The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  The central drama of Genesis, however, is of course that Eve acts on the serpent’s advice and induces Adam so that they both eat from the Tree of Knowledge, after which they discover that they are naked. This is incomprehensible unless we acknowledge that both ‘knowledge’ and nakedness here refer to sexuality, or sexual awareness in some form. And indeed, as the biblical scholar Elaine Pagels tells us, the Hebrew verb ‘to know’ (‘yada) ‘connotes sexual intercourse’. (As in ‘He knew his wife.’)29 What can this link between knowledge and nakedness mean other than that they become aware of their bodies, how they differ, how and why that difference matters, and that the knowledge they now have is of how sexual reproduction works? This knowledge is shocking and moving because it shows that reproduction is ‘natural’; humans are not made by some miraculous divine force but by sexual intercourse. This is why it is felt as a Fall.

  There are other clues to this change once we look for them. As Potts and Short again observe, hunter-gatherers are polygynous,30 but it is now, Elaine Pagels says, that marriage becomes monogamous and ‘indissoluble’.31 People understood the nature of paternity for the first time and it became important to them. It also becomes relevant, as again Elaine Pagels points out, that in Genesis iii:16, the text reads: ‘To the woman he [God] said, “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.”’* Elsewhere, Adam and Eve are given ‘dominion’ over the animals.32 Their naming of the animals was clear proof of the authority God had given them over other creatures.33

  Are we not seeing here a mythical account of the transition from hunter-gathering to farming and some of its associated implications? More than that, is it not accompanied by an attitude that is not entirely at variance with modern scholarship: that the transition was not wholly good, that harmony with nature had been lost and that even childbirth had become more painful and dangerous? (In addition to the changes in the dimensions of the birth canal, other contemporary research has shown that birth intervals of fewer than four years are more perilous than longer intervals. Although people at that time did not have the advantage of modern science, they were a lot nearer the event itself, and in a better position to note the changes that were occurring.)34

  Genesis does not ‘date’ when humanity linked sex and birth, not directly, but it does associate the link with the transition to farming. Therefore, is Genesis, and the Fall it records, really reporting a very great, shocking breakthrough that humanity made around 12,000– 10,000 years ago, that coitus and gestation are related? Is that why animal domestication followed plant domestication by about a thousand years, because the link was only then made? Timothy Taylor, in The Prehistory of Sex, reports that around that time, among the Inuit of Alaska, they had what archaeologist Lewis Binford recognised as ‘lovers’ camps’ – places where new couples could ‘get away from it all’ to cement their relationships.35 Does this reflect a new understanding? Taylor also makes the point that, around 10,000 years ago, the caves where the Ice Age art proliferated, also seem to have been forgotten.36 Whatever was going on was pretty important. Venus figurines were no longer needed, cave art was no longer needed. Mammal reproduction was understood and domestication was in place.

  These are tentative arguments but their main strength lies in the consistent picture they paint. Around 12,000–10,000 years ago, as well as a transition to sedentism, urbanism and domestication, people discovered the link between coitus and birth and this produced a seminal change in attitudes to ancestry, the male role, monogamy, children, privacy, property – it was above all a momentous psychological change as much as anything else and that is why it was recorded, in coded form, in Genesis.

  All this modifies but in effect amplifies Cauvin’s second general point – over and above the fact that recognisable religion as we know it emerged in the Levant around 9500 BC – namely, that these changes took place after cultivation and sedentism had begun, but before domestication/agriculture proper. The radical change in mentality and lifestyle took a while to complete itself.

  Cauvin’s central point, then (and there are others who share his general view), is that the development of domestication was not a sudden event owing to penury, or some other economic threat. Instead, sedentism long preceded domestication, with bricks and symbolic artefacts already being produced. From this, he says, we may infer that early humans, roughly 12000–8000 BC, underwent a profound psychological/ideological change, essentially a religious revolution, and that this accompanied the domestication of animals and plants. This religious revolution, Cauvin says, is essentially the change from animal or spirit worship, shamanism, to the worship of something that is essentially what we recognise today. That is to say, the human female goddess is worshipped as a supreme being. He points to carvings of this period in which the ‘faithful’ have their arms raised, as if in prayer or supplication. For the first time, he says, there is ‘an entirely new relationship of subordination between god and man’. From now on, says Cauvin, there is a divine force in the Old World, with the gods ‘above’ and everyday humanity ‘below’.37

  On this reading, the all-important innovation was the cultivation of wild species of cereals that grew in abundance in the Levant and allowed sedentism to occur. It was sedentism which allowed the interval between births to be reduced, boosting population, as a result of which villages grew, social organisation became more complicated and, perhaps, a new concept of religion was invented, which in some ways reflected the village situation, where leaders and subordinates would have emerged. Once these changes were set in train, domesticated plants at least would have developed almost unconsciously as people ‘selected’ wild cereals which were amenable to this new lifestyle.

  It was sedentism that allowed closer observation of the behaviour of the dog, leading to an understanding of mammal reproduction, which changed attitudes to marriage, property, ancestorship, and brought with it the understanding to domesticate other herding animals.

  These early cultures, with the newly domesticated plants and animals, are generally known as Neolithic and this practice spread steadily, first throughout the Fertile Crescent, then further, to Anatolia and then Europe in the west, and to Iran and the Caucasus in the east, gradually, as we shall see, extending across all of the Old World.

  The shift to sedentism, and then to agriculture, and to worship of the Goddess and the Bull, were momentous changes, and they were, of course, linked. The Goddess, as a fertility symbol – fertility in its human, animal and vegetal contexts – emerged not only with the change to sedentism but also as the monsoon began to weaken and the fertility of the land became ever more problematic and people and cattle lived in closer contiguity. Despite this, it is as well to remember that, in the Old World, the symbols of fertility were not just plants but animals, mammals, the Goddess and the Bull. Just as the relationship between people and cattle, sheep, goats and horses, was a move beyond their links to mammoth, rhinoceros and reindeer, so the worship of the Goddess and the Bull was a half-way house, a move beyond ‘raw shamanism’ that reflected the developing understanding of fertility and that animal fertility was easier to understand than vegetal fertility. Nor should we forget Cauvin’s other point, that bull worship was worship of his power, symbolic of the hostile forces of nature. The hostile forces of nature – earthquakes, storms, eruptions, tsunamis – are in fact more destructive of sedentary communities, who have more to lose, than they were of hunter-gatherer communities, who by definition are always moving on.

  Cauvin, then, was right by and large. Sedentism and the domestication of plants and animals brought with them a significant move beyond shamanism – divinities involving the human form were a conceptual breakthrough that would have momentous consequences. The bull interests us too, of course, because it didn’t exist in the New World and was therefore not available to be worshipped there as a god.

  More than that, since neither the bull nor most of the other domesticated large mammals of the Old World existed in the
Americas, the interaction of domesticated mammals and plants could not exist in the New World either. And it was this interaction which produced what was to be the single most important difference between the two hemispheres: the form of existence known as pastoral nomadism.

  • 8 •

  PLOUGHING, DRIVING, MILKING, RIDING: FOUR THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPENED IN THE NEW WORLD

  The four activities that make up the main title of this chapter are chosen precisely because they are all activities common enough in the ancient Old World but which did not exist in the New. Together, they comprise a way of life that shaped developments in Eurasia – both practical, technological and economic developments and ideological and political developments as well.

  BEYOND HUMAN MUSCLE: THE ‘SECONDARY PRODUCTS REVOLUTION’

  As, again, Andrew Sherratt has commented, cultivation alone, without the use of domestic mammals, was able to sustain complex urban societies (as in the New World) but he goes on to say this: ‘It is not without significance that the next threshold, that of industrialisation, was attained only in the Old World, for the employment of animal power as the first stage in the successive harnessing of increasingly powerful sources of energy beyond that of human muscle was only possible where these animals were domestic, not wild.’1 In other words, the real difference made by these (usually large) domesticated mammals lay less in them being sources of meat, as they had been to begin with, and more in their ‘emergent properties’.

  Sherratt’s most cited paper is ‘Plough and Pastoralism’, in which he identified what he called the ‘secondary products revolution’, following the invention of agriculture. For him, the next most important development was the ways in which domesticated animals interacted with domesticated plants. The world has 148 species of large herbivores or omnivorous mammals, candidates for domestication. Seventy-two of these are in Eurasia, of which thirteen were domesticated; fifty-one are in sub-Saharan Africa, of which none was domesticated; twenty-four are in the Americas, of which one, the llama, was domesticated; and there is one in Australia, which remained wild.2

  Of particular importance here was the plough, representing the first application of animal power to agriculture. Not long after came the cart, which allowed agriculture to be intensified and aided the transport of its product. The cart, even more than the plough, allowed surplus goods (milk, plus wool and cheese which did not deteriorate anywhere near as quickly as milk) to be traded far and wide. Not only did the Old World have the power of domesticated animals that the New World lacked, but it had products from those domesticated mammals that did not require them to be slaughtered. Live animals were valuable, more valuable than animals that were kept in order to be sacrificed. This too would, in time, have significant ideological/religious consequences.

  These developments didn’t happen straight away, with the birth of agriculture, but took several thousand years to emerge. In fact, the secondary products revolution took place, generally speaking, in the fourth millennium BC, at much the same time, significantly, as the emergence of civilisation. But the New World went without all this.

  The plough, for instance, made possible the cultivation of what had hitherto been regarded as poor-quality soils, resulting in the colonisation of wider areas that had not been cultivable before. The bulk transport offered by carts helped here too for it meant that ever more difficult land, hilly land for example, could be grazed by sheep, and the wool that was produced more easily transported to markets than before. More and more marginal land could be exploited, encouraging the pastoral sector, transhumance and even nomadism. None of these forms of subsistence – in particular plough-using agriculturalists and pastoralists – was available in the New World. In the Old World these two systems often went side-by-side, sometimes symbiotically, and sometimes in open conflict – they constitute an element in Old World history that is absent in the Americas. As we shall see, repeatedly, the conflict between pastoral nomads and sedentary peoples, was one of the main motors shaping Old World history. Not the least of the differences between plough agriculturalists and the pastoralists is their systems of heredity.

  Besides allowing more marginal land to be cultivated, the plough encouraged ‘broadcast’ seeding, whole fields given over to one foodstuff, as against the New World gardens, cultivated by small digging sticks. Broadcast seeding allowed greater surpluses to be built up, more wealth to be amassed, facilitating the emergence of civilisations benefiting from non-food-producing specialists of one kind and another.

  The ‘secondary products revolution’, Sherratt concluded, separated two stages in the development of Old World agriculture: an initial stage of hoe cultivation, based on human muscle-power, in which animals were kept purely for meat; and a second stage of plough agriculture and pastoralism, using animal sources of energy. It was these secondary products, he says, that marked the birth of the kinds of society that were to develop in Eurasia.

  THE TRACTION COMPLEX AND THE RISE OF MILK AND WOOL

  Cattle were fully domesticated by the sixth millennium BC but were not used as traction animals until the later fourth millennium. After that, cattle and carts spread as a closely related ‘traction complex’.3 (This spread is deduced partly from the dating of models made in clay, in the Harappan culture in the third millennium BC, and in China in the second, though the spread of carts across Asia was also associated with the domestication of the horse – see below.) Sherratt further concluded that the occurrence of model wheels in New World contexts shows that the principle was known but also that, since they were not used in transport, the (un)availability of draught animals was the critical factor in this technology.4

  The spread of the plough closely mirrored that of the cart, which both seem to have been first used ‘somewhere in northern Mesopotamia’ in the early fourth millennium BC. It was the plough which created an interest among early peoples in metallurgy.

  It was also in the fourth millennium that another four or five species of animals were domesticated which, though hunted in earlier times, had, says Sherratt, not been economical to domesticate. Furthermore, this group could be used not only as pack animals, or draught animals, but also could be ridden – these were the equids and the camels. There were/are four main groups of equid: zebras in sub-Saharan Africa, asses in North Africa, half-asses (hemiones) or onagers in the Near East and true horses in Eurasia.5 The horse’s main habitat was the steppe belt from the Ukraine to Mongolia and it was first domesticated by the sedentary cattle-keeping but non-agricultural communities of the middle Dnepr. The keeping of horses began there and spread out in the middle of the fourth millennium, once again when the traction complex was spreading. Domesticated horses spread slowly into forested Europe but also south where riders on horseback begin to be shown on terracottas of the Old Babylonian period.6 The onager was less easy to domesticate and is often shown muzzled in illustrations of this period. The horse gradually replaced the onager as a traction animal and propelled further changes in technology such as the horse bit and spoked wheels, around 2000 BC. This would eventually lead to the chariot, the very great significance of which is considered later.7

  The ass or donkey was domesticated at much the same time, its natural range being from Algeria to Sinai. Its advantage over other equids is its docility and its low dietary intake, making it a far more economical animal. Another advantage here was the discovery of what became known as ‘hybrid vigour’, that asses crossed with horses produce the mule, an infertile intra-specific hybrid that was, however, more vigorous than either parent species, and was used for the longer, more arduous overland trade networks.8

  The camel, as is well known, falls into two regional populations which were probably domesticated independently. The woolly, two-humped ‘Bactrian’ camel is adapted to the cooler steppe and mountain fringes of Eurasia, while the single-humped ‘Arabian’ camel is more suited to the more arid regions of Arabia and North Africa. The camel can carry twice as much as a donkey, is faster, and needs less frequ
ent feeding and watering. The two-humped variety was part of the traction complex from the third millennium on.

  These five independent but parallel episodes of domestication took place in the fourth millennium in adjoining zones, so that a ‘transportation complex’ arose across a wide area, with varied conditions stretching from western Europe to Mongolia – Sherratt calls this a revolution in transport.9 The Old World, therefore, was connected – in trade, in the movement of goods, people and ideas – in a way that the New World never was.

  But more than transport was involved. First there came milk (or possibly, before that, blood). The breakthrough here was that the products of domesticated animals could nourish populations without the necessity of killing the creatures, conserving resources. The attraction of milk is that it contains an amino acid, lysine, which is absent in cereal diets, and it also contains fat, protein and sugar, not to mention calcium. On top of that it can be converted into a number of storable products, such as cheese, butter and yoghurt.

  However, it is now known that most of the world (Mongoloid peoples, New World peoples, Melanesian, Australoid, Khoisan, many Negroid peoples, and about half the inhabitants of Mediterranean countries) cannot digest lactose, the disaccharide that is synthesised only in the mammary gland, and the theory has lately been advanced that ‘lactose tolerance’, as it is known, evolved only recently in northern Europe as a way for those peoples to assimilate vitamin d, otherwise available to more southerly peoples in sunlight, and which, via calcium, helped to prevent rickets. The adoption of milk-drinking is believed to be shown from the changing shapes of pottery, in which open bowls are gradually replaced by pouring vessels. They may have had some sort of ritual use too, since the production of koumish, an intoxicating fermentation milk product, also emerged at this time.10