The Human Journey, Volumes 1 - 2

by Kevin Reilly

  Relative Social Equality . The politics of Paleolithic society probably reflected its relative social equality. Our popular image of one caveman lording it over others is far from the reality. In modern hunter-gatherer bands, decision making is based on consensus. There is often a “headman” or leader, but his position is usually limited and advisory. For instance, the headman in a !Kung Khoisan band depicted in the film The Hunters is chosen because his wife is the daughter of a previous headman and because he has the confidence of the others in the band. Leadership is neither a full-time activity nor a job that excuses one from other duties. The only other specialty is that of a shaman, healer, or religious intermediary. Among contemporary hunter-gatherers, this individual also emerges through some combination of birth and evidence of special abilities. Among Arctic Eskimos, the role of shaman, which requires a high sensitivity to the spiritual world, typically fell to the individual, male or female, who seemed least adept at hunting and practical skills.

  Leisure Time . How much time and energy went into providing food? Anthropologists have discovered that most modern foraging bands are able to provide for their basic needs and still have considerable leisure time. In fact, it seems that modern foragers spend less time working and more time at leisure than do people in agricultural or industrial societies. Even in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa, a desolate and barren landscape to the outsider, the !Kung are able to find enough game, plants, roots, insects, and water to spend most of their time at leisure. Since our Paleolithic ancestors 10,000 to 50,000 years ago were not limited to remote areas or fragile ecosystems and since their world was far richer in flora and fauna, their workweek must have been even shorter. Nevertheless, there is no sign in the archaeological record of individuals of special privilege or distinction. While there are burial sites from this period, it is not until much later (5,000 to 6,000 years ago) that some graves outrank others.

  Interpreters of the lives of our foraging ancestors carry heavy burdens. There seems to be much at stake, in part because this “first” stage of human history is seen as the formative beginning and in part because it was such a long period of human history. Inevitably, the sense that our Paleolithic ancestors created “the human condition,” shaped “human nature,” that they are the “original” or the “real” us, demands more of our ancestors than is possible to accurately determine.

  Again, our distinction between biology and culture may be useful. Biologically, we are still like our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago. That may be significant in terms of our diet, our need for exercise, and our vulnerability to the ills of sedentary society. But culturally we are worlds away from our Paleolithic ancestors, and our ideas, feelings, visions, and dreams are shaped by our culture, not our biology.

  The difference is manifest if we consider a little hypothetical experiment. Imagine that we were able to exchange two newborn babies: one born 30,000 years ago with one born yesterday. At the age of 20, the child from the Paleolithic world would be dating, driving, and enjoying college world history courses like everyone else. The child born to modernity but raised in Paleolithic culture would be sniffing the air for the spoor of the wild boar, distinguishing the poisonous mushrooms from the tasty ones, or scanning the backs of beetles for signs of a cold winter. Both would have adapted to their worlds as completely and effortlessly as everyone else because everything they needed—including such physical attributes as muscular strength or the ability to distinguish smells—was taught by their culture. If, on the other hand, we were able to take two 50-year-olds, one from each world, and exchange them, both would be completely lost. Their cultures would have prepared them for skills that were irrelevant and unnecessary. And yet, with time, they too could learn.

  Merging Old and New . In December 2001, the shamans from a tenth of Brazil’s 230 indigenous nations met in the Amazon and drew up a declaration calling on the government to “create punishment mechanisms to deter the robbery of our biodiversity.”21 Concerned that they were losing control of their traditional knowledge of Brazilian plants to international pharmaceutical corporations, they called for a “moratorium on the commercial exploitation of traditional knowledge of genetic resources.” Their goal was not to deprive foreign scientists and corporations from benefiting from their knowledge but to develop a system that would involve them and pay royalties. “We’re not against science, but we don’t want to be just suppliers of data,” an organizer of the conference, Marcos Terena of the Terena tribe, explained. “We want to be part of the whole process from research to economic results.” The modern descendants of forest foragers have learned a lot.

  Subduing the Earth: The

  Consequences of Domestication

  The First Breakthrough: Origins of

  Agricultural/Pastoral Economies

  With her galaxy’s most powerful telescope, an astronomer viewing the planet Earth over the past million years would have had no reason to suspect the existence of intelligent life until very recently. Ice covered the poles, periodically pushing toward the equator and then retreating. The last expansion, which began 100,000 years ago, reached its maximum extent, halfway to the equator, about 20,000 years ago. About 10,000 years ago, our astronomer would have seen something new. That is when she could see anything at all, because as the ice retreated, it was replaced by mist and clouds. She would have seen green areas become more uniform in color, shape, and size. It was the stamp of agriculture. First by planting wild roots and seeds about 10,000 years ago and finally by plowing and irrigating fields and hillsides by 5,000 years ago, humans were revealing their presence on the planet.

  The intergalactic astronomer could only imagine the scene at ground level. In a couple of temperate, well-watered areas of the planet, women whose mothers had for generations dug the tubers and gathered the grains were putting some of them back into the ground. They were doing it systematically: punching holes in the ground with a digging stick and planting. Soon they were choosing particular plants, putting them in particular places, making sure there was sufficient sun and water, and clearing the area to improve the yield.

  Control over Food Supply . At the same time that women began to take control of edible plants, men began to control some of the animals they were in the habit of hunting. The taming or domestication of wild animals, although not visible from distant galaxies, had the same effect as the breeding and growing of favored plants. Men and women were controlling their food supply: increasing it, stabilizing it, and asserting their dominance over nature. From then on, as any sensible astronomer could see, a new planet had produced a species that was about to organize and subdue its small world.

  Why then? The retreat of the ice about 12,000 years ago would be part of the answer. Warmer temperatures (an average of 4 or 5 degrees Fahrenheit) and greater rainfall increased the number of plants that could be turned to human use. Vast fields of wheat and barley sprang up in the Middle East, providing a regular diet of cereals for an expanding population of people. The rising levels of rivers and oceans also increased the varieties and amount of fish available. In China too, rivers and coasts carried more fish and shellfish, and marshlands multiplied the varieties of wild rice.

  But that most recent retreat of ice was not a simple cause of the agricultural revolution. People may have learned to consume a wider variety of plants, especially in the Middle East. In northern Syria, there is early evidence of grinding wild grains and the use of a wide array of stone implements for harvesting cereals and other wild food. But there was no agriculture to supplement, much less replace, gathering for another 2,000 years. So agriculture was not just the result of warmer weather.

  There is also a problem with the idea that people chose agriculture as an obvious effort to better their lives. The problem is that no one could have foreseen that the long-term effects of agriculture would be beneficial. In fact, the short-term effects were probably not. Archaeologists who have examined skeleton remains of early farmers of about 10,000 years ago have
found evidence that the first farmers may not have eaten as well as gatherers had. Their bone fragments show signs that early farmers suffered from inferior nutrition, shorter stature, and earlier deaths than their foraging ancestors. A recent discovery of drilled teeth from a Neolithic site in Pakistan 9.000 years ago might mark our ancestor’s first visit to the dentist—a practice made increasingly necessary by the abrasive minerals produced when grain was ground on stone.22 In addition, anthropologists have concluded that most farmers worked longer hours than hunters and gatherers.

  Why Agriculture Developed . So why did they do it? Why did gatherers choose the backbreaking work of planting instead of just plucking fruit from the tree? And why did hunters decide to raise animals instead of just killing the wild ones? Why did they go through the trouble of taming, herding, feeding, and breeding them for meals they might not even live to enjoy?

  A clue to the answer may lie in the ice-age confusion. If warmer, wetter weather 12,000 years ago multiplied vegetation and animals, including humans, why did they wait another 2.000 years to become farmers? The agricultural revolution occurred not as the glaciers retreated 12,000 years ago but in the sudden cold snap that followed. So the question is not only why agriculture, but why agriculture then? The answer may be because they had to.

  Food production probably replaced hunting and gathering in a two-step process of experiment followed by necessity. First, 12,000 years ago, as the ice melted, increased rains and longer summers added abundant new species of plants and animals. In a world full of choices, gatherers continued weeding, selecting, and harvesting one species over another. But there was no need to plant what nature provided free of charge. Similarly, wild animals could be tamed as a supplement or leisure activity rather than as a necessity: first the wolf that became the dog, then wild sheep and goats were easily herded by people and dogs and provided food and clothing on demand. But in a world full of wild gazelles, shepherding was an unnecessary activity. Populations grew in the warming years; settlements increased, and people gorged on a natural harvest that seemed eternal. Then, in the wake of a dry, cold snap between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago,23 with more mouths to feed, the party ended. Agriculture and pasture became necessities. We know, for instance, that horses and wild gazelles, an important source of meat and protein, were rapidly disappearing from the Middle East about 10,000 years ago.

  Selecting Crops to Grow . The astronomer from another planet would have needed a telescope with an extremely sensitive color receptor to notice something else about the spreading green on planet Earth. The shades of green that she saw beginning 10,000 years ago were both different and less varied than the earlier ice-age greens. The farmers were changing the planet’s plants and choosing a few to take the place of the many.

  Farmers made different choices than nature. Nature selected plants with abundant seeds for survival against birds, pests, and chance. Humans chose to plant fruits, like bananas, with fewer or smaller seeds so that they would not get caught in their teeth. Nature protected some plants—the ancestors of almonds, cabbages, and potatoes, for instance—with a sour taste or poisonous fruit. Humans chose to develop the rare specimen that lacked this protection. Nature took fewer risks, finding safety in the widest variety of species. Humans chose the tastiest or hardiest and replaced the others.

  Human choices enabled the human population to grow exponentially. A few choices, like cereal crops bred for maximum number of grains, made all the difference. The grain/seeds of wild grasses were indigestible for humans and eaten only by animals 12,000 years ago. Today, grains like wheat, barley, millet, oats, rice, and corn—processed as cereals, ground as flour, and turned into noodles, breads, and baked goods—feed the world. This is a result of the domestication of these grains, the process of enlarging their size and quantity. The modern ear of corn, for instance, is a product of thousands of years of domestication. Five thousand years ago, it was a grass with small grains on the tip. Mexican Indians enlarged it to a thumbnail size stalk by about 2,000 years ago, and it measured about five inches by the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, 500 years ago. Today, the average ear of corn measures eight or nine inches.

  In some cases, humans increased the variety of nature. They took the humble ancestor of the cabbage, for instance, and produced a wide variety of descendants. Initially cultivated for the oil of its seeds, some cultivators chose to develop it for its leaves, producing modern cabbage; others chose plants with abundant small buds, leading to Brussels sprouts; and still others cultivated the flower and stems, producing broccoli and cauliflower.

  Reducing Variety . But the overwhelming impact of the farmer was to reduce nature’s riot of species, concentrating on those that humans could eat, especially those that produced the most per planting. Out of 200,000 species of wild plants, humans ate only a few thousand, and of those they domesticated only a few hundred. Today, only 12 of those account for 80 percent of the world’s tonnage of crops.24 These are wheat, corn, rice, barley, sorghum, soybeans, potato, sweet potato, manioc, sugarcane, sugar beet, and banana.

  The selection of crops for planting also reduced the genetic variety within a species. Ninety percent of all the world’s apples are descended from only two trees out of the thousands that existed in the forests of Kazakhstan 6,000 years ago.25 The shallow gene pool that results from ages of interbreeding makes such plants more vulnerable to blights, pests, and diseases. Apple growers, for instance, are returning to the central Asian source to breed hardier apples. Unfortunately, many plants that were discarded have become extinct. Many that have been adapted to human needs can no longer grow without human intervention. Bananas and breadfruit, for instance, can no longer be reproduced from their tiny seeds but require humans to make cuttings from their stalks for reproduction.

  In summary, the great revolution of human food production began to transform the world about 10,000 years ago after the end of the last ice age. It was a gradual process that began in discovery and experimentation and culminated in the need of growing populations to confront periodic shortages of wild foods. The result was not only a dramatic increase in human population and a change in human lifestyles but also a reshaping of the natural world.

  Globalization and Continental Variety

  Food production was the first human step to globalization. First, a planet of hunters and gatherers started to become a planet of farmers and herders—almost simultaneously from the standpoint of Big History. Second, these first farmers and herders in various parts of the world began exchanging recipes, sharing seeds, and using the same or similar animals for food, clothing, and transport.

  But some people were left out of this new revolution, in some cases for a long time. Thus, a revolution that eventually created a single world also created the first “haves” and “have-nots.” In the beginning, many farmers may not have lived better than foragers. But eventually, farmers formed larger, more complex societies; took the best land; and forced the remaining bands of gatherers to the margins: deserts, barren mountains, dense rain forests, and the Arctic north.

  For most of the 10,000 years since the beginning of domestication, the world has belonged to the farmers. Their descendants produced the first cities, states, and empires beginning 5,000 years ago. Their urban revolution of city building, state formation, and the development of complex, literate societies was in one sense a departure from agricultural society and in another sense its fulfillment. The great urban empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt, India, China, and the Americas erected their monuments by taxing and working untold numbers of peasant farmers. They invented writing and trained poets and historians to tell their stories as if it were the history of everyone. The foragers of the Philippines, Australia, the Amazon, and the African Kalahari and the hunting and fishing peoples of the American Northwest, the Arctic, and the hills of Southeast Asia were relegated to the spectator seats while the great kings strutted their stuff on the world stage.

  Nevertheless, not all agricultural societies be
came urban empires 5,000 years ago, and some of the early empires were not descended from the first farmers. The winners of history are not always the smartest or most talented. It took over 1,000 years for agriculture to spread from its first home in the Middle East to the Mediterranean. Greece and Rome and then Europe were late borrowers who made good use of the invention. And some of the important breakthroughs that enabled agricultural societies to become empires—domesticated horses, wheels, and chariots—first came to light in central Asia, not in the agricultural societies that turned horse-drawn chariots into engines of empire.

  Geography as Destiny . Why did some agricultural societies prosper far more than others? Geography partly explains why some agricultural people, borrowers as well as inventors, turned cultivation into high culture. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond argued provocatively that powerful city-based empires grew in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Mediterranean, Europe, India, and China because these agricultural societies were geographically well placed and close together. They had the good fortune to be where there were many available plants and animals that could be domesticated or to live along the same latitudes as the initial fortunate few who first domesticated them.26

  The first farmers, those of the Middle East, were blessed with a wide variety of plants and animals, many of which could be domesticated. Wheat and barley were prominent cereal grains of the Fertile Crescent, the area that stretched along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to the foothills of Turkey and the Mediterranean. The Fertile Crescent also had abundant pulses (edible seeds, like beans, which are rich in protein), specifically peas and lentils.