Topic: The Rise and Collapse of the Bronze Age: 3000-1000 BCE

Before the Agricultural Revolutions

OLD STONE AGE (2 millions years – 14,000 years ago)

Although the rise of humankind has been impressively rapid, its early stages can also be viewed as painfully long and slow. Most of the 2 million plus years during which our species have existed are described by the term Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age. Throughout this long-time span (which runs until about 14,000 years ago) human being learned only simple tool use, mainly through employing suitably shaped rocks and sticks for hunting and warfare.

People who hunted food and gathered nuts and berries could not support large numbers or elaborate societies. Most hunting groups were small, and they had to roam widely for food. Two people required at least one square mile for survival. Population growth was slow, partly because women breast-fed infants for several years to limit their own fertility. On the other hand, people did not have to work very hard—hunting took about seven hours every three days on average. Women, who gathered fruits and vegetables, worked harder, but there was significant equality between the sexes based on common economic contributions.

Paleolithic people gradually improved their tool use, beginning with the crude shaping of stone and wooden implements. The development of speech allowed more group cooperation and the transmission of technical knowledge. By the later Paleolithic period, people had developed rituals to lessen the fear of death and created cave paintings to express a sense of nature’s beauty and power. Goddesses often played a prominent role in the religious pantheon. Thus, the human species came to develop systems of belief that helped explain the environment and set up rules for various kinds of social behavior.

The development of speech provided rich language and symbols for the transmission of culture and its growing sophistication. At the same time, different groups of humans, in different locations, developed quite varied belief systems and languages.

MIDDLE STONE AGE (12,000-8000 BC)

Roughly 14,000 years ago—the last great ice age ended, which did wonders for living conditions over much of the Northern Hemisphere. Human development began to accelerate. A new term, Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age designates a span of several thousand years, from about 12,000 to 8000 BC in which human ability to fashion stone tools and other implements improved greatly.

People learned to sharpen and shape stone, to make better weapons and cutting edges. Animal bones were used to make needles and other precise tools. From the Mesolithic also date the increased number of log rafts and dugouts, which improved fishing, and the manufacture of pots and baskets for food storage. Mesolithic people domesticated additional animals, such as cows (dogs had been tamed earlier), which again improved food supply. Population growth accelerated, which also resulted in more conflicts and wars. Skeletons from this period show frequent bone breaks and skull fractures caused by weapons.

In time, better tool use, somewhat more elaborate social organization, and still more population pressure led people in many parts of the world to the final Stone Age—the Neolithic, or NEW STONE AGE . And from Neolithic people, in turn, came several more dramatic developments that changed the nature of human existence—the invention of agriculture, the creation of cities, and other characteristics of civilization, which ended the Stone Age altogether throughout much of the world.

· Most researchers agree that humans made the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural or pastoralist economies because the global warming of the Holocene period (beginning 9000 BCE) brought with its environmental changes that reduced the supplies of game and wild food plants.

· The agricultural revolutions brought about a significant increase in the world’s human population—from 10 million in 5000 BCE to between 50 and 100 million in 1000 BCE.

THE AGRICULTURE REVOLUTIONS

THE NEOLITHIC REVOLUTION (THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTIONS)

It was the invention of agriculture that most clearly moved the human species toward more elaborate social and cultural patterns that people today would recognize. With agriculture, human beings were able to settle in one place and focus on particular economic, political, and religious goals and activities. Agriculture also spawned a great increase in the sheer number of people in the world, a tenfold increase over several millennia.

There is evidence that by 9000 BC, in certain parts of the world, people were becoming increasingly dependent on regular harvests of wild grains, berries, and nuts. This undoubtedly set the stage for the deliberate planting of seeds (probably accidental to begin with) and the improvement of key grains through the selection of seeds from the best plants.

The first stage of the long process of domestication of plants was semi-cultivation, in which people would scatter the seeds of desirable food-producing plants in places where they would be likely to grow. The next stage was the use of fire to clear fields and specialized tools to plant and harvest grain.

Early farmers practiced swidden agriculture, changing fields periodically as the fertility of the soil became depleted.

As farming evolved, new animals were also domesticated. Particularly in the Middle East and parts of Asia, by 9000 BC., pigs, sheep, goats and cattle were being raised. Farmers used these animals for meat and skins and soon discovered dairying as well. Animals were used for pulling plows and supplied manure for fertilizer. These results not only contributed to the development of agriculture, but they also served as the basis for nomadic herding societies.

Farming was initially developed in the Middle East and Black Sea regions, in an arc of territory running from present-day Turkey to Iraq and Israel. This was a very fertile area, more fertile in those days than at present. Grains such as barley and wild wheat were abundant. At the same time, this are was not heavily forested, and animals were in short supply, presenting a challenge to hunters. In the Middle East, the development of agriculture may have begun as early as 10,000 BC, and it gained ground rapidly after 8000 BC. Gradually during the Neolithic centuries, knowledge of agriculture spread to other centers, including parts of India, North Africa, and Europe. Agriculture, including rice cultivation, soon developed independently in China. Agriculture had to be invented separately in the Americas, based on corn cultivation, where it was also a slightly later development (about 5000 BC).

Many scholars have termed the development of agriculture a Neolithic revolution. The term is obviously misleading in one sense: agriculture was no sudden transformation where the new system had its roots (even in the Middle East). Learning the new agricultural methods was difficult, and many peoples long combined a bit of agriculture with considerable reliance on the older systems of hunting and gathering. A “revolution” that took more than a thousand years, and then several thousand more spread to key population centers in Asia, Europe, and Africa, is hardly dramatic by modern standards.

The concept of revolution is, however, appropriate in demonstrating the magnitude of change involved. Early agriculture could support far more people per square mile than hunting ever could; it also allowed people to send more permanently in one area. The system was nonetheless not easy. Agriculture required more regular work, at least of men, than hunting did.

Settled agriculture concentrated populations and encouraged the spread of disease. As much as agriculture was demanding, it was also rewarding: agriculture supported larger population, and with better food supplies and a more settled existence, agricultural people could afford to build houses and villages.

We know next to nothing of the debates that must have raged when people were first confronted with agriculture, but it is not hard to imagine that many would have found the new life too complicated, too difficult, or too unexciting. Most evidence suggests that gathering and hunting people resisted agriculture as long as they could. Gradually, of course, agriculture did gain ground. Its success was hard to deny. And as farmers cleared new land from forests, they automatically drove out or converted many hunters.

[Disease played a role: settled agricultural societies suffered from more contagious diseases because of denser population concentrations. Hunting-and-gathering peoples lacked resistance and often died when agriculturists who had developed immunities carried the diseases into new areas.]

Agriculture set the basis for more rapid change in human societies. Greater wealth and larger populations freed some people for other specializations, from which new ideas or techniques might spring. Agriculture itself depended on control over nature that could be facilitated by newly developed techniques and objects. For example, during the Neolithic period itself, the needs of farming people for storage facilities, for grains and seeds, promoted the development of basket-making and pottery. The first potter’s wheel came into existence around 6000 BC, and this, in turn, encouraged faster and higher-quality pottery production. Agricultural needs also encouraged certain kinds of science, supporting the human inclination to learn more about weather or flooding.

CULTURAL EXPRESSIONS

The early food producers appear to have worshipped ancestral and nature spirits. Their religions centered on sacred groves, springs, and wild animals and included deities such as the Earth Mother and the Sky God. Some of these beliefs may be reflected in ancient Hindu texts.

Early food-producing societies used megaliths (big stones) to construct burial chambers and calendar circles and to aid in astronomical observations.