The Plant Trap
Cultivating plants was hardly a great leap forward
The term "hunting and gathering" is really a misnomer. It should really be "gathering and hunting." Why? Because anthropologists have known for a long time that gathering provides the bulk of the calories in the human diet.
Instead, hunting gets pride of place, mostly because it is more "sexy." It's a lot more exciting pursuing elusive prey animals across the landscape than it is plucking nuts and berries from trees and bushes, or laboriously digging up roots and tubers. But throughout recent human history it's largely been various types of plant foods—and not roasted meat—that has kept humans adequately fed.
Even what we consider to be "hunting" had an implicit male bias. Women occasionally hunted, too, but the prey was generally smaller, and captured with nets and traps rather than long-distance stalking with projectile weapons. This was not a hard-and-fast rule, however. The recent discovery of women buried with big-game hunting weapons and equipment in the Americas strongly suggests that women played a larger role in early big-game hunting than previously thought. [1] This was probably because big-game hunting played a much larger role in human society in general during the last Ice Age.
We tend to overemphasize hunting even though it contributed relatively little to the diet of hunting and gathering peoples for a couple of reasons. First, meat—with it's high protein and fat content and dense calories—is the highest prestige food item in many of these cultures, so hunting activities are prized; and second, hunting implements and the remains of prey animals are left behind as evidence for archaeologists to find, while plant foods and their processing equipment are less visible in the archaeological record. This gives us a distorted view of prehistory, as Richard Rudgley points out in Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age:
A great deal of emphasis has been placed on the role of hunting in the Old Stone Age, and the gathering of plant foods has far less attention than it deserves. The detailed study of modern hunter-gatherers by anthropologists has shown that gathered foods (particularly edible plants but also eggs and sessile life-forms such as shellfish) often make up 80 per cent of a community's diet, with meat derived from hunting making up the rest. Hunting has been given an inordinate status both by archaeologists and by hunting peoples themselves. In the latter case this is largely due to the fact that it is the men who do most of the hunting and they therefore pride themselves on their own achievements in providing meat and tend to play down the considerable contribution of women.
Prehistorians are presented with an archaeological record that contains far more information on hunting than on gathering activities. Animal bones are often found in abundance at Stone Age sites, whereas plant remains and other evidence of the gathering aspect of the economy are sparse, owing to the poor survival of botanical specimens. This has understandably led to a concentration on the available data, which can give the false impression that hunting was the most important means of getting food in the Paleolithic period. [2]
The importance of gathering plant foods (including eggs and mushrooms) and bagging smaller prey animals has lately been realized by anthropologists, calling for a reevaluation of what we were actually eating in prehistory. New techniques in archaeobotany such as mass spectrometry, phytolith analysis, and flotation methods are also giving us a more complete picture of prehistoric diets.
It is widely, if not generally recognized that the precedence of hunting over gathering in the term hunting-gathering—now nearly as phonologically-ingrained as Adam and Eve—is an artifact of our ethnocentrism. The hunting of large, terrestrial, or occasionally aquatic, animal prey with projectiles is a specialized technique of food procurement normally relegated to adult males. Hunting with nets, an activity women frequently participate in, or trapping, is judged on this ethnocentric view [as] not really hunting, since the prey is not pursued; there is no chase.
In contrast, gathering involves a much more eclectic set of food procurement activities—usually of plant products (which move very slowly) but often of small, relatively sedentary animals—normally relegated to females. Many more species may be gathered that could conceivably be hunted, and recent research has clearly shown that gathering produces more food than hunting in all but the most boreal societies. Thus women must be recognized as essential food producers in the vast majority of hunting-gathering societies probably throughout human history. [3]
As the song goes, it is really women who "brought home the bacon," even in prehistory.
The importance of gathering in the human diet makes the transition to farming a bit easier to understand. The scholarly consensus is now that agriculture wasn't a radically new invention—or even an invention at all—but rather an intensification of food procurement strategies that had been going on for thousands of years prior. It is for these reasons that cultivation practices and wildlife management are now thought of not a a dichotomy, but as a spectrum:
The original “hunter-gatherer versus agriculturalist” approach to classifying human cultures has given way in the past few decades to a more sophisticated analysis reflecting not a dichotomy, but a continuum of activities relating to the intensification of food supplies. In this continuum, foraging is situated at one extreme and breeding and domestication of plants and animals at the other, with various steps and stages in between.
Most human cultures, even those typically defined as hunter-gatherer, use a variety of strategies to manage and enhance the resources on which they rely. Conversely, most agriculturalist societies also rely to some extent on ecosystems that are less managed and more “natural” than their cultivated fields and pastures. [4]
Plant cultivation is usually divided into two major categories: horticulture and agriculture. Horticulture is from the Latin word hortus, meaning garden. In horticulture, a variety of staple crops are grown in plots using hoes and adzes. Multiple different species of plants were typically cultivated together, rather than a monoculture. Production was mainly for subsistence. The diet of horticulturalists still retained a significant percentage of wild plant and animal foods. Garden plots were often collectively cultivated by women and owned by family lineages and clans.
Small-scale horticulture was often practiced using shifting cultivation, where new plots were cleared each growing season and old plots were abandoned. This prevented exhausting the nutrients and minerals in the soil. Slash-and-burn (or swidden agriculture) was one common method for clearing plots, especially in the tropics. All around the world, tribal peoples still rely on these methods today.
Agriculture is from the Latin word ager, meaning field. In agriculture, a single staple crop is grown in fields, typically cereals like wheat or barley. A plow is often used to establish a field by clearing it of all other plants. This method took off where large draft animals were available such as oxen, water buffalo, and (later) horses. Domesticated animals—including draft animals—could be fed from the resulting crop, and their manure could be used as fertilizer.
Because it takes greater upper-body strength to handle a heavy plow, food production in agricultural societies became a male-dominated activity, with women consigned to domestic chores. In some instances, this led to a loss of status for women. Studies have shown that even today in plow-based cultures women are less likely to work outside the home than in cultures which relied less upon plow-based agriculture.
With the advent of agriculture a small number of people could produce enough food to sustain large populations, allowing many more people to work in areas unrelated to food production. This led to greater population numbers, and more critically, greater population density. It also allowed large armies to be fed.
Rather than shifting cultivation, soil exhaustion was prevented via crop rotation. Two-field, three-field, and even four-field methods were developed to extract ever more food from the same area of land—a process called intensification. Improved plow designs were developed for heavier soils, such as the moldboard plow, which also increased yields. Hilly areas were terraced, swamps were drained, and coastal areas were laboriously reclaimed from the sea by dykes and pumping. Because such large areas of the landscape were radically transformed through the practice of agriculture, wild plants and animals became consigned to minor portions of the diet, if any. Farming techniques were far more intensive than anything practiced by settled hunter-gatherer cultures.
We can additionally draw the line between cultivation and full-on agriculture by the presence of domestication—that is, agriculture is based around domesticated plant and animal resources rather than wild ones. With domestication, the DNA of the plant or animal is deliberately altered, often to the point where it can no longer survive without human intervention. As Yuval Noah Harari pointed out in Sapiens, wheat domesticated us as surely as we domesticated it: our entire lifestyle became oriented around the cultivation and propagation of a few select species of plants and animals—and all the unremitting toil that came along with it.
But as humans took an ever-more active role in their food production, they also found themselves falling into a trap. A trap, because after a certain point, there was no turning back. Such a trap is only visible in hindsight. Moffett describes this as the plant trap:
Taking to cultivation at all but the smallest scale of simple gardening had [a] drawback that no early farmer could have predicted: it could ensnare society in a plant trap. A trap, because the option of going back to hunting and gathering full-time faded away once an expanding society committed to agriculture.
Sure, hunter-gatherers such as the Lakota and Crow and some small South American tribes once farmed, but gave up on the practice. Yet once a society grew to a huge population, or was packed in tight with other agricultural societies, the numbers of people would be too great to be supported by native foods and starvation would be guaranteed. (138)
Of course, growing your food is a hell of lot more work than just harvesting what is freely provided by nature, as hunter-gatherer peoples all over the world understood very well. As one !Kung-San Bushman famously remarked to the anthropologist Richard Borshay Lee, "Why should we farm when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?" Evidence shows that farming was resisted wherever possible rather than being regarded as a self-evident improvement:
Reliant as we are on domesticated food and biased toward a way of life in which anonymous societies have been amplified to massive scale, we are prone to think of our ancestors as progressing from simple to like us. Yet transitions from hunting and gathering to farming were not a given. Whether in villages or bands, few hunter-gatherers saw raising food as a move forward.
"You have to go to all that trouble, working and planting seeds, but we don't have to do that. All these things are there for us," an Aboriginal woman was reported to have remarked to a white settler. "We just have to go collect the food when it is ripe." A traveler to the Andaman Islands in the mid-twentieth century wrote that the natives there reacted similarly to the prospect of planting coconuts, asking why anyone should "care for a tree for ten years to get its nuts when the island and seas around are teeming with food for the taking?"
So it was that the Chumash hunter-gatherers traded fish for the corn grown by their farming neighbors, not once taking up shovels and hoes themselves. Even the African Pygmies who lived for centuries as seasonal laborers for farmers and therefore understood agricultural techniques intimately never took to sowing seeds full time.
As it would turn out, giving up hunting and gathering was no advance in quality of life. After the advent of farming, people grew smaller, weaker, and more sickly as they struggled to nurture and harvest crops—conditions that wouldn't be reversed until the invention of the plow and harnessed oxen. (137-138)
During the heyday of colonialism, Europeans often tried to "civilize" native peoples by offering them farming implements and teaching them how to settle down and grow crops. But in places were food was abundant and could be procured relatively easily, farming was almost universally rejected by these natives unless the farming lifestyle was imposed on them by force. This came a a surprise to Europeans who assumed that they were helping these societies. In fact, the ancestors of Europeans themselves had emphatically rejected farming when it first arrived in Europe from the Near East approximately 8,000 years ago. [5] It took millennia for such practices to be widely adopted.
It used to be thought that hunter-gatherers "lived by the chase," permanently scampering after their next meal in a desperate bid to hold off starvation. Trying to secure enough calories to survive on a regular basis was the preeminent consideration for all cultures prior to the Neolithic Revolution, it was assumed, leaving no leisure time for things like art, music, poetry, philosophy, and so forth. This prevented non-agricultural societies from aspiring to "higher" degrees of civilization, according to the prevailing Eurocentric view.
Of course, all of this was based on the imagination of people who lived in large, densely-packed urban societies wholly dependent on agriculture and market exchange for their subsistence. When people actually started to observe hunter-gatherers in the wild first-hand, however, it turned out that this conception was profoundly wrong.
It turned out that hunter-gatherers ate better than farmers! They had better overall nutrition, suffered from fewer diseases, and worked less—a lot less. [6] And, course, hunter-gatherers did, in fact, have music, art, dancing and poetry, as well as more leisure time to engage in all those activities which everyone—not just a select few—got to participate in on a regular basis. What they didn't have was a parasitical class who could sit around and do all those things because someone else was producing all their food for them; often not of their own free will.
It turned out that hunter-gatherers almost universally knew how to farm—they just chose not to! Many of them lived alongside farmers and herders, and were fully aware of the backbreaking and repetitive labor that came along with that lifestyle. Furthermore, the farmers' food supply was much more precarious than was that of hunter-gatherers. Dependence on only a few staple crops left farmers vulnerable to famines due to droughts, pests, plant diseases, volcanic eruptions, raiding neighbors, or any number of other unforeseen events.
By contrast, hunter-gatherers' wide variety of food sources and smaller population numbers kept them more secure from periodic food shortfalls. Anthropologist James Suzman notes that, "The Ju/’hoansi hunter-gatherers of Namibia traditionally made use of 125 different edible plant species, each of which had a slightly different seasonal cycle, varied in its response to different weather conditions, and occupied a specific environmental niche. When the weather proved unsuitable for one set of species it was likely to benefit another, vastly reducing the risk of famine." [7]
Examination of burials has confirmed this for prehistoric peoples as well. Skeletons bear witness to the fact that when people switched from hunting and gathering to farming their health took a major downturn. They were shorter and sicker. Their teeth start falling out due to all the starchy sugars in the diet, and all the bacteria in the mouth that feed off those sugars. Their bones showed signs of malnutrition—when bones are deprived of nutrients and stop growing for a period of time and then start again, it leaves distinctive lines on the bones called Harris lines. Furthermore, skeletons show signs of repetitive stress injuries for the first time: slipped disks, hernias, arthritic joints, bone spurs, and so on. Given all this evidence, author Richard Manning asks:
Why agriculture? In retrospect, it seems odd that it has taken archaeologists and paleontologists so long to begin answering this essential question of human history. What we are today—civilized city-bound, overpopulated, literate, organized, wealthy, poor, diseased, conquered, and conquerors—is all rooted in the domestication of plants and animals. The advent of farming re-formed humanity. In fact, the question "Why agriculture?" is so vital, lies so close to the core of our being that it probably cannot be asked or answered with complete honesty. Better to settle for calming explanation of the sort Stephen Jay Gould calls "just-so stories."
In this case, the core of such stories is the assumption that agriculture was better for us. Its surplus of food allowed the leisure and specialization that made civilization. It's bounty settled, refined, and educated us, freed us from the nasty, mean, brutish, and short existence that was the state of nature, freed us from hunting and gathering.
Yet when we think about agriculture, and some people have thought intently about it, the pat story glosses over a fundamental point. This just-so story had to have sprung from the imagination of someone who never hoed a row of corn or rose with the sun for a lifetime of milking cows. Gamboling about plain and forest, hunting and living off the land is fun. Farming is not. That's all one needs to know to begin a rethinking of the issue. The fundamental question was properly phrased by Colin Tudge of the London School of Economics: "The real problem, then, is not to explain why some people were slow to adopt agriculture but why anybody took it up at all when it is so obviously beastly." Research has supported Tudge's skepticism...[8]
All of this raises the obvious question: why the hell did we start farming anyway? And why did this “beastly” way of life conquer the entire world?
The First Farmers
Theories for the origin of cultivation/agriculture generally fall into push factors and pull factors—the carrot or the stick. Push factors include things like population pressure and a worsening climate; pull factors include increased crop yields due to new technology, for example.
One of the earliest theories put forward was the "oasis theory" of archaeologist V. Gordon Childe. Childe argued that a drying climate forced people to congregate around oases and wetlands where wild grasses grew. Because of their proximity to these wild grasses, people started incorporating them as a larger portion of their diet, especially since a few weeks of work could procure enough food supplies for long periods of time which could be easily and reliably stored. Over time, by selecting grasses with seeds that were plumper and less likely to shatter (fall off the stalk), we domesticated these wild grasses.
There are many other theories—far too many to go into here. What we are pretty sure about, though, is that a changing climate played a significant role.
In brief, the large animals that humans had evolved to hunt perhaps half a million years ago started going extinct all over the world. Whether that was due primarily to climate change or human predation is still hotly debated. Certainly human predation must have played some role, since many of these animals managed to survive earlier shifts in climate before Homo sapiens became so widespread. The arrival of humans in an ecosystem and the extinction of large mammals tends to be tightly correlated for many parts of the world outside Africa.
As the climate changed, not only did the large animals (collectively called megafauna) die off, but the open steppes and tundra were gradually replaced with mixed environments of temperate forests and woodlands, interspersed with grasslands and marshes. This changed the makeup of prey animals available for hunting.
A single woolly mammoth was an enormous package of concentrated calories and protein that could sustain a big group of hunters for a long time. The new prey species were more elusive, solitary, and confined to smaller ranges like deer, wild boar, and antelope. They also offered up fewer calories *. Stalking with bows and arrows replaced mass drives of prey or spearing large animals with javelins. Humans also began going after smaller quarry—birds, foxes, rabbits, lizards, turtles, armadillos, porcupines, squirrels, rodents, insects—pretty much whatever was on hand. Labor became more divided along age and gender lines.
At the same time, the climate became warmer and wetter, causing a wide variety of wild grasses, woody shrubs and bushes, leafy trees, and mushrooms to proliferate. And so, being omnivores, humans began incorporating these newly abundant plant foods as a much larger portion of their diet. Gathering increased in importance as big game hunting diminished. As we saw last time, only in a few select areas of the world with superabundant fish runs were some of the old ways of life preserved.
Plants have evolved certain natural defenses against predators. But humans, with our big brains and tools, could overcome their defenses by processing them. Nuts and grass seeds aren't edible in their natural form, but are edible after processing. Other plants like berries actively want to be eaten so that consumers will spread their seeds in a symbiotic relationship.
Since humans are dependent on cultural learning and passing down knowledge through time, we could learn how to harvest and process these foods and pass down that knowledge through time, rather than relying on biological evolution to make certain foods palatable for us. Foods such as manioc are deadly without processing, for example, and you need to be able to recognize which types of mushroom are poisonous and which are not.
Then came a sharp climatic downturn called the Younger Dryas around 11,600 years ago. This was either due to the collapse of a glacial lake in Canada, or by a comet entering the atmosphere—the reasons are debated. To sustain our expanded populations during this downturn, it's thought that all around the world we began to more intensively cultivate and store our favored plant foods.
The climate of the Pleistocene era was far too harsh and too unreliable to rely on growing plants as your primary means of subsistence. But as the climate stabilized after the Younger Dryas, conditions changed dramatically. This new climatic period was known as the Holocene. It was warmer, wetter, but most importantly, it was far more stable. Most likely, in the richest and most abundant parts of the world, groups of settled hunter-gatherers were the first to turn to cultivation on a large scale. As one group of researchers put it succinctly, agriculture was “impossible during the Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene.” [9]
Simply put, we shifted to eating lower down the food chain as a result of megafauna extinction and a warmer, wetter, more stable climate. This is referred to a broad spectrum strategy, and the shift to to it is called the broad spectrum revolution. All of these factors contributed to the trend of moving around less and spending more time in one place. This, in turn, triggered explosive population growth. There is evidence of significant population growth before the agricultural revolution, not just after. In other words, sedentism leads to agriculture, not the reverse.
The other thing we know is that this process must have been, in some sense, inevitable. That's because multiple human groups living in diverse ecosystems all over the world with zero possibility of contact with one another all started doing these exact same activities between three and ten thousand years ago.
Ten thousand years in the past—a single heartbeat ago in the drawn-out prehistory of our species—the last ice age began to draw to a close. As the climate warmed, some hunter-gatherers turned to farming, a shift known to archaeologists as the Neolithic Revolution.
This metamorphosis took place independently in six parts of the world first and most prominently in Mesopotamia, a region of the Middle East, 11,000 years ago; followed by the area China now occupies, 9,000 years ago; in highland New Guinea, 7,000 years ago, if not earlier; in central Mexico and roughly contemporaneously in the Andes centered around Peru between 5,000 and 4,000 years ago; and in the eastern United States, between 4,000 and 3,000 years ago.
From these humble beginnings, enormous kingdoms emerged in four of the areas: China, the Middle East (I include India here, which was sustained by crops brought in from that region), Mexico (starting with the Maya and later the Aztecs), and the Andes (culminating in the Inca). (275)
As this process unfolded, the distinction between wild and domesticated crops was often difficult to discern, such as with crops like manioc or plantain. Some of these crops appear to have been deliberately cultivated for as many as 10,000 years in the Amazon, yet whether they are truly "domesticated" is still debated, unlike with maize where no wild varieties exist and the husk prevents it from reproducing without human intervention.
As Jack Weatherford notes, "Though the cultigen end of the spectrum is obvious, the other end is not so clear." He describes seeing stands of edible prickly pear cactus growing in hedgerows a consistent distance from Native American houses, despite the natives claiming they did not plant them in gardens or deliberately locate their houses near wild sources. After extended stays in Indian communities, he eventually came to the realization that the cactus was eaten by mashing the pulp in the mouth and swallowing the small, hard seeds whole. Because defecation is done a consistent distance away from houses, the Indians were unintentionally planting a garden every time they had to eliminate, even while eradicating the same cacti from their cornfields. [10]
Knowing exactly when various plants were domesticated is often difficult too, since wild varieties were exploited long before they were deliberately grown in plots. In the case of cereal grains, archaeologists look for telltale signs like heavier, plumper seeds and tougher rachis (the part of the stalk that holds the seeds) to determine whether or not domestication has occurred. The dates are always in flux. For example, the early dates for domestication in the Amazon have only come in the last few years based on the study of phytoliths—microscopic particles of silica found in plant tissues which remain after the rest of the plant has decayed.
Determining when animals were domesticated presents a similar challenge. Generally, domesticated animals are smaller than their wild cousins. The pattern of bones changes too—when animals are domesticated, many more female bones are found than male ones, because only select males are kept around for breeding. In wild populations the ratio is closer to equal. DNA analysis has also helped with these issues where it can be extracted from ancient samples.
Domestication means more than exploitation, which is why there is more than academic difference between proto-farming and farming. Domestication is human-driven evolution, a fundamental shift in which human selection exerts enough pressure on the wild plant that it is visibly and irreverable changed, its genes altered. This alteration of plants, and later animals, occurred at each of the key agricultural centers, but probably first in the Middle East, where a site along the Euphrates River shows clearly domesticated einkorn and emmer wheat and barley dating to 9,600 years ago. These wild annual grasses crossed a line—as two others, rice and maize, later would—forever altering their genomes and the terms of life on the planet.
If "why" is complicated, when and where agriculture began is not. We can fairly easily trace each of the modern world's leading crops to its point of domestication—that is, to the natural habitat of its wild ancestors. The great bulk of today's human nutrition, more than two-thirds of it, comes from four crops: corn (or maize, as it is known internationally), wheat, rice, and potatoes. Each can be traced in a clean, crisp line to a spot in the world where both agriculture and a branch of civilization began: maize to central Mexico, wheat to the Middle East, rice to the Yangtze and Yellow River basin of China and the Ganges plain of India, and potatoes to the Andes. Each produced a major, literate, urban civilization: Aztec, Western, Asian, and Inca.
These six places on the globe represent a relatively tiny portion of the lands humans inhabited. So why the leap in these places and only these? The answer has less to do with human range than with plant range. Of all species of plant extant, only a tiny subset—a few hundred species—have readily edible parts. These are the candidates for domestication, defined simply as plants with traits that allow them to be easily domesticated and, more important, to be productive enough to justify the effort. Agriculture began in the home range of these plants, because the plants' evolution had already done most of the work. [11]
So that's the story in a nutshell. Obviously the particulars are a lot more complicated. Entire books have been written about this subject and many scholars have dedicated their lives to it, so we won't go into much more detail here.
As far as the second question goes, the answer boils down to simple demographics: farmers have a lot more children than hunter-gatherers do. This meant that the weight of numbers eventually displaced all other ways of life over the ensuing millennia. As their numbers swelled and their existing soils became exhausted and eroded, farmers were perennially land-hungry. Of course, the farmers were far less healthy along the way, lost more children on average, worked much harder, were subjected to more interpersonal violence and periods of starvation, and had far less freedom due to the machinations of sociopathic elites than their "barbarian" neighbors.
The trap was sprung.
An Alternative Theory
Many scholars subscribe to some variant of the "backs against the wall" theory of agricultural origins. In this view, we had no choice but to more intensively cultivate plants in order to fend off starvation in the face of increasing numbers and/or a deteriorating climate. But one intriguing alternative theory for the domestication of plants and animals involves ritual centers like Stonehenge and Göbekli Tepe, along with competitive feasting and ceremonial activities.
This theory has domestication arising not out desperation but from human social instincts—specifically, the desire for status. It was first put forward by archaeologist Brian Hayden, who studies the cultures of the Pacific Northwest. Hayden followed the archaeologist Robert Braidwood in suggesting that cereal grains were first cultivated for the purpose of fermenting them into alcoholic beverages as much—if not more than—making into flour and porridge.
In an earlier entry, I described the activities of so-called “Big Men” who encouraged their relatives and followers to produce surpluses and used the resulting surpluses to gain power and influence. Was it this desire for greater and greater surpluses, asked Hayden, and not accident or necessity that pushed us toward domestication?
It's obvious that producing surpluses can only be done in resource-rich environments like those inhabited by settled hunter-gatherers. Band societies could simply not engage in these sort of activities. No matter how status-hungry a potential Big Man was, such activities were impossible, as Marvin Harris notes:
Primitive hunters and gatherers work less than we do—without the benefit of a single labor union—because their ecosystems cannot tolerate weeks and months of intensive extra effort. Among the Bushmen, Stakhanovite personalities who would run about getting friends and relatives to work harder by promising them a big feast would constitute a definite menace to society.
If he got his followers to work like the Kaoka for a month, an aspiring Bushman big man would kill or scare off every game animal for miles around and starve his people to death before the end of the year. So reciprocity and not redistribution predominated among the Bushmen, and the highest prestige falls to the quietly dependable hunter who never boasts about his achievements and who avoids any hint that he is giving a gift when he divides up an animal he has killed. [12]
But in settled societies which practiced plant and animal cultivation, such limitations no longer applied, and "Triple-A" personalities—acquisitive, aggressive, and accumulative—were free to pursue activities that raised their own status relative to the other members of the tribe:
Competitive feasting and other forms of redistribution overwhelmed the primordial reliance upon reciprocity when it became possible to increase the duration and intensity of work without inflicting irreversible damage upon the habitat's carrying capacity. Typically this became possible when domesticated plants and animals were substituted for natural food resources. Within broad limits, the more work you put into planting and raising domesticated species, the more food you can produce. [13]
In Hayden's view, the need to procure ever greater surpluses for competitive feasting events by such "Triple-A" personalities is what drove the intensification of food production, leading us down the path to agriculture and domestication, rather than any sort of immediate, pressing need. As our ability to produce surpluses grew, so too did population, with specialization and social complexity following along in their wake:
Many archaeologists regard the proliferation of feasts around the start of the agricultural epoch as a result of improvements in food production. Hayden argues that they were also a cause. Giving a lavish feast and prevailing in "competitive battles" with rival feast-givers was important enough to drive the search for new and more impressive kinds of foods—not staples but status foods, not porridge in every pot or bread in every table but party foods.
Hayden points out that the first domesticated crops in many cultures around the world were actually intoxicants and delicacies. Some were even party utensils: in Japan, Mexico and the eastern United States, one of the earliest domesticated crops was the bottle gourd, useful chiefly as a serving vessel at feasts. Elsewhere, it was the chili pepper—not a staple food but, in some Maya cultures even today, a status symbol. Wheat may have been domesticated for bread, but some researchers say beer came first. And chickpeas? Think hummus and pita chips.
He regards the feasts of the period as a political necessity, a way to disarm potential adversaries as the Triple-A sorts began to accumulate personal wealth. What they were undertaking was the single biggest revolution in history. It was a break not just with our long history of more or less egalitarian tribal life but with the much older tradition against hoarding behavior in primates. To get away with it, the Triple-A sorts used parties much as chimpanzees use feeding clusters, as a way to toss the rest of the tribe a few scraps. The feast, like the feeding cluster, was a promise: stick with me, friend. We've got good times ahead...Once they had figured out how to domesticate crops for their prestige value, their party value, people realized that they could use these crops for practical purposes, too. Having brewed domesticated wheat into beer, they went on to knead it into bread. Thus we stumbled, perhaps literally, into the agricultural way of life. [14]
Feasts were about more than just status: they also played a role in social integration as societies became bigger and more complex and people started inhabiting different ecological niches. They also allowed risk pooling: when people gathered for feasts, they brought food from their native region, and some regions were doubtlessly more abundant than others in any given season.
In the prehistoric world, the problem wasn't a surplus of labor, but rather a scarcity of it. During this period, work had to be voluntary, because people could always run away if conditions became too oppressive.
It is well-known that throughout the ancient world, the main way to get large amounts of people to work on a project was by throwing a huge feast. This was true throughout the ancient world, including in early protostates like Egypt and Sumeria. At a site like Göbekli Tepe, for example, the amount of work that went into doing things like carving and erecting the huge multi-ton stone pillars couldn't have been accomplished without large numbers of people from the surrounding communities spending significant amounts of time in one spot. How were they to be fed?
The answer, as it turns out, may have been domestication. This would have allowed the ritual specialists who built and maintained Göbekli Tepe to remain at the site for long stretches of time and still have enough food to eat (supplemented by the occasional hunt). And the grain could have also been used to brew the beer which would have been consumed during ritual feasts at the site. And, indeed, it looks like the earliest domesticated einkorn wheat comes from exactly the region where Göbekli Tepe is located. The alcohol would have been used for social integration—just as it is today (let's head down to the local pub to discuss it**).
Beer Domesticated Man (Nautilus)
It's worth noting that in every center of plant domestication which developed into a large-scale civilization in both the Old World and the New, alcoholic beverages were brewed and consumed on a regular basis. The oldest breweries found in China were discovered near the epicenter of millet cultivation. [15] Industrial-scale brewing was also done in the early protostates of Central and South America [16]. And there's plenty of evidence for beer consumption in the ancient Near East, especially at funeral feasts. The oldest brewery ever found was in modern-day Israel where cereal grains were first domesticated. [17] That is, domestication, breweries and early civilization tend to line up rather neatly.
It is widely acknowledged that the earliest culture to domesticate grains in the Near East—called Natufians after a cave in Israel—were a settled hunter-gatherer civilization with a complex hierarchical culture†.
There is also evidence that the earliest domesticated animals may have been originally kept for religious purposes—for sacrifice rather than for food, milk or hides.
By keeping live animals captive in corrals and pens for sacrifice, the biggest and most aggressive animals would have been culled first, leading to selective pressures toward smaller and less skittish specimens. Over time, this process could have led to the "accidental" domestication of certain animals. Once this process was under way, humans could have taken greater control over the process and applied it to a wide variety of animal species (including, possibly, ourselves). Thus, the herding way of life was born. Archaeologists have also pinpointed the region surrounding Göbekli Tepe as some the earliest places for the domestication of both swine and cattle from boar and aurochs, respectively.
So, in reality, domestication might have arisen out of sociocultural and religious practices, and not just through accident or desperation as is so often portrayed. This is all hypothetical, of course. We will probably never know for sure what happened without the use of a time machine.
However it happened, the dependence on plant cultivation permanently altered human social relations, for better or worse (most likely, worse). It ushered in the tribal level of social development. Tribal cultures practicing horticulture and living in permanent settlements, or villages, arose all around the world during the Holocene period. Many of these cultures persisted into fairly recent times, and some still exist today. That's what we'll be talking about next time.
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* An early example of diminishing EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). Agriculture, on the other had, is an example of increasing EROEI, as Vaclav Smil has pointed out.
** After Covid, of course!
† Before his untimely death, David Graeber was working on a theory that the settled hunter-gatherer cultures of the Near East were actually more hierarchical than early farming communities, and that agriculture may have been taken up as a way of escaping them. It’s worth noting that archaeological finds show some degree of rank stratification in Natufian burials, while early farming communities like Çatalhöyük appear to have been extremely egalitarian.
All quotes in parentheses from The Human Swarm by Mark W. Moffett; Basic Books, New York. Emphasis mine.
[1] Female hunters of the early Americas (Science Advances)
[2] Richard Rudgley; Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, p. 158. The Free Press, 1999.
[3] Resource Managers: North American And Australian Hunter-Gatherers by Nancy M. Williams, Eugene S. Hunn.
[4] The Encyclopedia of Hunter-gatherers, p. n613
[5] Don’t make me into a farmer: Northern Europeans to Neolithic interlopers (Science Daily)
[6] Farmers have less leisure time than hunter-gatherers (Science Daily)
[7] How neolithic farming sowed the seeds of inequality 10,000 years ago (The Guardian)
[8] Richard Manning; Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization, pp. 23-26
[9] Was Agriculture Impossible during the Pleistocene but Mandatory during the Holocene? A Climate Change Hypothesis (ResearchGate)
[10] Jack Weatherford; Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World, pp. 85-86
[11] Richard Manning; Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization, pp. 23-26
[12] Marvin Harris; Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture, p. 127
[13] Marvin Harris; Cows, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture, pp. 127-128
[14] Richard Conniff; The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide, pp. 67-69
[15] 9,000-year History Of Chinese Fermented Beverages Confirmed (Science Daily); 5,000-Year-Old Chinese Beer Recipe Revealed (NPR)
[16] The secret to a stable society? A steady supply of beer doesn't hurt (Science Daily); A Brewery in Peru Ran For Centuries, Then Burned After One Epic Ancient Party (Discover)
[17] 'World's oldest brewery' found in cave in Israel, say researchers (BBC); A prehistoric thirst for craft beer (Science Daily); Ancient Beer: 13,000-Year-Old Site May Be the World’s Oldest Brewery (History.com)
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