When our ancestors began to control fire, most likely somewhere in Africa around 400,000 years ago, the planet was set on a new course. We have little idea and even less evidence of how early humans made fire; perhaps they carried around smouldering bundles of leaves from forest fires, or captured the sparks thrown off when chipping stone or rubbing sticks together. However it happened, the human control of fire made an indelible mark on the earth’s ecosystems, and marked the beginning of the Anthropocene – the epoch in which humans have had a significant impact on the planet.
In Against the Grain James Scott describes these early stages as a ‘“thin” Anthropocene’, but ever since, the Anthropocene has been getting thicker. New layers of human impact were added by the adoption of farming about ten thousand years ago, the invention of the steam engine around 1780, and the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945. Today the Anthropocene is so dense that we have virtually lost sight of anything that could be called ‘the natural world’.
Fire changed humans as well as the world. Eating cooked food transformed our bodies; we developed a much shorter digestive tract, meaning that more metabolic energy was available to grow our brains. At the same time, Homo sapiens became domesticated by its dependence on fire for warmth, protection and fuel. If this was the start of human progress towards ‘civilisation’, then – according to the conventional narrative – the next step was the invention of agriculture around ten thousand years ago. Farming, it is said, saved us from a dreary nomadic Stone Age hunter-gatherer existence by allowing us to settle down, build towns and develop the city-states that were the centres of early civilisations. People flocked to them for the security, leisure and economic opportunities gained from living within thick city walls. The story continues with the collapse of the city-states and barbarian insurgency, plunging civilised worlds – ancient Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica – into their dark ages. Thus civilisations rise and fall. Or so we are told.
The perfectly formed city-state is the ideal, deeply ingrained in the Western psyche, on which our notion of the nation-state is founded, ultimately inspiring Donald Trump’s notion of a ‘city’ wall to keep out the barbarian Mexican horde, and Brexiters’ desire to ‘take back control’ from insurgent European bureaucrats. But what if the conventional narrative is entirely wrong? What if ancient ruins testify to an aberration in the normal state of human affairs rather than a glorious and ancient past to whose achievements we should once again aspire? What if the origin of farming wasn’t a moment of liberation but of entrapment? Scott offers an alternative to the conventional narrative that is altogether more fascinating, not least in the way it omits any self-congratulation about human achievement. His account of the deep past doesn’t purport to be definitive, but it is surely more accurate than the one we’re used to, and it implicitly exposes the flaws in contemporary political ideas that ultimately rest on a narrative of human progress and on the ideal of the city/nation-state.
Why did people start farming? At the ‘Man the Hunter’ symposium in Chicago in 1966, Marshall Sahlins drew on research from the likes of Richard B. Lee among the !Kung of the Kalahari to argue that hunter-gatherers enjoyed the ‘original affluent society’. Even in the most marginal environments, he said, hunter-gatherers weren’t engaged in a constant struggle for survival, but had a leisurely lifestyle. Sahlins and his sources may have pushed the argument a little too far, neglecting to consider, for instance, the time spent preparing food (lots of mongongo nuts to crack). But their case was strong enough to deal a severe blow to the idea that farming was salvation for hunter-gatherers: however you cut it, farming involves much higher workloads and incurs more physical ailments than relying on the wild. And the more we discover, as Scott points out, the better a hunter-gatherer diet, health and work-life balance look.
This is especially true of the hunter-gatherers who dwelled in the wetlands where the first farming communities developed, in the Fertile Crescent, the arc of South-West Asia now covered by Jordan, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, southern Turkey, Iran and Iraq. Scott’s book focuses on Mesopotamia – the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates where the first city-states also appeared – though it takes many diversions into ancient China, Mesoamerica, and the Roman and Greek ancient worlds. Until about ten thousand years ago, Mesopotamia had been a world of hunter-gatherers with access to a huge range of resources: reeds and sedges for building and food, a great variety of edible plants (clubrush, cat’s-tails, water lily, bulrush), tortoises, fish, molluscs, crustaceans, birds, waterfowl, small mammals and migrating gazelles, which were the chief source of protein. The wild larder was routinely replenished by the annual cycle of the ripening of fruits and wild vegetables, and the seasonal changes that brought the arrival of migratory species.
Wetland environments were available to hunter-gatherers elsewhere in the world too. In China’s Hangzhou Bay, phenomenally well-preserved waterlogged sites show that hunter-gatherers became sedentary amid a bounteous range of wild resources. I do my own fieldwork in Wadi Faynan, in southern Jordan, which is now an arid, largely treeless landscape, but 12,000 years ago a perennial river flowed there. Where it joined with the river of Wadi Dana, an oasis-like niche was created. That is where the early Neolithic site of WF16 is now located (we call it Neolithic even though there is no trace of domesticated crops and animals). A dense cluster of about thirty semi-subterranean dwellings was constructed there between 12,500 and 10,500 years ago by hunter-gatherers who were clearly enjoying a diverse and resilient set of local resources: hunting wild goats, trapping birds, collecting figs, wild grass, nuts and so forth. I suspect they were also practising some form of environmental management, setting fires to promote young shoots, building small dams to retain and divert water, and undertaking selective culls among wild herds to sustain animal populations.
The key to food security was diversity: if, by chance, a particular foodstuff gave out, there were always more to choose from. And so hunter-gatherers could become sedentary if they wished, without having to grow crops or rear livestock. The first cultivation of barley and wheat came from the slight modification of wild stands – weeding, removing pests, transplanting, sowing seeds into alluvial soils. This would have provided hunter-gatherers with a new source of food at the cost of little additional effort. The mystery is why cereal-farming came to be so dominant. Why hunter-gatherers passed up their affluent lifestyle in favour of far more onerous and risky existences growing a narrow range of crops and managing livestock is a fundamental question to which we have no good answer. Was it by choice, or was that first sowing of seed a trap, locking people into a seasonal cycle of planting and harvesting from which we have been unable to escape?
In Against the Grain James Scott describes these early stages as a ‘“thin” Anthropocene’, but ever since, the Anthropocene has been getting thicker. New layers of human impact were added by the adoption of farming about ten thousand years ago, the invention of the steam engine around 1780, and the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945. Today the Anthropocene is so dense that we have virtually lost sight of anything that could be called ‘the natural world’.
Fire changed humans as well as the world. Eating cooked food transformed our bodies; we developed a much shorter digestive tract, meaning that more metabolic energy was available to grow our brains. At the same time, Homo sapiens became domesticated by its dependence on fire for warmth, protection and fuel. If this was the start of human progress towards ‘civilisation’, then – according to the conventional narrative – the next step was the invention of agriculture around ten thousand years ago. Farming, it is said, saved us from a dreary nomadic Stone Age hunter-gatherer existence by allowing us to settle down, build towns and develop the city-states that were the centres of early civilisations. People flocked to them for the security, leisure and economic opportunities gained from living within thick city walls. The story continues with the collapse of the city-states and barbarian insurgency, plunging civilised worlds – ancient Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica – into their dark ages. Thus civilisations rise and fall. Or so we are told.The perfectly formed city-state is the ideal, deeply ingrained in the Western psyche, on which our notion of the nation-state is founded, ultimately inspiring Donald Trump’s notion of a ‘city’ wall to keep out the barbarian Mexican horde, and Brexiters’ desire to ‘take back control’ from insurgent European bureaucrats. But what if the conventional narrative is entirely wrong? What if ancient ruins testify to an aberration in the normal state of human affairs rather than a glorious and ancient past to whose achievements we should once again aspire? What if the origin of farming wasn’t a moment of liberation but of entrapment? Scott offers an alternative to the conventional narrative that is altogether more fascinating, not least in the way it omits any self-congratulation about human achievement. His account of the deep past doesn’t purport to be definitive, but it is surely more accurate than the one we’re used to, and it implicitly exposes the flaws in contemporary political ideas that ultimately rest on a narrative of human progress and on the ideal of the city/nation-state.
Why did people start farming? At the ‘Man the Hunter’ symposium in Chicago in 1966, Marshall Sahlins drew on research from the likes of Richard B. Lee among the !Kung of the Kalahari to argue that hunter-gatherers enjoyed the ‘original affluent society’. Even in the most marginal environments, he said, hunter-gatherers weren’t engaged in a constant struggle for survival, but had a leisurely lifestyle. Sahlins and his sources may have pushed the argument a little too far, neglecting to consider, for instance, the time spent preparing food (lots of mongongo nuts to crack). But their case was strong enough to deal a severe blow to the idea that farming was salvation for hunter-gatherers: however you cut it, farming involves much higher workloads and incurs more physical ailments than relying on the wild. And the more we discover, as Scott points out, the better a hunter-gatherer diet, health and work-life balance look.
This is especially true of the hunter-gatherers who dwelled in the wetlands where the first farming communities developed, in the Fertile Crescent, the arc of South-West Asia now covered by Jordan, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, southern Turkey, Iran and Iraq. Scott’s book focuses on Mesopotamia – the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates where the first city-states also appeared – though it takes many diversions into ancient China, Mesoamerica, and the Roman and Greek ancient worlds. Until about ten thousand years ago, Mesopotamia had been a world of hunter-gatherers with access to a huge range of resources: reeds and sedges for building and food, a great variety of edible plants (clubrush, cat’s-tails, water lily, bulrush), tortoises, fish, molluscs, crustaceans, birds, waterfowl, small mammals and migrating gazelles, which were the chief source of protein. The wild larder was routinely replenished by the annual cycle of the ripening of fruits and wild vegetables, and the seasonal changes that brought the arrival of migratory species.
Wetland environments were available to hunter-gatherers elsewhere in the world too. In China’s Hangzhou Bay, phenomenally well-preserved waterlogged sites show that hunter-gatherers became sedentary amid a bounteous range of wild resources. I do my own fieldwork in Wadi Faynan, in southern Jordan, which is now an arid, largely treeless landscape, but 12,000 years ago a perennial river flowed there. Where it joined with the river of Wadi Dana, an oasis-like niche was created. That is where the early Neolithic site of WF16 is now located (we call it Neolithic even though there is no trace of domesticated crops and animals). A dense cluster of about thirty semi-subterranean dwellings was constructed there between 12,500 and 10,500 years ago by hunter-gatherers who were clearly enjoying a diverse and resilient set of local resources: hunting wild goats, trapping birds, collecting figs, wild grass, nuts and so forth. I suspect they were also practising some form of environmental management, setting fires to promote young shoots, building small dams to retain and divert water, and undertaking selective culls among wild herds to sustain animal populations.
The key to food security was diversity: if, by chance, a particular foodstuff gave out, there were always more to choose from. And so hunter-gatherers could become sedentary if they wished, without having to grow crops or rear livestock. The first cultivation of barley and wheat came from the slight modification of wild stands – weeding, removing pests, transplanting, sowing seeds into alluvial soils. This would have provided hunter-gatherers with a new source of food at the cost of little additional effort. The mystery is why cereal-farming came to be so dominant. Why hunter-gatherers passed up their affluent lifestyle in favour of far more onerous and risky existences growing a narrow range of crops and managing livestock is a fundamental question to which we have no good answer. Was it by choice, or was that first sowing of seed a trap, locking people into a seasonal cycle of planting and harvesting from which we have been unable to escape?
by Steve Mithen, LRB | Read more:
Image: uncredited
