The Settled Life Timescale: The History of Agrarian Societies and Urban Civilizations, 5,000 Years The new farming culture literally transformed the surface of the earth The Holocene era begins ca. 11,500 years ago A threshold was crossed with a shift from extensive to intensive technologies Agriculture Stimulated population growth and encouraged humans to settle in the large, concentrated communities we call villages and towns Encouraged more exchange of ideas, stimulated collective learning so that the pace of technological change accelerated Also created novel social and organizational problems Their solutions required both new social relationships and larger and more complex social structures Even the earliest forms of farming could support perhaps 50 to 100 times as many people as foraging technologies could in a similar area Human Populations, 10,000 BP to Now 1930s The Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe proposed that this suite of changes be called the "Neolithic Revolution" The emergence of agriculture was revolutionary Today, archaeologists recognize these changes as gradual The Holocene Period of Human History
The End of the Last Ice Age All of recorded human history has taken place within the Holocene interglacial Climatic changes transformed landscapes and vegetation Regions of desert and tundra contracted, while forests expanded What Is Agriculture? Agriculturalists systematically groom the environment to favor those plant and animal species they find most useful But agriculture grooms so intensively that it eventually transforms favored species through an early form of genetic engineering known as domestication Domestication A symbiotic process in which one species, instead of just preying on another, protects the second species and encourages its reproduction, so as to create a more reliable source of food While the predator gains more control over an important food source, the prey species finds a protector happy to ensure its survival and reproduction--at a price In human history, the genetic changes have occurred principally in the domesticated species The greater speed of cultural change explains why symbioses with humans developed much faster than symbiotic relations between nonhumans Domesticates can no longer survive without human support
Domesticated sheep are too slow and stupid to survive in the wild Modern maize cannot reproduce without human help Humans remove animals and plants from genetic contact with wild populations Encourages rapid genetic changes Domesticated seed plants often have tight clusters of seeds that are more firmly attached to the stem than those in wild varieties, because humans find it easiest to collect (and therefore to replant) thick concentrations of seeds The fattest, fruitiest, and earliest sprouting plants are also more likely to be selected by humans for replanting A dingo, the wild dog of Australia The first species successfully domesticated was the wolf, but domesticated wolves did not have the transformative impact of later domesticated species, for instead of offering an alternative to foraging lifeway, they were used to help with the hunt Fertile Crescent
Plants domesticated Lentils, peas, chickpeas, bitter vetch, flax, and the cereals--emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, and barley The three cereals all seem to have been domesticated in the region near Jericho, between 11,500 and 10,700 BP, probably by communities that had once harvested them in the wild The Origins of Agriculture Agriculture did not spread from a single center It appeared, apparently independently, in many different regions of the world Many foraging communities have resisted adopting agricultural practices even when they knew about them Foragers saw agriculture as an option, but not an inevitability Evidence from skeletal remains shows that early agriculture bred new forms of disease and new forms of stress Farmers have less varied diets than foragers in warm climates, so they are more subject to periodic shortages Foragers can more easily switch to alternative sources of food Farmers are more subject to diseases carried by the rats, mice, bacteria, and viruses that flourish in moderately sedentary communities Disease bacteria easily spread from herd animals to humans Neolithic skeletons seem to be shorter, on average, than those of Stone Age foraging societies All in all, the appearance of agriculture did more to depress standards of human welfare than to raise them (John Coatsworth) "Bioarchaeologists have linked the agricultural transition to a significant decline in nutrition and to increases in disease, mortality,
overwork, and violence in areas where skeletal remains make it possible to compare human welfare before and after the change." Why would one prefer a lifeway based on the painful cultivation, collection, and preparation of a small variety of grass seeds, when it was so much easier to gather plants or animals that were more varied, larger, and easier to prepare? Cultural Preadaptations and Ecological Know-How Foragers knew many of the things farmers need to know Intensive, "affluent foragers" Whenever we see foraging communities becoming more sedentary, we know they are using more intensive technologies, because to stay in one place for long periods they have to to use its resources more intensively Intensification of this kind becomes much more apparent early in the millennia after the end of the last ice age In some form, intensification appears in all three world zones, and in all three it led to a form of sedentism Best known affluent foragers The Natufian communities that appeared around 14,000 BP along the eastern Mediterranean coast and survived for more than 2,000 years Wild cereals and acorns, lakeside resources such as fish, turtle, shellfish, and lake birds, and gazelle Remnant of a Natufian house
'Ain Mallaha, established around 12,500 BC First evidence of year-round dwelling--what is the evidence? Village at a juncture between thick woodland and forest steppe, likely to have a permanent water supply, suitable for hunting gazelle and providing edible plants Main work is still turning wild plants into food Dogs and other domesticated species Different villages, different jewelery 29,000-25,000 B.P. Sungir burial ( Homo sapiens ) Styles, trade
"Plant nurturing" Foragers might bring favored plant species back to base camps where, over several years, their seeds would form stands of plants ready for consumption by later generations of foragers Over time, those fruit that taste the best are most likely to be seeded around human campsites, while wild populations remain less "tasty" Over time, such intensive manipulation of particular plant populations can lead to significant genetic changes Wheat Sickle The ears of ripe wild grain shatter-why? Domestic grain "waits for the harvester?" There are always a few mutant, relatively non-brittle plants Two different methods of harvesting grain: (1) catching the grain with baskets,; (2) cutting the stalks with a sickle What is the difference? Hypothesis: the Natufians kept some grain and began to reseed the wild stands of cereals by scattering grain from a previous harvest What does this imply? What would happen over time (a great deal of time)? What would happen if the people stopped?
But the archaeological record tells us that the Natufians cut their grain with sickles for as much as 3,000 years without causing the evolutionary leap from brittle to non-britle plants--why? Unripe grain Fallen grain Selective pressure Morter and pestle Grinding stone Women had to spend several hours each day grinding grain for bread or porridge The repetitive movements made women prone to arthritis in the lower back as early as their twenties Climatic Change, Population Pressure, and Exchanges In some regions, warming climates increased the availability of both plant and animal foods Where resources were particularly abundant, foraging communities may have become more settled, thereby perhaps taking a crucial step towards agriculture Population pressures encouraged individuals and groups to move to less densely settled regions
The eventual result was that population pressure by the early Holocene "that groups throughout the world would be forced to adopt agriculture within a few thousand years of one another." Increase in interregional exchanges Exchanges of valued goods between foraging communities may have encouraged dense and perhaps even long-term settlement at the hubs of regional networks of exchange Population Growth, Intensification, and Specialization Mobile communities of foragers have good reasons to limit population growth But if they settle down, those limits to population growth can be relaxed Babies do not need to be carried so much Grain-based diets make it easier to wean children Birth intervals will shorten Females will reach puberty sooner All of these factors would have accelerated population growth in less mobile communities Neolithic "de-skilling" Increased dependence on a small number of abundant and easily-harvested food sources reduced people's familiarity with the wide range of species and techniques they had used when nomadic The Trap of Sedentism As the populations of sedentary communities increased, and as they became more dependent on a narrowing range of favored species and more skilled at raising the productivity of these species, both the possibility and the desirability of returning to nomadic lifeways diminished
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