The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  Cakes and Ale

  A final point relates to the way the domestication of plants links in with the domestication of animals and which completed the ‘package’ effect. In the Old World these two processes followed relatively closely upon one another. In the Middle East, for example, sheep, goats and pigs had been domesticated by 10000 BP, and possibly a little earlier, but in any case within a thousand years of wheat. It is possible that, when the first fields were created, and discovered to yield less well in subsequent years, early man also noticed that where mammals grazed – and more importantly defecated – the plants grew back there more quickly. So was conceived the notion of manure and its fertilising properties. But early man quickly found that these animals could also provide meat, milk (and then cheese), that their hides could be manipulated to make leather and thongs and much else.

  And here too there was a major difference between the Old World and the New. In some areas – North America, Australia, sub-Saharan Africa – there were no animals at all who were candidates for domestication. On the other hand, in Eurasia there were close to a dozen types of mammal which were capable of being (and were) domesticated: sheep, goats, various forms of cattle, pigs, horses, two types of camel, donkeys, reindeer, water buffalo, yaks. Moreover, seven of these were located in south-west Asia, or the Middle East, the area where wheat and barley were common. In South America, there were just three mammals suitable for domestication: the llama, the alpaca, and the guinea pig, plus the turkey. In North America, as noted earlier, there were none at all. Another major difference between the hemispheres was that, as well as the much larger variety of animals that were domesticated in the Old World, so those animals – by chance – had many more uses. These differences profoundly affected differential development between the Old World and the New.

  One of the reasons for this remarkable disparity between the hemispheres is probably the very great size of Eurasia, which determined that it had, overall, no fewer than seventy-two species of large mammal which could be candidates for domestication. Recent research has shown that most of these large mammals evolved in the great steppes of Eurasia.9 This compares favourably with fiftyone species of large mammal in sub-Saharan Africa, none of which have been domesticated, with twenty-four in the Americas and just one in Australia.

  Domestication is not easy and is not to be confused with keeping animals as pets. Most big mammals appear to have been domesticated in the ‘era of domestication’ between 10,000 years ago and 4,500 years ago. The dog appears to have come first (at 12,000 years ago), then sheep, goats and pigs at 10,000 years ago, cattle at 8,000 years ago, the horse and water-buffalo at around 6,000 years ago, the llama/alpaca at 5,500, the donkey in north Africa about 5,000 years ago, and the various forms of camel at 4,500 years ago (though why the camel was not adapted to pull the plough much earlier is a mystery).

  The main characteristics that domesticated mammals share is that they are herd animals with a strong dominance hierarchy and show not much in the way of territorial behaviour. This social structure is ideal because, in domestication, humans take over the ranking.10 Also, goats, cows, sheep, camels and other mammals can be milked, producing milk products – butter, cheese and yoghurt – meaning they can be a continuous source of protein over their lifetime, not just when they are slaughtered. Most solitary, territorial animals cannot be herded.

  As with plants, so the spread of animals around the New World was much slower than in the other hemisphere. None of the Andes’ domestic mammals (llama, alpaca, guinea pig) ever reached Mesoamerica in pre-Columbian times, meaning that the Olmecs, Mayans and Aztecs had to do without pack animals. Without pack animals, which could become draft animals, there was no real need for the wheel (though wheelbarrows, invented in China to cope with terrace farming, would have been helpful).

  The growth of sedentism, and the introduction of agriculture, allowed a marked rise in population and a corresponding increase in population density. This stimulated a virtuous cycle, or autocatalytic process, in which, as population densities rose, food production became increasingly favoured because it provided the increased outputs needed. Sedentism also meant that early mankind could shorten the interval between offspring (hunter-gatherers and nomads typically wean their children later to prevent early re-conception). The birth interval for farm people (sedentary communities) is around two and a half years, compared with twice that for hunter-gatherers. It was only natural, therefore, for population to grow much more under the regime of seed/package agriculture than under vegeculture, with the result that, eventually, the Old World in general grew far more crowded than the New.

  Moreover, the need to store grain, from one harvest to the next, produced a number of innovations that seem never to have occurred to people living off roots and tubers, who were ‘harvesting’ them throughout the year as needed and therefore had much less need of storage. One innovation was pottery, no doubt discovered when some clay fell into the fire and hardened. Pots were the ideal rat-resistant vessels, and their existence seems to have promoted the idea that, if a certain amount of grain was being harvested to store for the next year, just in case the following harvest should fail, why should the farmer not produce more than he needed and trade the surplus.

  Pottery is useful as a storage vessel, of course, only in sedentary societies. Hunter-gatherers, and people living off tubers/roots and hunting – on the move a lot – preferred baskets and woven bags and their bottle gourds, which were lighter, more supple, no less durable and much less likely to shatter. However, once again we see a process of interlocking developments, for the invention of pottery had several knock-on effects. One was that it enabled oats, rice and millet to be boiled in water, facilitating the making of gruel and/or bread (though it was not inevitable – in the Sahel millet communities, for example). Another was the invention of smelting – metallurgy, which presumably was also discovered accidentally, when stone was heated along with clay, and early man got the shock of his life when stone of one colour (probably the green of malachite) yielded a bright red malleable substance we know as copper. A third knock-on effect was the invention of beer. The combination of pottery and cereals (especially barley) produced fermentation – what must have seemed another magical process was presumably discovered accidentally as well, as people observed that an old gruel left to stand ‘did not spoil, but instead tasted sweet and had distinct effects on the mind and emotions’.11 In turn that led to the invention of wine with its psychological and emotional effects. We shall see in later chapters that in fact the development of ceramics may have had much more to do with the advent of alcohol and other psychoactivre substances than hitherto thought (and this is true in the New World also – see chapter eleven). Barley was linked with malting and, in brewing, yeast was produced which also facilitated baking. And third, as trade flourished, and more and more pots were used for the transport of goods, and had to be sealed to prevent theft or damage en route, their contents were identified by a series of tokens which, as we shall also see in a later chapter, led to the first signs or symbols which in turn would evolve into script, writing.

  And so the domestication of cereal grasses was a fortuitously momentous event, which fundamentally shaped the lives – and then the civilisations – of early man, governing ultimately the linked emergence of pottery, metallurgy (the plough in particular but also weapons), population density, baking, brewing and writing. The difference between cereal cultivation on the one hand, and root/tuber cultivation on the other, was, together with the weakening monsoon/increasing frequency of enso events, probably the most basic difference in the history of the world, and which gave the western hemisphere an historical trajectory very different from that of the Old World. Even in the New World, the great civilisations all arose in association with seed agricultural (maize-growing) areas. Root/tuber farmers, who were also hunters, never developed civilisations – they remained confined, as we shall see, to chiefdoms.*

  In the previous chapter we saw
that early man probably arrived in the New World with a stock of myths that was subtly different from those understood by many Old World people. To this we may add the difference in climate, the difference between seed culture and vege-culture, the presence/absence of domesticated mammals, and say further that what this also means is that, essentially, the world may be divided into three huge landmasses or continents – one ‘quick’ east-west continent, Eurasia, and two ‘slower’, north-south continents, the Americas and Africa (map 1, inset). Australia is considered separately later, albeit briefly.

  In Eurasia (which, for our purposes, includes the north coast of Africa, along the Mediterranean shoreline), the years 12000 BP to, roughly speaking, 5500 BP, saw the development of farming across the whole landmass, from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, the development of pottery and metallurgy (the ‘cultures of fire’), culminating in the rise of cities and the first great civilisations. There were no real barriers to this expansion – the great East-West Corridor has already been identified, and the Sahara did not become the barrier it is now until about 2500 BP. In addition, there were no bottlenecks or deserts to block the east-west passage of peoples and ideas, and the main mountain ranges – the Alps, for example, the Himalayas, the Tien Shan and the Qilian Shan in China and Krygystan, and the Altai in Russia/ Mongolia – were themselves essentially east-west configurations, and again did not act as substantial barriers to the diffusion of ideas, new practices and peoples. Indeed, in the existence of the Eurasian steppes (shown in broad outline on map 4) the natural features of the Old World actually facilitated movement and, as we shall see, had a major effect on the course of Old World history. At the end of this period, some time between 5500 and 5000 BP, major civilisations arose in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, the Nile Valley, the Indus Valley and the Yellow River and Yangtze Valleys.

  We have already discussed the (very effective) barriers to diffusion in the Americas, one consequence of which was that no major civilisation ever emerged in the continent of North America before the arrival of the Europeans, though there were some large and sophisticated chiefdoms. A not dissimilar picture emerges in Africa, where civilisation did not emerge south of the Sahara until 800 BC at the earliest, in West Africa. There, the main crops to begin with were yams and then millet with bananas and taro introduced from Oceania later on; and there was only one animal available for domestication, the guinea fowl. It was, therefore, in a situation not dissimilar to South America.

  At 5000 BP, the Bantu in their original homeland in West Africa, had cattle and yams but lacked metal and were still hunting, fishing and gathering. Smelting appears to have emerged in Africa around 4000 BP. Again, as in South America, there were barriers to north-south diffusion. For example, Egypt’s wheat and barley never reached the Mediterranean climate in the Cape of Good Hope until the Europeans arrived with it. The Khoisan (the Kalahari bushmen) never developed agriculture at all. The Sahel crops (the savannah at the edge of the Sahara), adapted to summer rain, could not grow in the Cape. The Sahara, after 2500 BP, and the tsetse fly together impeded the spread of livestock, particularly cattle and the horse. It took more than 2,000 years for cattle, sheep and goats to cross the Serengeti; and pottery – recorded in the Sudan and the Sahara as early as 10000 BP – did not reach the Cape until AD 1.12

  Put this way, it seems that the Old World has had all the advantages, and to some extent that is true. Its great size, its basic east-west configuration, its location largely away from the tropics, were all vitally important. And we are not done yet. If the geographical configuration of the Earth, and the distribution of plants about it, comprised the most basic division between the hemispheres to begin with, it was to be the role of domesticated mammals which – more than any other single factor – shaped history thereafter.

  • 7 •

  FATHERHOOD, FERTILITY, FARMING: ‘THE FALL’

  The backbone of this book is the differential development of ideology – the understanding of human nature and what it implies for the organisation of society – in the two hemispheres and this and the next chapter explain how those different trajectories began to diverge, thanks to a whole complex of interlinked changes that occurred together, beginning first around the tenth millennium BC.

  The very presence of grave goods, of whatever kind, suggests that ancient people believed at least in the possibility of an afterlife, and this in turn would have implied a belief in supernatural beings. Anthropologists distinguish three elements to a religion: that a non-physical component of an individual can survive after death (the ‘soul’); that certain individuals within a society are particularly likely to receive direct inspiration from supernatural agencies; and that certain rituals can bring about changes in the present world. The beads found at the burial site in Sungir, 150 miles east of Moscow and dated variously to 28000–25000 BP, strongly suggest that people did believe in an afterlife at that time, though we have no way of knowing how this ‘soul’ was configured. The remote caves spread across central and eastern Europe and decorated with so many splendid paintings, were surely centres of ritual (they were lit by primitive lamps, several examples of which have been found, burning moss wicks in animal fat). We have already encountered the caves of Les Trois Frères in Ariège in southern France, near the Spanish border, where there is what appears to be an upright human figure wearing a herbivore skin on its back, a horse’s tail and a set of antlers – in other words, a shaman (see figure 1 above). At the end of 2003 it was announced that several similar figures carved in mammoth ivory had been found in a cave near Shelklingen in the Jura mountains in Bavaria. These included a Löwenmensch, a ‘lion-person’, half-man, half-animal, dating to 33,000–31,000 years ago, and would appear to confirm that shamanism was the earliest form of magical or religious belief system. An image of a shaman at Les Trois Frères shows a horned shaman, in what appears to be a dancing pose, with two lines coming from his nose (figure 3). We shall see in a later chapter that shamans who take hallucinogenic snuff often excrete substances through their noses, substances which may be regarded as sacred. (This applies both to ancient peoples in the New World rainforests and the paintings of the present-day San people of South Africa.)1

  Fig. 3 ‘Dancing shaman’ with effluent extruding from his nose, c. 14000 BC. Les Trois Frères cave, Ariège, France. Compare figure 10.

  David Lewis-Williams, emeritus professor of cognitive archaeology at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, is convinced of the shamanistic nature of the first religions and believes they explain the layout of cave art. He puts together the idea that, with the emergence of language, early humans would have been able to share the experience of two and possibly three altered states of consciousness: dreams, drug-induced hallucinations, and trance. These, he says, would have convinced early humans that there was a ‘spirit world’ elsewhere, with caves – leading to a mysterious underworld – as the only practical location/entrance for this other world. He thinks that some of the lines and squiggles associated with cave art are what he calls ‘entoptic’, caused by people actually ‘seeing’ the structures of their brains (between the retina and the visual cortex) under the influence of drugs. No less important, he notes that many paintings and engravings in the caves make use of naturally occurring forms or features, suggesting, say, a horse’s head or a bison. This art, he suggests, was designed to ‘release’ the forms which were ‘imprisoned’ in the rock. By the same token, the ‘finger flutings’, marks made on the soft rock, and the famous hand prints, where early artisans used bone pipes to spray pigment around their outstretched hands, leaving a silhouette, were a kind of primitive ‘laying on of hands’, designed again to release the forms ‘locked’ in the rock.2

  He also notes a system of organisation in the caves. Probably, he thinks, the general population would have gathered at the mouth of the cave, the entrance to the underworld, perhaps using methods of symbolic representation that have been lost. Only a select few would have been allowed into the caves p
roper. In these main chambers Lewis-Williams reports that the ‘resonant’ ones have more images than the non-resonant ones, so there may have been a ‘musical’ element, either by tapping stalactites, or by means of primitive ‘flutes’, remains of which have been found, or drums.3

  Finally, the most inaccessible regions of the caves would have been accessed only by the shamans. Some of these areas have been shown to contain high concentrations of CO2, carbon dioxide, an atmosphere which may, in itself, have produced an altered state of consciousness. Either way, in these confined spaces, shamans would have sought their visions. Some drugs induce a sensation of pricking, or being stabbed, which fits with some of the images found in caves, where figures are covered in short lines. This, combined with the shamans’ need for a new persona every so often (as is confirmed today, among ‘Stone Age’ tribes) could be one of the origins of the idea of death and rebirth, and of sacrifice which, as we shall see, looms large in later religious beliefs.4

  THE PROMISE AND DANGERS OF BIRTH

  The widespread depiction of the female form in very early Palaeolithic art also needs some explanation and comment. These so-called ‘Venus figurines’ are found in a shallow arc stretching from France to Siberia, the majority of which belong to the Gravettian period – around 25,000 years ago. There has been, inevitably perhaps, much controversy about these figures. Many of them (but by no means all) are buxom, with large breasts and bellies, possibly indicating they are pregnant. Many (but not all) have distended vulvas, indicating they are about to give birth. Many (but not all) are naked. Many (but not all) lack faces but show elaborate coiffures. Many (but not all) are incomplete, lacking feet or arms, as if the creator had been intent on rendering only the sexual characteristics of these figures. Some (but not all) were originally covered in red ochre – was that meant to symbolise (menstrual) blood? Some figures have lines scored down the back of their thighs, perhaps indicating the breaking of the waters during the birth process.