KING SHYAAM’S ACHIEVEMENT illustrates how some limited degree of economic success can be achieved through extractive institutions. Creating such growth requires a centralized state. To centralize the state, a political revolution is often necessary. Once Shyaam created this state, he could use its power to reorganize the economy and boost agricultural productivity, which he could then tax.
Why was it that the Bushong, and not the Lele, had a political revolution? Couldn’t the Lele have had their own King Shyaam? What Shyaam accomplished was an institutional innovation not tied in any deterministic way to geography, culture, or ignorance. The Lele could have had such a revolution and similarly transformed their institutions, but they didn’t. Perhaps this is for reasons that we do not understand, because of our limited knowledge of their society today. Most likely it is because of the contingent nature of history. The same contingency was probably at work when some of the societies in the Middle East twelve thousand years ago embarked upon an even more radical set of institutional innovations leading to settled societies and then to the domestication of plants and animals, as we discuss next.
THE LONG SUMMER
About 15,000 BC, the Ice Age came to an end as the Earth’s climate warmed up. Evidence from the Greenland ice cores suggests that average temperatures rose by as much as fifteen degrees Celsius in a short span of time. This warming seems to have coincided with rapid increases in human populations as the global warming led to expanding animal populations and much greater availability of wild plants and foods. This process was put into rapid reverse at about 14,000 BC, by a period of cooling known as the Younger Dryas, but after 9600 BC, global temperatures rose again, by seven degrees Celsius in less than a decade, and have since stayed high. Archaeologist Brian Fagan calls it the Long Summer. The warming-up of the climate was a huge critical juncture that formed the background to the Neolithic Revolution, where human societies made the transition to sedentary life, farming, and herding. This and the rest of subsequent human history have played out basking in this Long Summer.
There is a fundamental difference between farming and herding and hunting-gathering. The former is based on the domestication of plant and animal species, with active intervention in their life cycles to change genetics to make those species more useful to humans. Domestication is a technological change that enables humans to produce a lot more food from the available plants and animals. The domestication of maize, for example, began when humans gathered teosinte, the wild crop that was maize’s ancestor. Teosinte cobs are very small, barely a few centimeters long. They are dwarfed by a cob of modern maize. Yet gradually, by selecting the larger ears of teosinte, and plants whose ears did not break but stayed on the stalk to be harvested, humans created modern maize, a crop that provides far more nourishment from the same piece of land.
The earliest evidence of farming, herding, and the domestication of plants and animals comes from the Middle East, in particular from the area known as the Hilly Flanks, which stretches from the south of modern-day Israel, up through Palestine and the west bank of the River Jordan, via Syria and into southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, and western Iran. Around 9500 BC the first domestic plants, emmer and two-row barley, were found in Jericho on the west bank of the River Jordan in Palestine; and emmer, peas, and lentils, at Tell Aswad, farther north in Syria. Both were sites of the so-called Natufian culture and both supported large villages; the village of Jericho had a population of possibly five hundred people by this time.
Why did the first farming villages happen here and not elsewhere? Why was it the Natufians, and not other peoples, who domesticated peas and lentils? Were they lucky and just happened to be living where there were many potential candidates for domestication? While this is true, many other people were living among these species, but they did not domesticate them. As we saw in chapter 2 in Maps 4 and 5, research by geneticists and archaeologists to pin down the distribution of the wild ancestors of modern domesticated animals and plants reveals that many of these ancestors were spread over very large areas, millions of square kilometers. The wild ancestors of domesticated animal species were spread throughout Eurasia. Though the Hilly Flanks were particularly well endowed in terms of wild crop species, even they were very far from unique. It was not that the Natufians lived in an area uniquely endowed with wild species that made them special. It was that they were sedentary before they started domesticating plants or animals. One piece of evidence comes from gazelle teeth, which are composed of cementum, a bony connective tissue that grows in layers. During the spring and summer, when cementum’s growth is most rapid, the layers are a different color from the layers that form in the winter. By taking a slice through a tooth you can see the color of the last layer created before the gazelle died. Using this technique, you can determine if the gazelle was killed in summer or winter. At Natufian sites, one finds gazelles killed in all seasons, suggesting year-round residence. The village of Abu Hureyra, on the river Euphrates, is one of the most intensively researched Natufian settlements. For almost forty years archaeologists have examined the layers of the village, which provides one of the best documented examples of sedentary life before and after the transition to farming. The settlement probably began around 9500 BC, and the inhabitants continued their hunter-gatherer lifestyle for another five hundred years before switching to agriculture. Archaeologists estimate that the population of the village prior to farming was between one hundred and three hundred.
You can think of all sorts of reasons why a society might find it advantageous to become sedentary. Moving about is costly; children and old people have to be carried, and it is impossible to store food for lean times when you are on the move. Moreover, tools such as grinding stones and sickles were useful for processing wild foods, but are heavy to carry. There is evidence that even mobile hunter-gatherers stored food in select locations such as caves. One attraction of maize is that it stores very well, and this is a key reason why it became so intensively cultivated throughout the Americas. The ability to deal more effectively with storage and accumulate food stocks must have been a key incentive for adopting a sedentary way of life.
While it might be collectively desirable to become sedentary, this doesn’t mean that it will necessarily happen. A mobile group of hunter-gatherers would have to agree to do this, or someone would have to force them. Some archaeologists have suggested that increasing population density and declining living standards were key factors in the emergence of sedentary life, forcing mobile people to stay in one place. Yet the density of Natufian sites is no greater than that of previous groups, so there does not appear to be evidence of increasing population density. Skeletal and dental evidence does not suggest deteriorating health, either. For instance, food shortage tends to create thin lines in people’s tooth enamel, a condition called hypoplasia. These lines are in fact less prevalent in Natufian people than in later farming people.
More important is that while sedentary life had pluses, it also had minuses. Conflict resolution was probably much harder for sedentary groups, since disagreements could be resolved less easily by people or groups merely moving away. Once people had built permanent buildings and had more assets than they could carry, moving away was a much less attractive option. So villages needed more effective ways of resolving conflict and more elaborate notions of property. Decisions would have to be made about who had access to which piece of land close to the village, or who got to pick fruit from which stand of trees and fish in which part of the stream. Rules had to be developed, and the institutions that made and enforced rules had to be elaborated.
In order for sedentary life to emerge, it therefore seems plausible that hunter-gatherers would have had to be forced to settle down, and this would have to have been preceded by an institutional innovation concentrating power in the hands of a group that would become the political elite, enforce property rights, maintain order, and also benefit from their status by extracting resources from the rest of society. In fact, a politi
cal revolution similar to that initiated by King Shyaam, even if on a smaller scale, is likely to have been the breakthrough that led to sedentary life.
The archaeological evidence indeed suggests that the Natufians developed a complex society characterized by hierarchy, order, and inequality—beginnings of what we would recognize as extractive institutions—a long time before they became farmers. One compelling piece of evidence for such hierarchy and inequality comes from Natufian graves. Some people were buried with large amounts of obsidian and dentalium shells, which came from the Mediterranean coast near Mount Carmel. Other types of ornamentation include necklaces, garters, and bracelets, which were made out of canine teeth and deer phalanges as well as shells. Other people were buried without any of these things. Shells and also obsidian were traded, and control of this trade was quite likely a source of power accumulation and inequality. Further evidence of economic and political inequality comes from the Natufian site of Ain Mallaha, just north of the Sea of Galilee. Amid a group of about fifty round huts and many pits, clearly used for storage, there is a large, intensively plastered building close to a cleared central place. This building was almost certainly the house of a chief. Among the burials at the site, some are much more elaborate, and there is also evidence of a skull cult, possibly indicating ancestor worship. Such cults are widespread in Natufian sites, particularly Jericho. The preponderance of evidence from Natufian sites suggests that these were probably already societies with elaborate institutions determining inheritance of elite status. They engaged in trade with distant places and had nascent forms of religion and political hierarchies.
The emergence of political elites most likely created the transition first to sedentary life and then to farming. As the Natufian sites show, sedentary life did not necessarily mean farming and herding. People could settle down but still make their living by hunting and gathering. After all, the Long Summer made wild crops more bountiful, and hunting and gathering was likely to have been more attractive. Most people may have been quite satisfied with a subsistence life based on hunting and gathering that did not require a lot of effort. Even technological innovation doesn’t necessarily lead to increased agricultural production. In fact, it is known that a major technological innovation, the introduction of the steel axe among the group of Australian Aboriginal peoples known as Yir Yoront, led not to more intense production but to more sleeping, because it allowed subsistence requirements to be met more easily, with little incentive to work for more.
The traditional, geography-based explanation for the Neolithic Revolution—the centerpiece of Jared Diamond’s argument, which we discussed in chapter 2—is that it was driven by the fortuitous availability of many plant and animal species that could easily be domesticated. This made farming and herding attractive and induced sedentary life. After societies became sedentary and started farming, they began to develop political hierarchy, religion, and significantly more complex institutions. Though widely accepted, the evidence from the Natufians suggests that this traditional explanation puts the cart before the horse. Institutional changes occurred in societies quite a while before they made the transition to farming and were probably the cause both of the move to sedentarism, which reinforced the institutional changes, and subsequently of the Neolithic Revolution. This pattern is suggested not only by the evidence from the Hilly Flanks, which is the area most intensively studied, but also by the preponderance of evidence from the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and East Asia.
Certainly the transition to farming led to greater agricultural productivity and enabled a significant expansion of population. For instance, in sites such as Jericho and Abu Hureyra, one sees that the early farming village was much larger than the prefarming one. In general, villages grew by between two and six times when the transition took place. Moreover, many of the consequences that people have traditionally argued as having flowed from this transition undoubtedly happened. There was greater occupational specialization and more rapid technological progress, and probably the development of more complex and possibly less egalitarian political institutions. But whether this happened in a particular place was not determined by the availability of plant and animal species. Instead, it was a consequence of the society’s having experienced the types of institutional, social, and political innovations that would have allowed sedentary life and then farming to emerge.
Though the Long Summer and the presence of crop and animal species allowed this to happen, it did not determine where or when exactly, after the climate had warmed up, it would happen. Rather, this was determined by the interaction of a critical juncture, the Long Summer, with small but important institutional differences that mattered. As the climate warmed up, some societies, such as the Natufians, developed elements of centralized institutions and hierarchy, though these were on a very small scale relative to those of modern nation-states. Like the Bushong under Shyaam, societies reorganized to take advantage of the greater opportunities created by the glut of wild plants and animals, and it was no doubt the political elites who were the main beneficiaries of these new opportunities and of the political centralization process. Other places that had only slightly different institutions did not permit their political elites to take similar advantage of this juncture and lagged behind the process of political centralization and the creation of settled, agricultural, and more complex societies. This paved the way to a subsequent divergence of exactly the type we have seen before. Once these differences emerged, they spread to some places but not to others. For example, farming spread into Europe from the Middle East starting around 6500 BC, mostly as a consequence of the migration of farmers. In Europe, institutions drifted away from parts of the world, such as Africa, where initial institutions had been different and where the innovations set in motion by the Long Summer in the Middle East happened only much later, and even then in a different form.
THE INSTITUTIONAL INNOVATIONS of the Natufians, though they did most likely underpin the Neolithic Revolution, did not leave a simple legacy in world history and did not lead inexorably to the long-run prosperity of their homelands in modern Israel, Palestine, and Syria. Syria and Palestine are relatively poor parts of the modern world, and the prosperity of Israel was largely imported by the settlement of Jewish people after the Second World War and their high levels of education and easy access to advanced technologies. The early growth of the Natufians did not become sustained for the same reason that Soviet growth fizzled out. Though highly significant, even revolutionary for its time, this was growth under extractive institutions. For the Natufian society it was also likely that this type of growth created deep conflicts over who would control institutions and the extraction they enabled. For every elite benefiting from extraction there is a non-elite who would love to replace him. Sometimes infighting simply replaces one elite with another. Sometimes it destroys the whole extractive society, unleashing a process of state and societal collapse, as the spectacular civilization that Maya city-states built more than one thousand years ago experienced.
THE UNSTABLE EXTRACTION
Farming emerged independently in several places around the world. In what is now modern Mexico, societies formed that established states and settlements, and transitioned to agriculture. As with the Natufians in the Middle East, they also achieved some degree of economic growth. The Maya city-states in the area of southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Western Honduras in fact built a fairly sophisticated civilization under their own brand of extractive institutions. The Maya experience illustrates not only the possibility of growth under extractive institutions but also another fundamental limit to this type of growth: the political instability that emerges and ultimately leads to collapse of both society and state as different groups and people fight to become the extractors.
Maya cities first began to develop around 500 BC. These early cities eventually failed, sometime in the first century AD. A new political model then emerged, creating the foundation for the Classic Era, between AD 250 an
d 900. This period marked the full flowering of Maya culture and civilization. But this more sophisticated civilization would also collapse in the course of the next six hundred years. By the time the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the early sixteenth century, the great temples and palaces of such Maya sites as Tikal, Palenque, and Calakmul had receded into the forest, not to be rediscovered until the nineteenth century.
The Maya cities never unified into an empire, though some cities were subservient to others, and they often appear to have cooperated, particularly in warfare. The main connection between the region’s city-states, fifty of which we can recognize by their own glyphs, is that their people spoke around thirty-one different but closely related Mayan languages. The Mayas developed a writing system, and there are at least fifteen thousand remaining inscriptions describing many aspects of elite life, culture, and religion. They also had a sophisticated calendar for recording dates known as the Long Count. It was very much like our own calendar in that it counted the unfolding of years from a fixed date and was used by all Maya cities. The Long Count began in 3114 BC, though we do not know what significance the Mayas attached to this date, which long precedes the emergence of anything resembling Maya society.
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