Chapter 10 Outline

Introduction

• Early exploration of central highlands of Papua New Guinea brought the surprising discovery that their gardens were mostly growing sweet potatoes, a tuber which originated in South America, not Melanesia. Sweet potatoes were the staple food not just for all these people, but also for huge herds of domesticated pigs.
• How could such large populations in the center of New Guinea be cultivating huge areas with a crop that did not originate there? When and how did the changes enabled by sweet potato cultivation happen? This was the result of domestication: the process of converting wild plants and animals to human uses by taming animals or turning them into herds that can be raised for meat or milk or making plants able to be grown for food or other uses.
• The dominance of sweet potatoes in the central highlands of Papua New Guinea added a new dimension to an old debate among anthropologists about how, when, and why ancient humans, who lived by hunting and gathering, shifted to food production.
• In the 1920s the Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, who had studied this shift in the Middle East, described it as a revolution, the Neolithic: the “new” stone age when humans had begun growing crops and raising animals for food, using a stone-tool technology.
• At the time, this transformation was revolutionary because it allowed for population expansion and change in almost all aspects of society. The focus on the domestication of grains, which can be stored for long periods, was why it was a big surprise that tubers could also sustain such large populations.
•  The main problem with tubers is that, unlike grains, they tend to rot after a couple of weeks. But the New Guinea highlanders did store the tubers in the form of animal protein by feeding them to their large herds of pigs.
• Cultivation had a profound effect on how people lived. ranging from population growth and the ability to settle in one place to the development of sophisticated social hierarchies, agricultural systems, political systems, and the arts.
• These issues lead us to ask: How did raising plants and animals change the ways people lived in their environments? Embedded within this larger question are a number of smaller questions:
• How important was hunting to prehistoric people?
• Why did people start domesticating plants and animals?
• How did early humans raise their own food?
• What impact did raising plants and animals have on other aspects of life?

How Important Was Hunting to Prehistoric People?

• As explained in Chapter 6, anatomically modern humans, around for approximately 200,000 years, ate only what they could hunt, gather, or scavenge from the natural environment.
• Living hunter-gatherers offer archaeologists and anthropologists ideas and insights about early practices in these kinds of societies.
• In the nineteenth century, most of the world’s people had been growing their own food for at least a few thousand years. It was only in the remote deserts, rainforests, and polar regions that small bands of people practiced foraging: obtaining food by searching for it, as opposed to growing or raising the plants and animals people eat.
• The practice of growing or raising the plants and animals people eat—agriculture and animal husbandry—had not penetrated the regions inhabited by hunter-gatherers because the environment and climate were not suited to these activities.
• These environments were depicted as harsh, and their inhabitants’ technologies as simple and their ways of life as crude and brutish which became the basis for deeply held cultural stereotypes rooted in urban European and American world views.
• None of these early perspectives reflect the perspectives of the desert-dwelling Australian Aboriginals and the people of the Kalahari desert.
• They assumed these people, who still hunted in the arctic or the deserts, represented examples of the most primitive human societies and therefore resembled the human ancestors of contemporary peoples living in Europe, the Middle East, India, and China who evolved into more complex and sophisticated forms.
• How difficult was it for early hunter-gatherers to get their food? And how similar were contemporary hunter-gatherers to their prehistoric ancestors? These questions spurred the debate leading to an international gathering of anthropologists and archaeologists titled “Man the Hunter.”
• The dominant anthropological model of these societies in the decades before the conference held that hunter-gatherers live in patrilocal bands: small groups where men controlled resources and hunting territories.
• The assumptions included three key features:
• Hunting was an activity principally undertaken by men.
• Hunting was more important than gathering.
• Men’s subsistence activities were more significant than women’s.
• The outcome of the conference was a resounding rejection of the old male-dominated model. A key revelation in toppling this old view was the consensus among participants that hunting was not the defining feature of these societies but in fact were based on women’s subsistence activities.
• Participants offered what has come to be known as the generalized foraging model: a model asserting that hunter-gatherer societies have five basic characteristics.
• The five characteristics included egalitarianism, low population density, lack of territoriality, a minimum of food storage and flux in band composition.
• Also challenged was the notion that hunter-gatherer lives were harsh when in fact, they were examples of the “original affluent society”. Previous assumptions claimed that a hunting-gathering lifestyle was so difficult and precarious that people had to work long hours and had no time to develop elaborate cultural artifacts. This image was rejected by pointing out that hunter-gatherers worked only a few hours a week.
• Ethnographic data supported the view that hunter-gatherers had more than enough food resources available to them. Most people in a foraging band spent many hours each day in leisure activities, socializing, or sleeping. Their nomadic life style meant that they neither needed nor desired material goods. It was also noted that hunter-gatherers did not view their natural environments as scarce and harsh, but as affluent and always providing for their needs.
• More recent research has shown that there is considerable variation among hunter-gatherer groups. Women spend as much time working as men do.
• Recent analyses suggest that in most horticultural and agricultural societies, women’s effort is typically greater than that of men.
• This view of hunter-gatherers raises an interesting question: if they could procure sufficient food with just a few hours of labor each day, why did they not spend an extra hour each day to amass a surplus?
• Anthropologists have suggested two answers to this question:
• Lorna Marshall noted that the !Kung women she observed only gathered as much as they needed for their own families because a surplus meant they would be expected to share it with the entire band. If her labor would not help her family, collecting too much was intentionally avoided. The key feature of this explanation is that among many hunter-gatherer communities, people place great emphasis on sharing as a moral obligation.
• Bruce Winterhalder showed that even if only a few members of the band harvested more than they needed on a regular basis, their actions could threaten the survival of the entire community due to depletion of local resources needed by everyone. Winterhalder and Eric Smith, developed a model they called the optimal foraging strategy, which suggests that people capture just enough calories from the environment as they need to survive comfortably. Any additional calories would, over time, stress the resources of the area and threaten the survival of the community.
• In fact, not all societies using hunting and gathering as their subsistence strategy avoided accumulating surpluses, as the examples of the Indian communities of the Pacific Northwest demonstrate.
• These peoples amassed large surpluses above their subsistence needs. Fish and other valuable objects were given away or sometimes destroyed in competitive exchanges called potlatches: Opulent ceremonial feasts intended to display wealth and social status by giving away or destroying valuable possessions like carved copper plates, button blankets, and baskets of food. These were characteristic of the communities on the Northwest coast of North America.
• The goal of these gift exchanges was not to provide food or material goods to other groups, but to assert political, economic, and social superiority by giving away more than the recipients could pay back at some later potlatch.
• While the large number of ethnographic studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers offers many insights about life under these non-agricultural conditions, we must ask: do these societies represent the actual lifestyles of our prehistoric ancestors during Paleolithic times?
• Clearly, contemporary hunter-gatherers are not identical to prehistoric communities. In almost every contemporary case, hunter- gatherers are linked to sedentary agricultural and industrial societies through trade and other social ties, which would obviously not have been the case before the development of agriculture.
• However, some contemporary groups do have features that are important for archaeological understanding of prehistoric hunter-gatherers.
• First is the fact that hunting and gathering can occur in a variety of forms, with hunting and fishing making up as much as 100 percent of the diet or as little as 10 percent, while foraging makes up the rest.
• Secondly, our anthropological models of the typical hunter-gatherers have changed. Before the “Man the Hunter” conference, these societies were seen as male-dominated and focused almost solely on hunting. After the conference, they were seen principally as egalitarian foragers, relying primarily on plant foods, where women’s roles are equal in importance to those of men.
• What emerges from this discussion is one of the biggest questions of all: what led people to shift from a foraging lifestyle in the first place?

Why Did People Start Domesticating Plants And Animals?

• Sometime in the past ten thousand years, ancient societies developed more or less independently in the Middle East, China, India, Meso-America, and South America. One common feature among these societies was that at some point the people who created them abandoned their hunting and gathering lifestyles in favor of regular food production that involved some sort of horticulture, farming, or herding. Why?
• It is not because hunter-gatherers suddenly “discovered” how to plant seeds, nor is it because they abruptly learned that by feeding certain wild animals they could control their behavior.
• Simple agriculture emerged in many different locations worldwide at very similar times:
• The Fertile Crescent of Middle East about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, with similar forms emerging in the Indus valley at roughly the same period.
• Chinese development of simple rice agriculture emerge in the same period, almost certainly independent of the other two.
• In the New World, cultivation emerged somewhat later and was characterized by maize: the indigenous species of corn that was first domesticated in Mexico—the term is often used for any variety of corn, since all current varieties are thought to have been derived from this early version of so-called Indian corn.
•  The Peruvian potato was being cultivated by at least 8,000 years ago.
• The various tubers of the New Guinea highlands noted earlier were being raised in small fields drained by ditches 10,000 years ago.
• No matter what the cultigen (any plant that is intentionally grown for human use), humans across the globe were beginning to cultivate useful plants almost simultaneously, suggesting that the knowledge of plants long preceded systematic cultivation.
• What seems lacking until roughly 10,000 years ago was some reason to grow one’s own food. Why did hunter-gatherers shift to agriculture? Theories range from the influence of certain geographic features to the growth of populations.
• V. Gordon Childe was the first to recognize that the shift from hunting and gathering to food production had significant consequences for the development of more sophisticated technologies, larger populations, and more complex forms of social organization— including the formation of cities, state governments, and social hierarchies.
• See “Classic Contributions: V. Gordon Child on the Neolithic Revolution”
• For Childe, food production was not a single event but a process that set into motion a variety of changes, each of which encouraged other socioeconomic, political, and technological changes. He favored the notion that food production arose around oases in the Mesopotamian lowlands.
• While Childe was correct that food production was associated with other social changes, he did not understand what actually led hunters and gathers to begin producing their own food, and some questioned his oasis hypothesis.
• The first evidence of early humans actively and intentionally planting seeds for their own food comes from excavations in the Middle East in what has come to be known as the “Fertile Crescent.” Here we find the beginnings of sedentary lifestyles, and archaeological evidence that early humans were transforming the foods they ate.
• American archaeologist Robert J. Braidwood noted that few of the plants first cultivated in the Fertile Crescent were indigenous to the lowland plains. He reasoned that the upland fringes of the Fertile Crescent were the natural habitat of these prehistorically cultivated species. There, on the so-called “hilly flanks”, not only were the necessary cultigens present, but environmental conditions were conducive to cultivation. Braidwood hypothesized that once certain plants had been domesticated in the uplands, their use for food spread to neighboring groups in the lowlands, where population growth, cities, and states eventually emerged.
• While this analysis suggested where people were starting to domesticate plants and animals in the Middle East, what they were domesticating, and why domestication began in these areas, it did not explain why people started to produce their own food when they did rather than a few thousand years earlier or later.
• Esther Boserup developed a model to explain why some societies with simple economies had not taken up intensive agricultural activities, noting that it requires hard labor, and focused on the issue of population growth as a possible motivator.
• Boserup examined the relationship between population growth and food production challenging the assumptions of Robert Malthus, who had argued that the supply of food available to any community was inelastic.
• For Malthus, population growth depended on the food supply, and societies that had small populations were limited by the food available to them.
• Boserup argued instead that population growth forced people to work harder to produce more food, citing evidence from Asian countries like India, Japan, and Indonesia, which during the nineteenth century had experienced rapid population growth at the same time they increased their food production.
• She argued that similar processes of population growth had triggered technological improvements and increased labor inputs throughout recorded history.
• Her argument’s relevance to the Neolithic Revolution was this: if hunter-gatherers already understood how plants grow, even a small increase in population could have been enough to encourage them to manage their own food resources.
• If incipient food production supported the existing population plus a small amount of further population growth, population pressure would encourage people to further intensify food production.
• Others built on Boserup’s model.
• Mark Cohen argued that after the end of the last ice age, environmental conditions stabilized and improved, allowing a small but gradual population increase, with the domestication of animals emerging only when populations of wild game declined.
• Lewis Binford and Kent Flannery suggested that the post-glacial populations increased in coastal areas that had favorable wild resources for fisher-foraging groups. Population growth pressured some coastal residents to move away from these resource-rich coastal areas into less favorable environments situated along the “hilly flanks” of the Fertile Crescent, with less reliable wild resources. Cultivation was an obvious way to control uncertain food supplies. Thus, food production did not begin where resources were most plentiful or most scarce, but in environmental zones that were less predictable.
• Beyond population pressure, two other kinds of theories have been offered.
• First, if food production began in diverse parts of the world almost simultaneously, then it likely had to do in part with the more habitable environment following the last ice age. Which or which combination of changing conditions prompted food production is unclear, but this early phase of global warming was felt everywhere.
• A second family of theories suggests that social processes were key to the beginning of food production due to changes in cognitive ability that allowed them to perceive some longer-term advantages that came with regular food production.
• A third theory comes from a neoevolutionary symbiosis model suggesting that irrespective of why people in one region or another began cultivating plants, the people and the plants they began cultivating began to evolve together. Once people started planting crops, the plants began domesticating the people, which also happens in a similar process in animal husbandry.
• These are the major theories about why humans made the shift from foraging to agriculture. Now we can address the how of the actual transition.

How Did Early Humans Raise Their Own Food?

• Hunter-gatherers and their ancestors have an extraordinary knowledge of their natural environment, knowing where to find foods, when they ripen and become edible, that seeds grow into mature plants and that birds and game animals deposit seeds on the soil in feces, which then sprout and grow.
• This information was the result of careful observation made in their daily lives.
• Successful hunters of game know where animals ate or drank, and have an understanding of animal behavior.
• It is highly likely that our human ancestors knew some or all of these things for hundreds of thousands of years, if not even longer. People put this knowledge to work.
• Almost immediately after humans started consciously planting wild grains from locally occurring grasses, the edible seeds became larger than their wild cousins. By tending and planting wild grass seeds, early humans were selecting the best seeds, rapidly improving the planting stock in subsequent seasons.
• This selection process is evidenced in the Americas with early varieties of maize, and to a lesser extent in the domestication of tubers in the New Guinea Highlands.
• Humans did not just domesticate plants for food, but have also domesticated plants for other uses, such as fiber-bearing plants for basket-making.
• Similar processes occurred with domesticated animals as they did with plants: selective breeding to favor certain qualities, such as to increase size or to favor certain other qualities and characteristics like docility, protectiveness, and appearance.
• While domestication of animals cannot happen in all species, among many it is possible to a large extent. Domesticating animals is not necessarily an all or nothing proposition. We can see examples of semi-domestication in Papua New Guinea today among the Ningerum people with feral piglets.
• Raising animals is also an especially useful practice for people who have domesticated plants. Animal dung can be used as fertilizer to nurture the crops, and some animals, such as oxen, horses, and mules can help till the soil.
• Archaeologists and anthropologists are examining how humans may have begun manipulating their food sources in more subtle and less comprehensive ways than with wheat, barley, and maize.
• Archaeologist Kyle Latinis suggests that arboriculture, or planting and tending tree crops whose fruits are edible, occurred much earlier than domestication of other crops in Southeast Asia. Trees last a long time and are easily tended. Such activity takes little time or energy and yet has considerable impact on the productivity of the tree or the size of its fruit.
• Modest tending of sago palms, for example, can even increase the amount of starch produced by the palm, doubling or even tripling the starch content as well as speeding up the maturation process.
• See “Anthropologist as problem solver: Michael Heckenberger on the Amazon as a Culturally-Managed Landscape”
• It is likely that the earliest efforts to manipulate plants came with the tending of useful trees. Once people began to plant seeds, roots, or cuttings, the improvements in the seeds or tubers would have been obvious because by choosing the best planting stock they would have selected for the best varieties.
• Such modest manipulations would be difficult to detect in the archaeological record, though modifications would leave an impact on the productivity of a crop long-term.
• The management or modification of the environment shapes the environment and the ways people live in that environment, including human lifeways.

What Impact Did Raising Plants And Animals Have On Other Aspects Of Life?

• While we do know that the Neolithic Revolution happened over time in a series of “small revolutions”, it is likely that first efforts to raise food changed people relatively little.
• Hunter-gatherer groups ranging across large territories in search of food planted and harvested plants during the annual movements within their territory in much the same way they did with naturally occurring plants.
• Herding may have brought a greater change in people’s way of life, because livestock always need new food from new fields in which to graze or forage.
• As the number of livestock increased, the needs of the animals may have led some food producers to turn to transhumance: the practice of moving herds to different fields or pastures with the changing seasons.
• Transhumance is a fairly simple transformation of the nomadic lifestyle of hunter-gatherers. Instead of moving from one territory to another to hunt game, a family moves itself and its livestock from one set of pastures to another to take advantage of seasonal changes.
• This led to societies that practice pastoralism: the practice of animal husbandry, which is the breeding, care, and use of domesticated herding animals such as cattle, camels, goats, horses, Llamas, reindeer, and yaks.
• Raising herds of livestock is a key component of such a group’s subsistence economy and does not necessarily require people to settle in one place.
• Pastoralism tends to lead to larger populations and much more complex patterns of social interaction that resemble what has typically happened whenever humans become sedentary.
• Pastoralists are relatively few in number worldwide. Most people in the world are settled, living from agriculture, either directly or indirectly.
• The most significant changes that accompany food production are largely the combined result of population growth and sedentism: or year-round settlement in a particular place.
• A number of hunter-gatherer-forager groups seem to have established year round lakeside or seaside settlements during the Mesolithic: period from the end of the last ice age until the beginning of agriculture or horticulture.
• Once people started settling down to tend crops, populations grew, leading gradually to greater intensification of food production. Larger communities required more labor for food production, typically resulting in periodic shortages of food because of the growing population. These shortages in turn led to what we might call true agriculture.
• The most striking aspect of sedentism is that with population growth it tends to lead to permanent social inequality, one of the characteristics commonly associated with the rise of early cities and the emergence of state-like political formations.
• The shift to sedentism also brought with it a change from relying on a large variety of plants and animals typical of hunting and gathering to relying on a small number of plant species. Indeed, the more intensive the horticulture or agriculture, the smaller the list of cultigens becomes.
• In horticultural communities where people typically plant mixed gardens with 15 to 30 species of plant cultigens, and most people eat fewer than a dozen species of plants on a regular basis and have access to animal protein only sporadically.
• Sedentism and population growth also have an impact on people’s health. Larger numbers of people living together allow certain bacteria, viruses, and parasites to move from one host to another more easily, making it easy to spread quickly in the form of epidemics throughout a population.

Conclusion

• The Neolithic Revolution was not a single event occurring during one span of years, but many events in many parts of the world at different times, each with its own unique features.
• Cultivation and animal husbandry typically led to sedentism and the production of food surpluses as well as new ways of storing grains and other crops. Since people were not always on the move, they did not need to limit the food they acquired, as they did when they collected everything they ate. Growing population pressures together with the ability to amass surpluses led to radical, new ways for groups to interact.
• Taken all together, this led to other developments, most notably the rise of cities, the formation of states, and introduction of social hierarchies with essentially permanent patterns of social inequality.