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 thepace of technological change accelerated

Also created novel social and organizational problems

Their solutions required both new social relationships and largerand more complex social structures

Even the earliest forms of farming could support perhaps 50 to 100 times as manypeople 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 ofchanges 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 animalspecies they find most useful

But agriculture grooms so intensively that it eventually transforms favoredspecies through an early form of genetic engineering known as domestication

Domestication

A symbiotic process in which one species, instead of just preying on another, protectsthe second species and encourages its reproduction, so as to create a more reliablesource of food

While the predator gains more control over an important food source, the preyspecies finds a protector happy to ensure its survival and reproduction--at aprice

In human history, the genetic changes have occurred principally in the domesticatedspecies

The greater speed of cultural change explains why symbioses with humansdeveloped much faster than symbiotic relations between nonhumans

Domesticates can no longer survive without human support

Domesticated sheep are too slow and stupid tosurvive in the wild

Modern maize cannot reproduce without humanhelp

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 firmlyattached to the stem than those in wild varieties, because humans find it easiest tocollect (and therefore to replant) thick concentrations of seeds

The fattest, fruitiest, and earliest sprouting plants are also more likely to be selected byhumans for replanting

A dingo, the wild dog of Australia

The first species successfully domesticated was the wolf, but domesticated wolves didnot have the transformative impact of later domesticated species, for instead ofoffering 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--emmerwheat, einkorn wheat, and barley

The three cereals all seem to have been domesticated in the regionnear Jericho, between 11,500 and 10,700 BP, probably bycommunities 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 whenthey 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 diseaseand new forms of stress

Farmers have less varied diets than foragers in warm climates, so they aremore 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, andviruses 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 Ageforaging societies

All in all, the appearance of agriculture did more to depress standards of human welfarethan to raise them

(John Coatsworth) "Bioarchaeologists have linked the agricultural transition toa significant decline in nutrition and to increases in disease, mortality,

overwork, and violence in areas where skeletal remains make it possible tocompare human welfare before and after the change."

Why would one prefer a lifeway based on the painful cultivation, collection, andpreparation of a small variety of grass seeds, when it was so much easier to gatherplants 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 knowthey are using more intensive technologies, because to stay in one place forlong periods they have to to use its resources more intensively

Intensification of this kind becomes much more apparent early in the millennia after theend of the last ice age

In some form, intensification appears in all three world zones, and in all threeit led to a form of sedentism

Best known affluent foragers

The Natufian communities that appeared around 14,000 BP along the easternMediterranean 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 huntinggazelle 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 severalyears, their seeds would form stands of plants ready for consumption by latergenerations of foragers

Over time, those fruit that taste the best are most likely to be seeded aroundhuman campsites, while wild populations remain less "tasty"

Over time, such intensive manipulation of particular plantpopulations 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 ofcereals 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 asmuch as 3,000 years without causing the evolutionary leap from brittle to non-britleplants--why?

Unripe grain

Fallen grain

Selective pressure

Morter and pestle

Grinding stone

Women had tospend several hourseach day grindinggrain for bread orporridge

The repetitivemovements madewomen prone toarthritis in the lowerback as early astheir twenties

Climatic Change, Population Pressure, and Exchanges

In some regions, warming climates increased the availability of both plant and animalfoods

Where resources were particularly abundant, foraging communities may havebecome more settled, thereby perhaps taking a crucial step towardsagriculture

Population pressures encouraged individuals and groups to move to less denselysettled regions

The eventual result was that population pressure by the early Holocene "thatgroups throughout the world would be forced to adopt agriculture within a fewthousand years of one another."

Increase in interregional exchanges

Exchanges of valued goods between foraging communities may haveencouraged dense and perhaps even long-term settlement at the hubs ofregional 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 populationgrowth in less mobile communities

Neolithic "de-skilling"

Increased dependence on a small number of abundant and easily-harvestedfood sources reduced people's familiarity with the wide range of species andtechniques they had used when nomadic

The Trap of Sedentism

As the populations of sedentary communities increased, and as they became moredependent on a narrowing range of favored species and more skilled at raising theproductivity of these species, both the possibility and the desirability of returning tonomadic lifeways diminished

Eventually population growth was bound to outstrip the abundant naturalresources that had encouraged sedentism in the first place

Since the option of returning to more nomadic lifeway was no longer available,they had little choice but to intensify further, putting more effort into raising theproductivity of a few favored species

This decision constituted the final step to fully developed forms ofagriculture

Village Communities

At Abu Hureyra, the early farming village lay above a settlement used by the last huntergathers. Here a rectangular house built by the farmers has been cut through to revealthe circular dwellings of the hunter gatherers

More permanent dwellings

Who lives with whom? The nuclear familymay have acquired a sharper definitionwithin these villages

A clearer sense of family and village"property"

These people are also dependent on hunting gazelles, but they are only hunted for afew weeks each year as the migrations pass by, and have wild gardens

Attractive environmental conditions that persisted for thousands of years provided themwith abundant plants and animals and allowed them to give up their mobile lifestyle

[Mithin] "Why create the social tensions that inevitably arise when one haspermanent next-door neighbors within a village?Why expose oneself to human waste and garbage and the health risks thataccompany a more sedentary lifestyle?Why risk the depletion of the animals and plants near one's own village?"

Social life: intense communal life versus dull life in small, far-flunggroups

Drought of the Younger Dryas

Disrupts the gazelle migrations, decimates the productivity of the steppe

The village is abandoned

No longer enough food to go around

People begin to over-exploit the wild animals and plants around them

Evidence of declining health

The people return to hunting and gathering--but it is not so simple

Hierarchies or Equality?

In most respects, foraging societies have to be egalitarian

No stored surpluses to generate significant distinctions in wealth

Inequalities began to appear as soon as foragers became more sedentary

When people become mobile again, the differences in burials also disappears,suggesting differences in wealth and power also vanished

The entire early agrarian era may have been a period of relative equality between menand women and between different families

A clear division of labor by gender probably existed

But this does not necessarily imply systematic gender inequality

How the late Natufian people domesticated cereals, etc.

Brand-new plots of cereals, peas, and lentils were regularly sown andharvested

What is the difference? Geography?

Climate warms up again, the experiment in village life is taken up again

More than a thousand years later people return to Abu Hureyra, not as hunter-gatherers,

but as farmers

Main Theme: unintended consequences of unconscious actions

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Earliest evidence of agriculture in Near East

Earliest evidence of agriculture in Southeast Asia

Evidence of pastoralism in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan

Evidence of agriculture in Americas

First cities and city-states

First empires

First superempire (Persia)

Foundation of world religions

Foundation of largest pastoral empire '1 (Genghis Khan, ca, 1220 eEl JI Scale of

Timeline 11.1 Industrial Revolution

Timeline 8.:1. The history of agrarian societies and urban civilizations: 5,000 years.

7,000

6,000

V> c: ~ 5,000 g § 4,000 ~ :J&- 3,000

2nd millennium

2,000

1,000

01 10,000 9,000 8,000 7,000 6,000 5,000 4,000

Years before Present

3,000 2,000 77

1,000 0

Figure 8.2. Human populations, 10,000 BP to now. Based on table 6.2.