Discussion 1

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The Long Prologue 9

or wetter, with different animals as poten- tial prey or predator and unrecognizable mushrooms that might cure or kill? What new scraper, spear point, or fishhook was invented to kill the mammoths of the north- ern Asian grasslands or the seals of the Ber- ing Sea?

We cannot know the specific answers to these questions. We do know that these travelers became remarkably adept at colo- nizing and conquering new lands. We do not know if Homo sapiens sapiens were responsible for the extinction of other hu- man species, like the Neanderthals or Homo florensis. Whether or not these or other early humans were annihilated by Homo sapiens sapiens, many animal species probably were. Humans were by no means the largest ani- mals, but they used their brains to capture and kill with abandon. So devastating was the human contact with large mammals and birds that we can practically chart the migra- tion of Homo sapiens sapiens by looking for the multiple extinctions of these creatures: 50,000 years ago in Australia and 14,400 years ago in northern Eurasia.

Between 18,000 and 15,000 years ago,12 Homo sapiens sapiens crossed the Bering Sea land bridge created by low ice-age ocean levels. They may have followed the path of small groups of earlier humans who settled in the Western Hemisphere much earlier; there is some evidence of human settlements in Chile 30,000 years ago and in South Carolina possibly 50,000 years ago. But the settlement at the end of the ice age, between 18,000 and 15,000 years ago, had a far greater ecological impact. They arrived in a world of huge elephant-like mastodons, woolly mam- moths standing over 10 feet to the shoulder and weighing 13 tons, birds with the wing span of a small airplane, bears that weighed

1,500 pounds, giant bison, sloths, horses, camels, and lions. It was a world that makes our own look “zoologically impoverished,” the great naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, Darwin’s collaborator, remarked. At some time before 13,000 years ago, these travelers perfected a stone spear point (called Clovis after its discovery in Clovis, New Mexico) that gave the new Americans a deadly ad- vantage over the large mammals.

The resulting impact may have been a “megafaunal overkill,”13 rivaling the extinc- tion of the dinosaur. Virtually every large animal species on the continent was hunted to extinction before a second human migra- tion came by sea about 8,000 years ago.

The First Modern Humans

Homo sapiens sapiens, the colonizers of ev- ery continent but Antarctica over the past 100,000 years, were the first truly modern human beings with regard to the size of their brains, the height of their foreheads, and their general appearance. They were the first of our ancestors who, with the right haircut, diet, and clothes, would fail to surprise us if we saw them on the street or in the shower.

We used to think that the early ances- tors of our species were late bloomers, that it took more than 100,000 years before these anatomically moderns became behav- ioral and thinking moderns. Without much evidence of Homo sapiens sapiens’ art or invention between the time of their appear- ance 100,000 to 200,000 years ago and the dramatic cave paintings created 30,000 years ago, archaeologists thought that the first half of our species’ existence was fairly unevent- ful. But no more.

Recent discoveries in sub-Saharan Africa from almost 100,000 years ago reveal an

Reilly, Kevin. The Human Journey : A Concise Introduction to World History, Prehistory to 1450, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nu/detail.action?docID=5328388. Created from nu on 2021-11-02 02:05:25.

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early propensity of our species for artistic expression and abstract thought. We find a wide range of highly specialized tools— scrapers, fishhooks, awls, and needles—for specific functions, and we find them in various shapes, sizes, and media—stone, wood, and bone. These people also carved their tools for aesthetic effect. We also find red ocher pigments often associated with burial, body decoration, and religion.14 In addition, recent excavations in South Africa uncovered a set of pierced beadlike shells that may have been worn as jewelry 75,000 years ago.15

Human clothing may also date from this period. Research on the “molecular clock” of lice16 indicates that human body lice di- verged from human head lice about 75,000

years ago. Since body lice live in clothing and most other mammals support only one kind of lice, the reasoning is that only a widespread human use of clothing would have precipitated such a successful genetic mutation.

As early as 40,000 years ago, people in modern-day Australia engraved thousands of circles on a high sandstone monolith and surrounding boulders. Early human burials date to more than 50,000 years ago; in caves in the Middle East, there are examples of children buried with deer antlers or the skull of a wild boar, indicating some religious or totemic identification of human and animal. All these efforts to beautify, plan, or give meaning suggest if not the origins of art and religion, then at least the beginnings

Figure 1.2 These bison from a cave in the Pyrenees Mountains were painted by hunter- gatherers about 13,000 years ago. The earliest European cave art dates from 32,000 years ago. We can only speculate about their origins, but it is likely that these images of wild animals conveyed a magical or religious aspect of the hunt. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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of abstract thought and a fairly developed capacity for expression and communication.

We also see the beginning of cultural differences in this period. Tool kits, the set of tools a group employs, begin to vary from one area to another. They vary not only to serve different purposes—fishing or hunt- ing the big game residing in the forest or grasslands—but also to reflect a local style or tradition. These cultural differences mean that culture was beginning to shape human behavior. Nature had moved to the back seat.

Cave Paintings and Female Figurines. The full flowering of this human creativity can be seen in the cave paintings and female figurines that date from about 30,000 to 12,000 years ago. These works, discovered in areas of Europe that have undergone exten- sive excavation, have led many archaeolo- gists to speak of a late or “Upper Paleolithic Cultural Revolution” during this period. Clearly, these Stone Age ancestors had be- come talented artists, innovative toolmak- ers, symbolic thinkers, and reflective human beings. All this occurred as they became the effective hunters and voracious meat eaters that swept through the herds of big game that roamed the planet and as they migrated throughout the glacially cold world at the height of the last ice age. Their need to adapt to new environments as they moved and their need to confront conditions of sometimes bitter cold may, in fact, have been challenges that pushed their cultural development. They invented techniques like sewing close-fitting fur garments, weaving fibers and firing pottery, and creating tools like bows and arrows, spear throwers, nets, traps, and multipurpose flint blades.

The best evidence of this “Upper Paleo- lithic,” or late Stone Age, revolution is in the female figurines and animal cave paintings that can be found from Spain to Mongo- lia, heralding a mature artistic ability, re- ligious rituals, long-range cultural contact and trade, and a considerable increase in population density.

Cultural Adaptation. The changes that occurred to our human ancestors between 100,000 and 10,000 years ago were not only the most extensive changes that had ever oc- curred in such a short time but also changes in the way in which change occurred. These were not physical changes. The human brain

Figure 1.3 Statues of women, like this from France 25,000 years ago, were also created by Paleolithic artists in Europe and Asia from 30,000 to 12,000 years ago. They are sometimes called “Venus” figurines to suggest a possible religious function related to women’s fertility. Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY. Museo Civico Vicenza.

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and facial features that typify Homo sapiens sapiens reached their current form 100,000 years ago. The changes that occurred after that were cultural: changes in behavior and thought. And they were so critical that they al- tered the way humans were to change forever after. From then on, cultural changes far out- paced the slow process of physical evolution.

To the extent that the fittest humans survived the past thousands of years, it was because of culture. Warm clothes, better weapons and tools, social support, and the ability to communicate—these cultural at- tributes of humans provided more leverage in surviving than would any random muta- tion in genes or physical condition. Even at the height of the last ice age, 18,000 to 20,000 years ago, the human ability to control fire, make warm clothing and housing, and thus stay warm by cultural means far outweighed any potential physical change. It is difficult to imagine a physical change that would have been as effective. The development of a thick coat of fur-like hair would have been a successful adaptation to the ice age but to little else, especially not to the warming that began 12,000 years ago. A far more effective adaptation was the development of the abil- ity to make a fur coat that could be worn or taken off. Physical changes are limiting be- cause they address a single problem. The key adaptation that humans experienced was the ability to think and express themselves with complex language; the special function of culture was the ability to solve new problems as they arose.

Human Differences: Race and Culture

The overwhelming changes that have oc- curred to humans over the past few hundred

thousand years occurred to them all. The physical changes were species wide and very slow; the cultural changes spread rapidly. But there were some changes, both physical and cultural, that occurred separately or in varying degrees. Oddly, humans have often been more preoccupied by these differences. From the vantage point of a Martian, all humans were changing in the same way, but to human eyes on the ground, it sometimes looked like people were going their separate ways.

The most obvious physical differences among humans are those that are popularly lumped under the heading of race. Skin pigmentation is one of these. Dark pigmen- tation is obviously an adaptation to bright sun (actually ultraviolet light) in a tropical climate. However, that does not mean that all our African ancestors had dark skin. Today’s Africa has an enormous variety of climates and peoples, and all these have changed over the past 100,000 years. But it is likely that one successful adaptation by humans who came from Africa to the cloudy skies of northern Europe was a lightening of skin pigmentation. This is because sunlight supplies necessary vitamin D, and light skin can compensate for limited sunlight. Fish are also a good source of vitamin D, so Inuit (Eskimo) adaptation to Arctic winters over the past 50,000 years has not required white skin. Each natural adaptation may have a single function, but there are numerous possible adaptations to any problem. Recent DNA evidence suggests, for instance, that the light skin of Europeans is a different genetic adaptation than the light skin of Asians.17

Human body sizes and shapes also var- ied as adaptations to climate and environ- ment. In a hot dry climate, like that of North

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Africa and the Middle East, a successful ad- aptation enabling the rapid release of body heat resulted in a small head, long legs with short torso, and a generally tall stature (pro- viding a high ratio of skin surface to body mass). Initial human settlements outside of Africa were limited to the lower, warmer latitudes. But when humans began to move into northern cold and dry climates, the op- posite adaptation—large heads, short legs, long torso, and short overall stature—then evolved.

When did these changes occur? Since different species of our human ancestors have traveled out of Africa on numerous occasions over the course of the past 2 million years, there is some debate about when and how modern humans evolved into their current appearances. Some, called “out-of-Africa” theorists, believe that the latest African emigrants, Homo sapiens sa- piens, who left Africa less than 100,000 years ago, replaced all previous humans in the world without interbreeding with them. According to this theory, all physical differ- ences among human beings would therefore have occurred within the past 100,000 years. Another theory, called “multiregional,” as- sociated with Milford Wolpoff,18 argues that Homo sapiens sapiens likely interbred with the descendants of earlier travelers from Af- rica, possibly including the descendants of Homo erectus. According to this view, mod- ern humans evolved differently in different parts of the world even though all mixed with the late-arriving Homo sapiens sapiens out of Africa. If Wolpoff is right, human dif- ferences evolved over the millions of years of human settlement around the globe. The de- bate continues: a recent DNA study argues that all modern humans are descended from an Africa migration 65,000 years ago.19 But

another recent study suggests interbreeding: it reveals that Neanderthal DNA is 99.5 per- cent similar to the human genome.20

What about cultural differences? They are more recent than biological differences. For most of the past 5 million years, cul- tural changes were monotonously uniform throughout the world. Wherever humans went, they took many of the same tools. Homo erectus in East and South Asia used more bamboo and less stone for projectile points than did the stone toolmakers of Africa, Europe, and Central Asia. Stone axes that could be thrown like lethal Frisbees were widely produced west of India, but not, it used to be thought, in East and South Asia.21 Recently, however, archaeologists have unearthed similar axes made 800,000 years ago in South China, suggesting that the technologies of early humans were quite similar.

Certainly in the past 100,000 years, cul- tural differences in the world have increased. In this period, the tool kit of central Africa was very different from that of southern Af- rica. Two areas of France produced different sets of tools. The cave paintings of the Medi- terranean were vastly different from those of the Sahara or Australia.

Nevertheless, the emergence of separate cultural zones did not prevent one culture from influencing another. Especially during the Upper Paleolithic era (40,000 to 12,000 years ago), as cultural contacts increased, toolmakers and artists learned to borrow and adapt styles or techniques from oth- ers. Thus, the caves of Chauvet, France, were unique in their depiction of rhinos, but that was a minor variation in an animal cave art that spread throughout settled Eur- asia. Strikingly similar Venus figurines were carved from 27,000 to 20,000 years ago in

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Lespuge, France; Willendorf, Austria; and Kostenski, Russia. They all emphasize the breasts, belly, thighs, and vulva of the female figure, suggesting a common religious atten- tion to fertility.

They are also similar in their depic- tion of woven string material or textiles, a testament not only to a common style but perhaps also to the common activity of Pa- leolithic women. Is the similarity of these works a result of imitation or common de- velopment? We do not know. Certainly, no one would presume to identify a “French” or “Russian” style in any of these works. The world of national style was still far in the future.

Did all these Upper Paleolithic peoples speak the same language? We do not know that either. Some scientists postulate an original language at the time of leaving Af- rica, whether by Homo erectus 2 million or

Homo sapiens sapiens 100,000 years ago. But because Africa contains 25 percent of the world’s languages, it is likely that there were many languages in Africa before humans left to colonize the world. The current distribu- tion of the world’s language groups may only be as old as the spread of agriculture. In any case, languages change much faster than genes. Certainly, the languages we know are very recent, none of them more than a few thousand years old and most of them only a few hundred years old in recognizable form. A shaved Shakespeare in jeans would go un- noticed until he opened his mouth.

Do Numbers Count? Patterns of Population Growth

If you had been viewing Earth from Mars with a good telescope for the past 100,000 years, you would likely be impressed by how

Figure 1.4 Venus of Brassemouy, France 25,000–20,000 BCE. Head of a woman in Paleolithic age. This “Venus” is unusual in its attention to facial detail. It also reveals the work of Paleolithic women in braiding and textile weaving. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d’Archéologie nationale) / Jean-Gilles Berizzi.

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humans took over the planet. From a popu- lation of about 10,000 at the beginning of the last glacial expansion about 100,000 years ago, humans increased to about 6 million by its end, 10,000 years ago. But you would also be struck by how humans replaced other animals. With the help of a technique of modern archaeology, it would be tempting to conclude that humans multiplied by eat- ing everything in sight. The archaeological technique is the examination of ancient cop- rolites or fossilized excrement to determine what was eaten.22 A team of archaeologists studied the coprolites of three long-term hu- man settlements around the Mediterranean Sea in Italy and Israel. All these communi- ties consumed shellfish, tortoises, partridges, hares, and rabbits from almost 200,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago. The archaeologists discovered that the food remains from the early years of settlement showed a diet made up almost entirely of the slow-maturing, slow-moving, and easy-to-catch tortoises and shellfish. By 50,000 years ago, this easy prey had declined to about three-fourths of local meat intake, and about 20,000 years ago, they fell to less than a quarter. Humans increased their numbers at the expense of the abundant, easy-to-capture prey, forcing their descendants to run ever more quickly for the hares and rabbits.

Most of Human History: Foraging Societies

What were the lives of these first humans like? We call them foragers because that is how they obtained their food. Before the agricultural revolution, 10,000 years ago, all humans foraged for their food: gather- ing available plants and animals, fishing, and hunting. Some combination of hunting,

fishing, gathering, or foraging for whatever was available in nature has been the primary means of subsistence for most of humanity for most of our history: for all primates up to 10,000 years ago and for many since. Even today, there are isolated pockets of people who engage in little or no agriculture but live on what nature provides. Agriculture has spread so far and wide that today’s foragers are relegated to some of the most remote and uninviting environments in the world. We find the Khoisan in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa, the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia in the arid Outback, the Inuit (Eskimos) in the northern Arctic, the Mbuti Pygmies in the rain forests of central Africa, and many foragers deep in the Amazon rain forest.

Lifestyles of Foragers. It is tempting to think that these contemporary hunters and gatherers live as all our ancestors did before the agricultural revolution. No doubt there are some ways in which a foraging lifestyle shapes how people think and behave. But before we try to figure out what these are, we must issue a couple of warnings. First, we must recognize that the lives of today’s foragers may be very different from that of their parents, grandparents, or ances- tors. Their society has had its own history; it has not been static. Today’s hunters and gatherers have not emerged from a pristine pre-agricultural world as if from a time ma- chine. This lesson has been brought home to anthropologists and historians by a series of recent studies of foragers in the world to- day, beginning with a study of the Khoisan people of the Kalahari Desert.23 Since the Khoisan are foragers today, it was assumed that their lives were continuations of an- cient traditions and that they could conse- quently be used to speak for all of our past

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ancestors before the agricultural revolution. On closer inspection, however, it turned out that the Khoisan living today were actually descended from a pastoral people who had known agriculture as well as domesticated animals. Similarly, a recent study of a forag- ing people in the interior of Borneo revealed that their ancestors had been farmers who became gatherers hundreds of years ago in order to supply forest products to Chinese traders.24 We can still call these people for- agers or hunter-gatherers, but we cannot use them as stand-ins for the human population before agriculture.

Another warning—and one for which this chapter has already prepared the ground—is that the lives of our hunter- gatherer ancestors also changed, sometimes radically, in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions of years before the agricultural revolution. In time and space, the lives of foragers varied too much for us to ask “what was it like?” Changes in climate, tool capacity, speech, organiza- tional ability, population density, geograph- ical position, environment, and knowledge changed our ancestors’ lives radically.

With those reservations in mind, how- ever, we can use examples from contempo- rary foragers when they correspond to what we know from archaeological excavations. We have already alluded to their diet, a mat- ter of concern to some modern nutritionists who reason that whatever worked for the first hundreds of thousands of years should be good enough for us today. Vegetarian nutritionists who hoped to find evidence of a meatless Paleolithic diet have con- tinually been disappointed by evidence that the Upper Paleolithic diet always contained meat, but modern critics of animal fat, milk products, and grains have found support for

their contention that the modern diet is a radical departure from that of our ancient ancestors. Food remains of ancient hunter- gatherers show a heavy reliance on lean game animals, fish and crustaceans, nuts, fruits, berries, and leaves. It was a diet high in protein and low in carbohydrates and fats, especially when compared to the di- etary changes that came about as a result of the agricultural revolution. It was also a var- ied diet, consisting of a wider-than-modern variety of plants and animals, many of which no longer exist.

What of their social life? Like mod- ern foragers, our pre-agricultural ances- tors probably lived in groups of families or “bands” of a couple dozen to a couple hundred individuals. Bands were further divided into families and groups of rela- tives. Like modern foragers, many were nomadic, following game seasonally, return- ing periodically to familiar places, but build- ing homes from available materials (leaves, grasses, mud, or ice) quickly for stays of a few nights to a few months. Not all hunt- ers and gatherers were nomadic, however. Some of our foraging ancestors lived in almost permanent communities, and some Paleolithic sites were inhabited continually. Whether nomadic or settled, they carried few possessions with them, owned little in the way of personal or family property, shared the bounty of a hunt, and made sure that everyone had an adequate and roughly equal supply of food.

Sexual Division of Labor. In most cases, men hunted, usually in small groups, while women gathered plants and small animals with the children, closer to home. This sexual division of labor is typical of mod- ern foragers, but few today live in regions of abundance as they once did. Modern

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hunters sometimes travel for days, even weeks, at a time, bringing back the kill for a special feast. The richer natural environ- ment of the Upper Paleolithic tropical and temperate world might have made meat more frequent, man’s work easier, the male presence greater, and men’s social role more prominent. In modern foraging societies, especially those in which plant life provides the bulk of the food source, the women’s role is correspondingly important. Never- theless, the Venus figurines of the Upper Paleolithic suggest that the woman’s role as provider of life was a matter of consid- erable concern, perhaps even veneration. Kathleen Gough, an anthropologist who studied foragers in India, wrote that women in hunting societies are “less subordinated in crucial respects” than are women in almost all other societies. “Especially lack- ing in hunting societies,” she writes, “is the kind of male possessiveness and exclusive- ness regarding women that leads to such institutions as savage punishment or death for female adultery, the jealous guarding of female chastity and virginity, the denial of divorce to women, or the ban on a woman’s remarriage after her husband’s death.”25

Whether or not women were wor- shipped as life givers, fertility goddesses, or food providers, they played many important roles in Paleolithic society. Besides bearing children and providing what was likely the most reliable source of food by gathering, women were also the ones who cooked the food and distributed it to the family.

Women also probably invented fabric. Paleolithic figurines show that women have learned to make string by twisting fiber and wear garments like skirts from dangling string tied to a band. A recently excavated site in the Czech Republic shows evidence

of both weaving and pottery, dating from 28,000 years ago. Both of these activities were traditionally women’s work, performed almost exclusively by women in agricultural societies. That these skills developed long before the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago may be an indication that some Upper Paleolithic societies were much more sophisticated than we have thought.

Relative Social Equality. The politics of Paleolithic society probably reflected its rela- tive social equality. Our popular image of one caveman lording it over others is far from the reality. In modern hunter-gatherer bands, decision making is based on consen- sus. There is often a “headman” or leader, but his position is usually limited and advi- sory. For instance, the headman in a !Kung Khoisan band depicted in the film The Hunt- ers is chosen because his wife is the daughter of a previous headman and because he has the confidence of the others in the band. Leadership is neither a full-time activity nor a job that excuses one from other duties. The only other specialty is that of a shaman, healer, or religious intermediary. Among contemporary hunter-gatherers, this indi- vidual also emerges through some combina- tion of birth and evidence of special abilities. Among Arctic Eskimos, the role of shaman, which requires a high sensitivity to the spiri- tual world, typically fell to the individual, male or female, who seemed least adept at hunting and practical skills.

Leisure Time. How much time and en- ergy went into providing food? Anthro- pologists have discovered that most modern foraging bands are able to provide for their basic needs and still have considerable lei- sure time. In fact, it seems that modern foragers spend less time working and more time at leisure than do people in agricultural

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or industrial societies. Even in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa, a desolate and barren landscape to the outsider, the !Kung are able to find enough game, plants, roots, insects, and water to spend most of their time at leisure. Since our Paleolithic ances- tors 10,000 to 50,000 years ago were not limited to remote areas or fragile ecosystems and since their world was far richer in flora and fauna, their workweek must have been even shorter. Nevertheless, there is no sign in the archaeological record of individuals of special privilege or distinction. While there are burial sites from this period, it is not un- til much later (5,000 to 6,000 years ago) that some graves outrank others.

Interpreters of the lives of our foraging ancestors carry heavy burdens. There seems to be much at stake, in part because this “first” stage of human history is seen as the formative beginning and in part because it was such a long period of human history. Inevitably, the sense that our Paleolithic ancestors created “the human condition,” shaped “human nature,” that they are the “original” or the “real” us, demands more of our ancestors than is possible to accurately determine.

Again, our distinction between biology and culture may be useful. Biologically, we are still like our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago. That may be significant in terms of our diet, our need for exercise, and our vulnerability to the ills of sedentary soci- ety. But culturally we are worlds away from our Paleolithic ancestors, and our ideas, feelings, visions, and dreams are shaped by our culture, not our biology.

The difference is manifest if we consider a little hypothetical experiment. Imagine that we were able to exchange two newborn babies: one born 30,000 years ago with one

born yesterday. At the age of 20, the child from the Paleolithic world would be dating, driving, and enjoying college world history courses like everyone else. The child born to modernity but raised in Paleolithic culture would be sniffing the air for the spoor of the wild boar, distinguishing the poison- ous mushrooms from the healthy ones, or scanning the backs of beetles for signs of a cold winter. Both would have adapted to their worlds as completely and effortlessly as everyone else because everything they needed—including such physical attributes as muscular strength or the ability to distin- guish smells—was taught by their culture. If, on the other hand, we were able to take two 50-year-olds, one from each world, and exchange them, both would be completely lost. Their cultures would have prepared them for skills that were irrelevant and un- necessary. And yet, with time, they too could learn.

Merging Old and New. In December 2001, the shamans from a tenth of Brazil’s 230 indigenous nations met in the Amazon and drew up a declaration calling on the Brazilian government to “create punishment mechanisms to deter the robbery of our bio- diversity.”26 Concerned that they were losing control of their traditional knowledge of Brazilian plants to international pharmaceu- tical corporations, they called for a “mora- torium on the commercial exploitation of traditional knowledge of genetic resources.” Their goal was not to deprive foreign scien- tists and corporations from benefiting from their knowledge but to develop a system that would involve them and pay royalties. “We’re not against science, but we don’t want to be just suppliers of data,” an orga- nizer of the conference, Marcos Terena of the Terena tribe, explained. “We want to be

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part of the whole process from research to economic results.” The modern descendants of forest foragers have learned a lot.

Subduing the Earth: The Consequences of Domestication

The First Breakthrough: Origins of Agricultural/Pastoral Economies

With her galaxy’s most powerful telescope, an astronomer viewing the planet Earth over the past million years would have had no reason to suspect the existence of intelligent life until very recently. Ice covered the poles, periodically pushing toward the equator and then retreating. The last expansion, which began 100,000 years ago, reached its maxi- mum extent, halfway to the equator, about 20,000 years ago. About 10,000 years ago, our astronomer would have seen something new. That is when she could see anything at all, because as the ice retreated, it was re- placed by mist and clouds. She would have seen green areas become more uniform in color, shape, and size. It was the stamp of agriculture. First by planting wild roots and seeds about 10,000 years ago and finally by plowing and irrigating fields and hillsides by 5,000 years ago, humans were revealing their presence on the planet.

The intergalactic astronomer could only imagine the scene at ground level. In a couple of temperate, well-watered areas of the planet, women whose mothers had for generations dug the tubers and gathered the grains were putting some of them back into the ground. They were doing it systemati- cally: punching holes in the ground with a digging stick and planting. Soon they were choosing particular plants, putting them in particular places, making sure there was

sufficient sun and water, and clearing the area to improve the yield.

Control over Food Supply. At the same time that women began to take control of edible plants, men began to control some of the animals they were in the habit of hunt- ing. The taming or domestication of wild animals, although not visible from distant galaxies, had the same effect as the breed- ing and growing of favored plants. Men and women were controlling their food supply: increasing it, stabilizing it, and asserting their dominance over nature. From then on, as any sensible astronomer could see, a new planet had produced a species that was about to organize and subdue its small world.

Why then? The retreat of the ice about 12,000 years ago would be part of the

Figure 1.5 Saharan Africa: 6000-4000 BCE, pigment on rock, Tassili n’Ajjer, Algeria.This rock painting from the Sahara Desert shows the relationship between women and agriculture. Notice the grain falling from the stalks that grow like a crown above the woman’s head. Consider also how the Sahara was different in the early Neolithic age.

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answer. Warmer temperatures (an average of 4 or 5 degrees Fahrenheit) and greater rainfall increased the number of plants that could be turned to human use. Vast fields of wheat and barley sprang up in the Middle East, providing a regular diet of cereals for an expanding population of people. The ris- ing levels of rivers and oceans also increased the varieties and amount of fish available. In China too, rivers and coasts carried more fish and shellfish, and marshlands multi- plied the varieties of wild rice.

But that most recent retreat of ice was not a simple cause of the agricultural revo- lution. People may have learned to consume a wider variety of plants, especially in the Middle East. In northern Syria, there is early evidence of grinding wild grains and the use of a wide array of stone implements for harvesting cereals and other wild food. But there was no agriculture to supplement, much less replace, gathering for another 2,000 years. So agriculture was not just the result of warmer weather.

There is also a problem with the idea that people chose agriculture as an obvious effort to better their lives. The problem is that no one could have foreseen that the long-term effects of agriculture would be beneficial. In fact, the short-term effects were probably not. Archaeologists who have examined skeleton remains of early farm- ers of about 10,000 years ago have found evidence that the first farmers may not have eaten as well as gatherers had. Their bone fragments show signs that early farmers suf- fered from inferior nutrition, shorter stat- ure, and earlier deaths than their foraging ancestors. A recent discovery of drilled teeth from a Neolithic site in Pakistan 9,000 years ago might mark our ancestor’s first visit to the dentist—a practice made increasingly

necessary by the abrasive minerals produced when grain was ground on stone.27 In addi- tion, anthropologists have concluded that most farmers worked longer hours than hunters and gatherers.

Why Agriculture Developed. So why did they do it? Why did gatherers choose the backbreaking work of planting instead of just plucking fruit from the tree? And why did hunters decide to raise animals instead of just killing the wild ones? Why did they go through the trouble of taming, herding, feeding, and breeding them for meals they might not even live to enjoy?

A clue to the answer may lie in the ice- age confusion. If warmer, wetter weather 12,000 years ago multiplied vegetation and animals, including humans, why did they wait another 2,000 years to become farmers? The agricultural revolution occurred not as the glaciers retreated 12,000 years ago but in the sudden cold snap that followed. So the question is not only why agriculture, but why agriculture then? The answer may be because they had to.

Food production probably replaced hunting and gathering in a two-step pro- cess of experiment followed by necessity. First, 12,000 years ago, as the ice melted, increased rains and longer summers added abundant new species of plants and ani- mals. In a world full of choices, gatherers continued weeding, selecting, and harvest- ing one species over another. But there was no need to plant what nature provided free of charge. Similarly, wild animals could be tamed as a supplement or leisure activity rather than as a necessity: first the wolf that became the dog, then wild sheep and goats were easily herded by people and dogs and provided food and clothing on demand. But in a world full of wild gazelles, shepherding

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was an unnecessary activity. Populations grew in the warming years; settlements increased, and people gorged on a natural harvest that seemed eternal. Then, in the wake of a dry, cold snap between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago,28 with more mouths to feed, the party ended. Agriculture and pasture became necessities. We know, for instance, that horses and wild gazelles, an important source of meat and protein, were rapidly disappearing from the Middle East about 10,000 years ago.

Selecting Crops to Grow. The astronomer from another planet would have needed a telescope with an extremely sensitive color receptor to notice something else about the spreading green on planet Earth. The shades of green that she saw beginning 10,000 years ago were both different and less varied than the earlier ice-age greens. The farmers were changing the planet’s plants and choosing a few to take the place of the many.

Farmers made different choices than na- ture. Nature selected plants with abundant seeds for survival against birds, pests, and chance. Humans chose to plant fruits, like bananas, with fewer or smaller seeds so that they would not get caught in their teeth. Nature protected some plants—the ances- tors of almonds, cabbages, and potatoes, for instance—with a sour taste or poisonous fruit. Humans chose to develop the rare specimen that lacked this protection. Nature took fewer risks, finding safety in the widest variety of species. Humans chose the tastiest or hardiest and replaced the others.

Human choices enabled the human pop- ulation to grow exponentially. A few choices, like cereal crops bred for maximum number of grains, made all the difference. The grain/ seeds of wild grasses were indigestible for humans and eaten only by animals 12,000

years ago. Today, grains like wheat, barley, millet, oats, rice, and corn—processed as cereals, ground as flour, and turned into noodles, breads, and baked goods—feed the world. This is a result of the domestication of these grains, the process of enlarging their size and quantity. The modern ear of corn, for instance, is a product of thousands of years of domestication. Five thousand years ago, it was a grass with small grains on the tip. Mexican Indians enlarged it to a thumb- nail size stalk by about 2,000 years ago, and it measured about five inches by the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, 500 years ago. Today, the average ear of corn measures eight or nine inches.

In some cases, humans increased the variety of nature. They took the humble ancestor of the cabbage, for instance, and produced a wide variety of descendants. Ini- tially cultivated for the oil of its seeds, some cultivators chose to develop it for its leaves, producing modern cabbage; others chose plants with abundant small buds, leading to Brussels sprouts; and still others cultivated the flower and stems, producing broccoli and cauliflower.

Reducing Variety. But the overwhelming impact of the farmer was to reduce nature’s riot of species, concentrating on those that humans could eat, especially those that pro- duced the most per planting. Out of 200,000 species of wild plants, humans ate only a few thousand, and of those they domesticated only a few hundred. Today, only 12 of those account for 80 percent of the world’s ton- nage of crops.29 These are wheat, corn, rice, barley, sorghum, soybeans, potato, sweet potato, manioc, sugarcane, sugar beet, and banana.

The selection of crops for planting also reduced the genetic variety within a species.

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Ninety percent of all the world’s apples are descended from only two trees out of the thousands that existed in the forests of Ka- zakhstan 6,000 years ago.30 The shallow gene pool that results from ages of interbreed- ing makes such plants more vulnerable to blights, pests, and diseases. Apple growers, for instance, are returning to the central Asian source to breed hardier apples. Un- fortunately, many plants that were discarded have become extinct. Many that have been adapted to human needs can no longer grow without human intervention. Bananas and breadfruit, for instance, can no longer be reproduced from their tiny seeds but require humans to make cuttings from their stalks for reproduction.

In summary, the great revolution of hu- man food production began to transform the world about 10,000 years ago after the end of the last ice age. It was a gradual process that began in discovery and experimentation and culminated in the need of growing popula- tions to confront periodic shortages of wild foods. The result was not only a dramatic increase in human population and a change in human lifestyles but also a reshaping of the natural world.

Globalization and Continental Variety

Food production was the first human step to globalization. First, a planet of hunters and gatherers started to become a planet of farmers and herders. Second, these first farmers and herders in various parts of the world began exchanging recipes, sharing seeds, and using the same or similar animals for food, clothing, and transport.

But some people were left out of this new revolution, in some cases for a long time. Thus, a revolution that eventually created

a single world also created the first “haves” and “have-nots.” In the beginning, many farmers may not have lived better than for- agers. But eventually, farmers formed larger, more complex societies; took the best land; and forced the remaining bands of gatherers to the margins: deserts, barren mountains, dense rain forests, and the Arctic north.

For most of the 10,000 years since the beginning of domestication, the world has belonged to the farmers. Their descendants produced the first cities, states, and empires beginning 5,000 years ago. Their urban revolution of city building, state formation, and the development of complex, literate societies was in one sense a departure from agricultural society and in another sense its fulfillment. The great urban empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt, India, China, and the Americas erected their monuments by taxing and working untold numbers of peasant farmers. They invented writing and trained poets and historians to tell their stories as if they were the only stories to be told. The foragers of the Philippines, Aus- tralia, the Amazon, and the African Kalahari and the hunting and fishing peoples of the American Northwest, the Arctic, and the hills of Southeast Asia were relegated to the spectator seats while the great ones strutted their stuff on the world stage.

Nevertheless, not all agricultural soci- eties became urban empires 5,000 years ago, and some of the early empires were not descended from the first farmers. The winners of history are not always the smart- est or most talented. It took over 1,000 years for agriculture to spread from its first home in the Middle East to the Mediter- ranean. Greece and Rome and then Europe were late borrowers who made good use of the invention. And some of the important

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breakthroughs that enabled agricultural so- cieties to become empires—domesticated horses, wheels, and chariots—first came to light in central Asia, not in the agricul- tural societies that later turned horse-drawn chariots into engines of empire.

Geography as Destiny. Why did some agricultural societies prosper far more than others? Geography partly explains why some agricultural people, borrowers as well as inventors, turned cultivation into high culture. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Di- amond argued provocatively that powerful city-based empires grew in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Mediterranean, Europe, India, and China because these agricultural soci- eties were geographically well placed and close together. They had the good fortune to be where there were many available plants and animals that could be domesticated or to live along the same latitudes as the initial fortunate few who first domesticated them.31

The first farmers, those of the Middle East, were blessed with a wide variety of plants and animals, many of which could be domesticated. Wheat and barley were

prominent cereal grains of the Fertile Cres- cent, the area that stretched along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to the foothills of Turkey and the Mediterranean. The Fertile Crescent also had abundant pulses (edible seeds, like beans, which are rich in protein), specifically peas and lentils.

Perhaps the wild gazelles were hunted almost to extinction because they could not be domesticated. But the people of the Fertile Crescent domesticated sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle. They brought these animals under human control not only for food but also for their wool and hides for clothing and eventually for milk and cheese. They also recognized the utility of certain plants for their fiber content and planted flax for the fiber we know as linen.

China, too, had a rich assortment of wild plants and animals that could be domesti- cated. The Chinese had access to millet in the northern Yellow River valley and wild rice in the lakes and marshes of the south- erly Yangtze River. In addition, soybeans provided protein. For meat, the Chinese domesticated the pig. For fiber, they grew

Map 1.2 Agriculture originated independently in nine different regions of the world. What are these, and what plants did they domesticate?

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hemp for rope and the silkworm for silk cloth.

Other areas of independent domesti- cation offered different combinations of cereals, pulses, animals, and fibers. The African Sahel (the grasslands just south of the Sahara) had the cereal grains sorghum, millet, and African rice and such pulses as cowpeas and African peanuts. In addition, guinea fowls provided meat. Separately, far- ther south in West Africa, the available domesticates were African yams, oil palms, watermelon, gourds, and cotton. Farther east, in Ethiopia, coffee was first domesti- cated along with certain local plants.

Native Americans domesticated plants and animals in three areas. The inhabitants of Central America and Mexico domesti- cated tomatoes, corn, beans, squash, and turkeys. South Americans (in the Andes and Amazon) domesticated potatoes, the grain

quinoa, various beans, and the llama, alpaca, and guinea pig. In addition, the inhabitants of the Eastern Woodlands (today’s eastern United States) domesticated a number of lo- cal plants that yield starchy or oily seeds, like the sunflower. Independently of all these areas, the farmers in New Guinea domes- ticated sugarcane, bananas, yams, and taro, but they lacked cereals and animals.

Of these nine separate cases of domes- tication in the world, only a few produced a wide range of edible plants, a balance of carbohydrates and proteins, and animals for meat, hides, and transportation. The Middle East was the richest area, followed by China and South and Central America. Some areas initiated farming or herding with so few plants and animals that people continued to forage or hunt for much of their food. Ethiopia, West Africa, New Guinea, and North America were such areas. In these

Figure 1.6 The first step of the agricultural revolution was to recognize the nutritive grains that grew in nearby wild plants. These are modern domesticated rice plants. Photo by Damien Boilley, January 5, 2006.

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cases, domestication was a part-time af- fair, supplemented by hunting, fishing, and gathering. In addition, Eurasia enjoyed a far greater variety of animals that could be domesticated than did Africa and the Americas.

Thus, the agricultural/pastoral revolu- tion began to create a world in which the accidents of geography enabled some peo- ple to benefit from a varied diet and wide range of animals under human control, while others did not. Almost all farming societies grew and prospered at the ex- pense of foragers. But some of the original agricultural societies—again, New Guinea, the West Africans, and the native North Americans—did not develop the complex urban and literate cultures that became the next step for agriculturalists 5,000 years later. The most successful agricultural so- cieties, in addition to the Middle East and China, were probably Egypt, India, and the Mediterranean, all of which piggybacked on the original discoveries in the Middle East or Southwest Asia.

East–West Transmission Advantages. What accounts for this difference in for- tunes? Again, geography may be the answer. In general, plants, animals, people, and ideas moved more easily along an east–west than a north–south axis. If other climate factors like rainfall and temperature were similar, newly domesticated crops could be easily transplanted on the same latitude because the climate and growing season were similar. The plants and animals that were domesti- cated in the Fertile Crescent traveled easily from the Tigris and Euphrates westward to Egypt, the Mediterranean and Europe, and eastward to Iran, Afghanistan, and India. In each of those areas, the new farmers and herders added new crops and tamed new

animals—Egyptian figs and donkeys; Indian cucumbers, cotton, and humped cattle; and Mediterranean olives and grapes. The result was a remarkably varied basket of cereals, pulses, fruits, and vegetables and numerous animals for food, transport, clothing, and pets, most of which could travel back and forth between Europe and India.

Conversely, plants and animals resisted north–south movement. Horses would not breed easily close to the equator because the even hours of night and day hampered ovulation. Mexican corn took 1,000 years to reach what is today the United States.

Chinese domesticated crops and animals also moved more quickly along the east- bound paths of the great river valleys: millet along the Yellow River and rice along the Yangtze. But north–south movement was slow. Northern domesticated pigs, dogs, and mulberry trees did not transfer eas- ily to the more tropical zones of south- ern China. Southern Chinese wet rice and tropical fruits did not easily move north, but along with pigs and chickens, they trav- eled in two directions: south into Southeast Asia and east to the island of Taiwan about 6,000 years ago. There, the southern Chi- nese cultural complex joined the maritime and fishing traditions of the island, forming a new complex called Austronesian and a culture of maritime expansion. In the Phil- ippines about 5,000 years ago, this culture added such tropical products as bananas, taro, sugarcane, and breadfruit to their diet of rice, chicken, and pigs. Within another 1,000 years, it spread to the coasts of South- east Asia and the islands of Indonesia, from which Polynesian descendants colonized the Pacific Ocean as far east as Easter Island and as far west as the Indian Ocean and Mada- gascar, paving the way for the introduction

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of the yams, bananas, and other tropical fruits into Africa.

To summarize, the domestication of plants and animals gave certain peoples, though not always the original inventors, a leg up on the next global revolution—cities and state societies. The future would belong to those who, by accident of geography, could borrow, imitate, innovate, and in- teract with neighbors in a similar environ- ment—and that often meant latitude.

Agriculture and Language. The first farmers may have spread their languages with their seeds. Whether farmers actu- ally moved and displaced earlier hunting- gathering populations or passed on their words with their seeds and techniques, a map of the spread of languages follows the spread of agriculture. Each of the original nine places of domestication seems to have passed its language along to those who ad- opted its foods. Thus, the Indo-European language family, which extends from Ire- land to India, covers a northern band of the territory that received the crops of the Fertile Crescent. The Afro-Asiatic family of languages, which includes ancient Egyptian and Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic, extends across a southern band of shared crops from Egypt or the Fertile Cres- cent. Chinese cultivators may have spread three language families: Sino-Tibetan, Tai, and Austroasiatic. From the latter in Tai- wan came the Austronesian language group, which spread throughout the Pacific. Most of these language groups spread in an east– west direction. Where such movement was blocked, as in the Americas, languages and crops moved slower and not as far. In Africa, the Niger-Congo language family spread from West Africa eastward and then south- ward, never fully displacing the earlier click

languages of the non-agricultural Khoisan people. In general, forager languages re- mained more localized.

Languages and crops could travel with people on the move or be exchanged in trade with foreigners. In the Americas, corn spread mainly through trade. Mexican corn moved gradually to the southwestern and southeastern United States in separate se- ries of trading exchanges. In the Middle East, early farmers spread their crops and languages by moving to new areas and cul- tivating new lands. The process varied in speed and intensity. Early agriculture spread rapidly. One recent theory argues for a spur in a possible natural catastrophe: the dis- placement of early farmers by the overflow of the Mediterranean onto the shores of the Black Sea about 8,000 years ago.32 Whether the early farmers of the Mediterranean were refugees from a rapidly flooding homeland or merely the descendants of earlier Middle Eastern farmers starting new families, the process was swift across the Mediterranean but very slow into northern Europe.

Agriculture, however, drove one of many waves of language change. In later centuries, pastoral peoples, most notably Arabs, Turks, and Mongols, spread their languages over vast areas of Eurasia. In the modern era, European colonizers substituted their lan- guages for innumerable Native American, African, and Asian languages, a process that continues today with the use of Eng- lish for certain computer and international purposes.

The Long Agricultural Age: Places and Processes

From our vantage point as members of a city-based civilization, it may seem as

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though the domestication of plants and ani- mals was merely a step on the way to cities, states, governments, complex societies, and often bronze metallurgy and writing. But ag- ricultural village life, without cities or states, was the norm for most of humanity for most of the past 10,000 years. In this section, we survey the scope and length of the agricul- tural age by looking at a few specific sites at particular times. In addition to suggesting the enormous variety of agricultural societ- ies before the formation of cities and states, these examples suggest how the transition to cities occurred.

Jericho. The remains of one of the earli- est agricultural villages in human history lie beneath the modern town of Jericho in

Palestine, on an oasis in the desert northwest of the Dead Sea. Archaeologists have un- earthed signs of the conversion from gath- ering to farming dating more than 10,000 years ago. There are round huts indicat- ing permanent settlement and a large wall circling the village. There is also evidence of pottery, baked brick, textiles, grinding stones, and the polished stone blades that became a hallmark of the Neolithic period, or New Stone Age. More than 2,000 people may have lived in the village at an early stage. Its permanence for them is attested by the recent discovery of decorated hu- man skulls with seashells in the eye sockets, placed in a collective burial.

Catal Huyuk. One of the most intensely excavated sites of the early agricultural or Neolithic age is Catal Huyuk, in Turkey, dating from 9,000 years ago.33 Spanning 32 acres, at its height it may have num- bered 10,000 people. While earlier Jericho consisted of rounded dwellings and only later switched to rectangular houses, Catal Huyuk was composed from its beginning of rectangular dwellings, situated side by side and on top of each other like a layered field of bricks three or four stories high. Without streets to separate one row of buildings from another, the people of Catal Huyuk entered their dwellings by ladder from the roof.

Why did farming people deliberately live in such crowded quarters in what re- sembles a modern apartment complex? For over 1,000 years (10,500 to 9,000 years ago), the dwellings of people in places like Jeri- cho were moving farther apart as foragers became full-time farmers. It seems that the introduction of agriculture pushed people apart by giving families independence from each other. But from the beginnings of Catal Huyuk, about 9,000 years ago, its

Figure 1.7 Inside a model of a house in Catal Huyuk. Notice the ladder to the roof entrance. Photo by Stipich Béla.

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inhabitants clustered together like bees in a beehive. James Mellaart, the archaeolo- gist who began excavations of the site in the 1950s, called it a “Neolithic city.” But later excavations have revealed none of the elements of city life except for the clustered living. Archaeologists have found no public spaces, for instance. Even Jericho had public walls and a tower. Catal Huyuk also shows no sign of a division of labor, not even the distinction between farmers and other oc- cupations, which is a basic characteristic of city life. Each family constructed its own home with a slightly different mix of materi- als for mud and plaster. Families also used the nearby deposits of obsidian for blades and mirrors, which they fashioned in their own homes.

In fact, the inhabitants of Catal Huyuk were not even full-time farmers. People

lived on wild seeds, acorns, pistachio nuts, fruits, and grains as well as domesticated cereals (wheat and barley), lentils, and peas. Similarly, while they domesticated sheep, goats, and cattle, they also consumed wild horses, deer, boar, bears, foxes, wolves, dogs, birds, and fish. Catal Huyuk had other Neo- lithic characteristics, however. The people created ceramic pottery, wove cloth that they wore in addition to skins, and amassed a wide range of tools, containers (straw baskets as well as pots), weapons (bow and arrow), and objects for art or ritual.

Archaeologists also found early exam- ples of an art form that is characteristic of Neolithic societies. There are numer- ous figurines of women, many of which show heavy breasts or protruding stomachs that might suggest pregnancy or fertility. One enthroned woman figurine, dubbed the

Figure 1.8 A statue from about 6000 BCE called by some “the great goddess of Catal Huyuk,” sitting on a throne, flanked by large cats and giving birth: an echo of earlier “Venus figurines” and a precursor of the Middle Eastern agricultural goddess Cybele. HIP/ Art Resource, NY.

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“mother goddess” by Mellaart, evokes later myths of goddesses who suckled animals and of Earth Mothers who gave birth to veg- etation each spring. But there are other im- ages as well. There are sculptured heads of bulls and animal horns on walls. There are headless figures with arms and legs splayed outward, possibly giving birth. There are also images of vultures, apparently pecking at headless bodies.

What does all this mean? Archaeologists are excavating this huge site with painstak- ing care, and their work is expected to take another 20 years. But at this point, they can venture a couple of theories. One is that religion, whether or not it was related to goddess worship, was a central focus of daily life in Catal Huyuk. There are no free- standing temples. The sculptured clay and plaster images have been found in people’s homes, usually in one room of a three- room house. This separateness within the house, in a place that was frequently swept clean, suggests a sacred space for each fam- ily: a family religion rather than a larger public worship.

Finally, the excavations reveal consid- erable attention to death, dying, and the dead. Like earlier farmers (e.g., Jericho), the people of Catal Huyuk buried their dead under the floor. Sometimes they decapitated the bodies and just buried the skulls. The images of vultures pecking at headless bod- ies may reveal what happened to the rest of the remains outside. In Jericho, whole rooms of skulls were found in addition to sculptured or cast figures of the heads of the deceased. In Catal Huyuk and some nearby sites, people did something else. At the end of a particular time frame, after a number of family skulls or bodies had been buried under the house, the whole house would

be filled up and everything covered in dirt, including the images on the wall, the oven, and the possessions of the last person who died. Then it appears that the next genera- tion of the same family would construct its house over the one that had just been buried, beginning the cycle again. This is why Catal Huyuk appeared to be a Neolithic apart- ment complex: people did not live on top of each other; rather, they lived on top of their ancestors. This may have been a form of ancestor worship or a way of making sense of the passing of previous generations. The fertility imagery might have added the im- portant dimension of the future. In any case, art, religion, and daily life seem to have been closely related in Catal Huyuk in houses that were also temples to the ancestors.

Banpo. One of the oldest well-excavated Neolithic sites in China is Banpo, a village near the Yellow River and modern Xian, settled about 6,000 years ago. The inhabit- ants domesticated millet, pigs, and dogs and supplemented their diets with numer- ous fish and fowl. The dwellings at Banpo resembled Jericho more than Catal Huyuk; many were rounded dwellings of mud and thatch on a scaffold of wooden poles; they were scattered rather than clustered to- gether. A trench encircled the village, like the wall of Jericho. Like Jericho, Banpo had public spaces that may have been meeting or ritual areas. But adults and children were buried whole, adults outside the trench, children inside the village and enclosed in pottery jars with open bottoms. Like both Catal Huyuk and Jericho, Banpo was a vil- lage of equals. There was little, if any, sign of political or religious leadership: no palaces, temples, or signs of differentiated status. Each house was the same size, constructed by its occupants.

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As at Catal Huyuk, there is some evidence at other early Neolithic sites that women played an important role. At Banpo, a young female was buried with more possessions than others. This may be a sign that the society was matrilineal, that is, that inheri- tance was figured from mother to daughter. Matrilineal inheritance was common in Na- tive American Neolithic societies and among some of the first Neolithic settlers in Europe, the Bandkeramik people, where female graves are also more ornate than those of males. In fact, the matrilineal clan may have been com- mon in early Neolithic society. Excavations in Thailand at Khok Phanon Di (near modern

Bangkok) have revealed evidence of early rice cultivation about 4,000 years ago along what was a shellfish-rich mangrove coast. Among many unexceptional burials, archaeologists have excavated the body of a woman elabo- rately clothed in a dress sewn with 120,000 beads whose arms were covered with decora- tive shell bracelets. Because she is buried with a treasure of pottery, archaeologists surmise that this “Princess” of Khok Phanon Di was an expert potter who may have traded her pottery for shell ornaments. More generally, the role of women in producing high-quality pottery at Khok Phanon Di may have raised their status.

If early Neolithic society was frequently matrilineal, it may have been related to

Figure 1.9 Chinese vase from early Neolithic village, Banpo, about 5000 BCE, marked with hemp cord. The agricultural revolution created pottery and advanced weaving, both likely women’s work. © DeA Picture Library/ Art Resource, NY.

Figure 1.10 Writing was a later urban invention, but we see here some possible beginnings in pottery design from Banpo village 6,000 years ago.

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The Long Prologue 31

women’s role in the domestication of agri- culture. As the gatherers of an earlier age, women were the first to cultivate plants. One can easily imagine an early associa- tion between women’s capacity to produce life from their own bodies and their skill or rapport with Mother Earth. The worship of women’s fertility might have been a key ingredient of Neolithic religion. Long after Catal Huyuk had been abandoned, farm- ing communities worshipped goddesses of the earth, harvest, field, or hunt. One ar- chaeologist, Marija Gimbutas, has reported excavating thousands of figurines that sug- gest the continuation of a worship of the mother goddess in southern Europe until about 4,000 years ago. Many later cultures captured in written myths and stories what must have been living legend in the early age of agriculture. The Sumerian goddess Inanna descends to the underworld, and the crops and animals die; she returns, and all life is reborn. The Greek goddess of the harvest, Demeter, allows the earth to turn green during the six months that her daughter Persephone is allowed to visit from the underworld. Later folk myths con- tinued the identification of women and the fertility of the earth: women should plant corn because they know how to produce children, the sterile wife is injurious to a garden, seed grows best when planted by a pregnant woman, and only bare-breasted women should harvest the crops.34 Until quite recently, it was common practice to throw rice at a bride to ensure her fertility.

Ibo Culture. In some places, Neolithic culture ended with the rise of cities 5,000 years ago. New urban ways replaced the culture of the village. But in most parts of the world, Neolithic culture continued or changed more gradually. The modern

African novelist Chinua Achebe re-creates the Neolithic culture of his Ibo people in a series of novels set in West Africa at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. In Things Fall Apart, a story of the destruction of traditional Ibo culture by European missionaries and co- lonialists, as well as other historical novels, Achebe recalls a world of family-centered rural Africa in which individual households are relatively equal and individuals are dis- tinguished by merit and ability rather than birth. Ibo men compete not for money, which barely exists, but for titles that recog- nize their good works or feats of strength. Some have more yams than others, some are more ambitious than others, but everyone is taken care of by family, clan, and village. In proverbial Ibo wisdom, individuals must re- member their roots: “However tall a coconut tree, it originated in the ground.”35 And no one is entirely self-sufficient: “A bird with a very long beak does not peck out what is on its head.”36

At the beginning of the previous cen- tury, Ibo culture was also one in which both men and women had important sources of power and status. Both had personal spiri- tual guides, called chi, which they challenged only at their peril. There was an earth god- dess, Ani, who was the source of fertility, provider of the harvest, and arbiter of mo- rality. There were other gods and goddesses, natural and ancestral, mediated through priests and priestesses, but in an agricultural society, the earth goddess was the most im- portant in people’s lives. Her power did not necessarily translate into female domina- tion, however. Ani was interpreted through her priest.

In certain respects, Ibo culture favored men over women. Men but not women were

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32 Chapter 1

allowed to have more than one spouse. Men were the heads of the household. A male- centered culture encouraged men to disci- pline women and demeaned weaker males by calling them women.

Was Ibo society more male-centered than early Neolithic societies like Catal Huyuk? Did inequality increase? How did Neolithic societies change? In some cases, of course, they became larger. Population pressure could lead to increased density in a single village like Catal Huyuk. Alternately, a growing population could send members away to settle new colonies. On a large scale, this is how Austronesian and Polynesian society colonized the Pacific. Population size affected government. Small villages often governed themselves. Typically, a group of elders would decide what was best for the village. From all indications, Catal Huyuk managed such self-government by elders despite its size. The slice of Ibo culture that Achebe re-creates in Things Fall Apart consists of nine villages. In this case, some decisions were made by the elders of the vil- lage and some by the larger clan or tribe that embraces all nine villages.

Not all societies become larger and larger. Some were able to reach a balance and remain the same size for generations. But when some Neolithic societies expanded beyond the size of self-governing villages, they often developed a more complex sys- tem of government. Some anthropologists call this a transition from a tribal structure to a chiefdom. Such a transition may have occurred for the first time in the Middle East as early as 7,500 years ago and in the Ameri- cas about 3,000 years ago. One example of an American chiefdom was the Taino people of the Caribbean at the time of the arrival of Columbus, 500 years ago.

The Taino. The Taino inhabited the Bahamas and the Caribbean, north of Gua- deloupe, in 1492. The island of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic today) may have had as many as 500,000 inhabit- ants. Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica each had a population of a few hundred thou- sand. The Taino lived in villages of 100 to a few thousand in round wood and thatch dwellings around a plaza. In a slightly larger building on the plaza lived the cacique, or chief. A group of villages were ruled by a district chief, one of whom, the regional chief, was in charge of all districts. This hierarchical organization was reflected even on the small scale of the village, which dis- tinguished between upper- and lower-class people.

Taino society was also more specialized than Catal Huyuk or later Ibo society. There were Tainos experienced in such crafts as woodworking, pottery, cotton weaving, and hammering gold nuggets into jewelry (but not smelting). There were Tainos who made the hammocks in which most people slept, the baskets that hung from every wall, the elaborate wooden stools on which the chief sat, and the individual and grand chiefly canoes that provided transportation.37 Yet none of these were full-time specialists.

The basic work of Taino society, like less complex Neolithic societies, was agriculture. And the basic implements of agriculture were still the digging stick and the hoe. But Taino agriculture was more sophisticated than that of early Neolithic farmers. Those who lived in lush environments like the Taino often used a method of clearing land called swidden, or “slash and burn.” By this method, they cleared land by cutting trees so that they would die and dry out. Then they burned off the dry biomass for ash

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that would provide nutrients for three or four plantings before becoming exhausted, but at that point they would have to move on to slash and burn another area of for- est. The Taino developed a more sustain- able agriculture with a unique method of irrigating and draining their crops. They constructed mounds of soil called canuco in which they planted their mainly root crops—yuca (manioc or cassava) and sweet potatoes. These mounds were self-irrigating and needed little weeding or care. Yuca and potatoes added carbohydrates to a rich pro- tein diet that included fish, small animals, and beans.

Did the complexity of Taino society make it necessary to have a more hierarchi- cal political structure? Or did the caciques and nobles create a more complex society for their own benefit? Two aspects of Taino culture may help answer that question: reli- gion and sports.

Taino religion, like other Neolithic reli- gions, had elements of ancestor and nature worship. Every individual had a special rela- tionship to an ancestral deity called a zemi. While each Ibo had one chi, the Taino had many zemis; the term was applied to objects that contained the spiritual force of the ancestor as well as the ancestor. These ob- jects—made of wood, bone, shell, pottery, or cotton cloth—were kept in special places in a Taino home. In this respect, they may have functioned much like the skulls, masks, figu- rines, and sculpture of ancient Catal Huyuk. But unlike Catal Huyuk and Ibo society, each Taino village also had a chief. And each chief had zemis in his home or in specially built temples that required the worship of the entire village. Once a year, the villagers would gather to pay homage to the chief’s zemi. Women brought cassava bread as a

gift. A priest would make sacrifices, and all would sing the praises of the zemis and feast and dance. Clearly, the centerpiece of Taino religion was the chief’s zemi. The sacred ground was the plaza in front of the chief’s house, where all rituals and festivals were carried out under the watchful eye of the most important zemi.

As the religion of the Taino chiefdom was both more centralized and more wide- spread than that of less complex societies, so was its leisure. The bounty of the natu- ral environment, combined with canuco agriculture, gave the Taino a considerable amount of free time. One activity that filled that time was a kind of ball game that was played throughout the Americas. The ances- tors of the Taino had brought the rubber ball from the Amazon. On the Taino court, two sides of about 10 players each tried to keep the ball in the air without using their hands or feet. Ball courts were located not only in villages but also at the border between vil- lages. In Puerto Rico, the most elaborate ball courts have been found on what were the borders between chiefdoms, suggesting that they may have played a role in diplomacy or the settlement of disputes. In the Caribbean, the outcome of the ball game was benign, but in the more complex states of Central America at the same time, the losers (or sometimes winners) would forfeit their lives. Did shared competition and shared religious observance bring unity and commonality to a society spread out over hundreds or thousands of villages? Or did the controller of the game and the owner of the zemi use sport and religion to magnify and centralize power?

The changing role of women offers a clue. Tainos worshipped two supreme dei- ties: a male god of cassava and the sea and

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