculture agroforestry: [T]he limited, shifting, and periodic removal of the forest cover to cultivate food-crops." Seeds and cuttings were transplanted long distances and deliberately cultivated in plots that had been cleared from the forest by burning. The most important crops were manioc (cassava), squash and peach palm, but also included other useful species like Brazil nut, cashew, cacao and açaí palm. The natives supplemented these plant foods by harvesting fish from rivers and streams. A recent analysis of phytoliths (tiny pieces of glass that form inside the cells of plants) revealed that these forest islands were cultivated as far back as 10,000 years ago.

The researchers were able to identify evidence of manioc (cassava, yuca) that were grown 10,350 years ago. Squash appears 10,250 years ago, and maize more recently – just 6,850 years ago. “This is quite surprising,” said Dr [Umberto] Lombardo. “This is Amazonia, this is one of these places that a few years ago we thought to be like a virgin forest, an untouched environment. Now we’re finding this evidence that people were living there 10,500 years ago, and they started practising cultivation.” [21]

Unlike monoculture crops which exhaust and degrade the soil over time and encourage erosion, the agroforestry techniques practiced by the natives actually enhanced the soil over time. By adding charcoal, organic waste, and human excrement to the soil, they created what one researcher described as "a continuous compost pile for thousands of years," which transformed the naturally poor soils found in tropical rain forests into rich terra preta, otherwise known as "Amazonian Dark Earth" soil. These rich areas of soil created the forest islands that can be seen from the air today. Unlike today's destructive techniques based on European agriculture which involve wholesale clearing of large areas of the forest to raise cattle or cash crops for export, the native techniques worked in harmony with the ecosystem and left much of the surrounding forest intact. Today’s inhabitants of the Amazon rain forest are able to survive without cultivating crops thanks to the existence of these forest islands which were deliberately created by their ancestors thousands of years ago:

...[F]oraging bands such as the Guaja, the Kaingang, or the Siriono are able to subsist in the rainforest without cultivated crops, thanks to a few essential “wild” resources (palms, fruit trees, or bamboo), which are, in fact, the products of the activities of ancient populations.

Nomadic bands do not wander at random in the forest, but move their camps between palm forests, bamboo forests, or Brazil nut forests, all of them “cultural forests” which were ancient dwelling sites. Evidence has [indicated] that, far from being impeded by scarce resources, the indigenous people of the Amazon have created biotic niches since prehistoric times. In other words, they have created and exploited “anthropogenic forests.” [22]

While the Amazon rain forest lacked domesticable animals, some natives of the Amazon rain forest did engage in innovative practices that might be seen as a kind of "animal husbandry," although not one that would be recognized as conventional livestock farming:

In some instances hunter-gatherers fiddled with nature to improve its productivity. The Ache of South America established plantations of guchu beetle larvae, which mature to a hefty ten centimeters in dying Pindo palms, by felling and sectioning trees for the beetles to find. The meanderings of the bands had to be choreographed so everyone got back in time to harvest the plump insects. The delicacy was so relished that if the Ache had found a way to safely raise enough of them at one spot, my guess is they would have taken up residence right then and there as beetle farmers...(126)

Due to the introduction of epidemic diseases into Amazonia hundreds of years ago by European explorers, a mass die-off occurred causing the native civilizations (as they might be considered) to collapse in a relatively short period of time. This meant that the natives were forced to revert to hunting and gathering, causing the human management of the tropical forest ecosystem to cease and the jungle to quickly reclaim the monuments and cities they had built—which were made from wood and earth rather than stone (as they often were in North America as well due to the shortage of building stone). Only now is ground penetrating radar finally revealing vast ancient earthworks called geoglyphs that have been hidden for centuries under the overgrowth which were the hallmarks of settled peoples:

Anthropologist Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida teamed with the local Kuikuro people in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso to uncover 28 towns, villages and hamlets that may have supported as many as 50,000 people within roughly 7,700 square miles (20,000 square kilometers) of forest—an area slightly smaller than New Jersey. The larger towns boasted defensive ditches 10 feet (three meters) deep and 33 feet (10 meters) wide backed by a wooden palisade as well as large plazas, some reaching 490 feet (150 meters) across...

The remains of houses and ceramic cooking utensils show that humans occupied these cities for around 1,000 years, from roughly 1,500 years to as recently as 400 years ago. Satellite pictures reveal that during that time, the inhabitants carved roads through the jungle; all plaza villages had a major road that ran northeast to southwest along the summer solstice axis and linked to other settlements as much as three miles (five kilometers) away. There were bridges on some of the roads and others had canoe canals running alongside them.

Two thirds or more of the original human inhabitants of Brazil are believed to have been killed by such disease, and the forest quickly swallowed the cities they left behind...[23]

Rather than domestication, this could be seen as "domiculture"—the domestication, not of particular species, but rather of the entire ecosystems, as James C. Scott describes in his book Against The Grain:

Since the dawn of the species, Homo sapiens has been domesticating whole environments, not just species...Whether we call it niche construction, domestication of the environment, landscape modification, or the human management of ecosystems, it is clear on a long view that much of the world was shaped by human activity well before the first societies based on fully domesticated wheat, barley, goats and sheep appear in Mesopotamia...As early as eleven or twelve thousand years ago there is firm evidence that populations in the Fertile Crescent were intervening to modify local "wild" plant communities to their advantage many thousands of years before any clear morphological evidence of domesticated grains appears in the archaeological record...[24]

We now know that agriculture wasn't a new invention, or part of a "radical transformation;" but rather an intensification of practices that had already been going on for a very long time by the start of the so-called Neolithic "revolution." Scott lists the many ways that humans manipulated the natural environment around them long before the arrival agriculture and full-time sedentism, many of which would be virtually invisible to us in the archaeological record:

Some of these techniques include the burning of undesirable flora, weeding wild stands of favored plants and trees to eliminate competitors, pruning, thinning, selective harvesting, trimming, transplanting, mulching, relocating protective insects, bark-ringing, coppicing, watering and fertilizing.

For animals, short of full domestication, hunters have long been burning to encourage browse for prey, sparing females of reproductive age, culling, hunting based on life cycles and population, fishing selectively, managing streams and other waters to promote spawning and shellfish beds, transplanting the eggs and young of birds and fish, manipulating habitat, and occasionally raising juveniles. [25]

Such "lost civilizations" demonstrate that depicting human history as beginning with the Neolithic Revolution in a few select regions of the globe a few thousand years ago really has caused us to get a lot of human prehistory very wrong. Humans didn’t just live in small-scale band societies right up until the Neolithic period. People were already developing complex, stratified societies and living in permanent settlements long before any plants and animals were domesticated. These were settled hunter-gatherers, and that’s what we’ll be talking about next time.

UPDATE 11/29: One of the largest discoveries of rock art anywhere in the world has been found in the Colombian Amazon dating from 12,500 years ago (ca. 10,500 BCE). Many of the drawings depict extinct animals, including ones not native to rain forests. It appears that the Amazon was a drastically different environment during this time period than it is today.

###

* It appears that the oral traditions of the natives of this region have encoded this event into their creation mythology, which would make the eruption of the Budj Bim volcano one of the earliest recorded events in human history. See Volcanoes in Victoria reveal fresh evidence of eruptions 37,000 years ago (ABC News Australia)

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Thanks to all the people who signed up over the past few weeks. Hopefully I can keep up a decent schedule.

If I had planned this out a little better, I would have written a post about feasting this week, which I have examined before on my blog. In the meantime, enjoy this post from Aeon by archaeologist Brian Hayden, whose work I drew upon extensively for that series of posts: How the village feast paved the way to empires and economics (Aeon)

Plus, did you know that turkeys may have been originally domesticated for ritual and ceremonial purposes by Native Americans rather than as a food source? The eggs were offerings to the gods by the Zapotecs living in modern-day Mexico over a thousand years ago, and their feathers were highly valued, too.

This shows that the motivations for domestication may be different and more complex than we imagined—perhaps food scarcity wasn't the reason for domestication after all! There is evidence that cattle were originally domesticated for sacrifice rather than as a food source (sheep and goats could easily provide milk), and the worship of "sacred cows" is found in many herding cultures around the world. Cattle were also arguably the earliest form of money.

Ancient Turkey Bones In Mexico Reveal A Strange Relationship With Humans (NPR)

Thanksgiving Turkeys May Have Been Tamed 1,500 Years Ago in Mexico (New York Times)

~SOURCES~

All page numbers in parentheses from The Human Swarm by Mark W. Moffett.

[1] Rethinking the Study of Landscape Management Practices Among Hunter-Gatherers in North America (PDF)

[2] Resource Managers: North American And Australian Hunter-Gatherers, by Nancy M. Williams, Eugene S. Hunn, editors.

[3] Ancient Indigenous aquaculture site Budj Bim added to UNESCO World Heritage list (ABC News Australia)

[4] An Australian Stonehenge? (The Australian National Maritime Museum)

[5] The detective work behind the Budj Bim eel traps World Heritage bid (The Conversation)

[6] An ancient aquatic system older than the pyramids has been revealed by the Australian bushfires (CNN)

[7] Dark Emu's infinite potential: 'Our kids have grown up in a fog about the history of the land' (The Guardian)

[8] Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers in Wetland Environments: Theoretical Issues, Economic Organization and Resource Management Strategies by George P. Nicholas in Wetlands: Local Issues, World Perspectives, edited by M. Lillie and S. Ellis, Oxbow Press, Oxford, pp. 46-52. , 2006.

[9] Human Adaptation and Plant Use in Highland New Guinea 49,000 to 44,000 Years Ago (Science)

[10] How the Owens Valley Paiute Made The Desert Bloom (KCET)

[11] Modifying the marsh: Evaluating Early Epipaleolithic hunter-gatherer impacts in the Azraq wetland, Jordan

[12] The Cute Critter Rewriting Our Understanding of Prehistory (Atlas Obscura)

[13] Pre-Neolithic wild boar management and introduction to Cyprus more than 11,400 years ago (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

[14] See: Ecological consequences of human niche construction: Examining long-term anthropogenic shaping of global species distributions (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

[15] Colin Tudge, The Time Before History, pp. 261-262

[16a] Jack Weatherford, Native Roots: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World, pp. 41-42

[16b] ibid. pp. 153-156

[17] ibid. p. 41

[18] The Cambridge Encyclopedia Of Hunters And Gatherers, edited by Richard Lee and Richard B. Daly. Cambridge University Press. p. 614

[19] ibid.

[20] The Forest-garden Farms of Kandy, Sri Lanka by D. J. McConnell. p. 1

[21] Strange Forest Patches Littering The Amazon Point to Agriculture 10,000 Years Ago (Science Alert)

[21] Crops were cultivated in regions of the Amazon '10,000 years ago' (BBC)

[22] Ancient amazonian societies managed the forest intensively but sustainably — here’s what we can learn from them (Medium)

[23] Ancient Amazon Actually Highly Urbanized (Scientific American)

[24] James C. Scott. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. p. 72

[25] ibid. p. 71