THE THANKSGIVING DECOUPLING: FUN WITH FARMS

In “The Thanksgiving Decoupling,” Season 7, Episode 9, Penny reveals her farming roots.

“Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.”

—Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)

From Foraging to Farming

Penny was born on a farm near Omaha, Nebraska. In “The Maternal Capacitance,” Penny tells of how her father, Wyatt, raised her like a boy. This is meant to explain her tomboy nature, her ability to rebuild a tractor engine, and her engagement in many activities, such as sports, to earn her father’s love, thereby gaining the nickname “Slugger” until Penny hit puberty.

In the show’s Season 10 premiere episode, “The Conjugal Conjecture,” Penny’s mother, Susan, seems quite embarrassed by her family’s shortcomings. For starters, there’s the drinking of her husband, Wyatt, and her son’s criminal record. Although she’d met Leonard before, she fears meeting his academic parents, not wanting them to think of her family as white trash due to their humble existence as farming folk, though she seems to have little shame over Penny’s lack of knowledge regarding the physics of cow tipping. And yet, a brief odyssey into the early history of farming would have presented Susan with plenty to be proud of—her family business is part of a long tradition running back over twelve thousand years.

Modern shopping sure is a tremendous convenience. All you need do is saunter down to the supermarket, and presto, shelves full of fruit, veg, meat, and fish. Not only that, but corporate online giants plan to make life even easier, promising a mere thirty-minute turnaround time from mouse click to drone delivery of your sandwiches, sushi, or sex toy. But perhaps Susan would care to imagine what life was like for ancient humans, all those years ago, back in the old Stone Age days of foraging and hunter-gathering.

Foraging was far from convenient. For one thing, you had to hunt and gather all your own food. You had to seek for yourself the riches the planet provided. Prehistoric people had to kill to eat meat, and hunting could be a complex matter. The entire community might be engaged in finding the food that made the difference between survival and extinction, so Stone Age humans made a very important discovery: cooperation and people power made for an easier hunt. Through custom and practice, prehistoric people found power in numbers—the more people involved in the hunt, the better the hunt went. And this was especially true if they planned the hunt. Planning and thinking were more important than sheer force. They hunted mostly mammoths, reindeer, and buffaloes. Hunting must have been highly exciting and a truly significant event for Stone Age humans, as ancient artists made it the main theme for many of their cave paintings.

Meat wasn’t the only thing on the Stone Age menu, of course. Prehistoric peoples, such as Neanderthals and early homo sapiens, would also have foraged for fruit, nuts, seeds, roots, and mushrooms. Early humans were excellent fishermen, too. Nets of animal hide were used to catch fish, and stone hatchets were used to make boats out of tree trunks. In fact, the foraging life is so good, some humans are still in the hunter-gatherer habit. In the summer of 2014, tribesmen living deep in the rainforests of Peru emerged into the “outside world.” They were members of the Mashco-Piro clan, who inhabit remote regions of the Amazon rainforest. In 2013, scholars had estimated there were more than one hundred such tribes around the world, most of them living in the dense forests of South America, Central Africa, and New Guinea.

Sadly for foraging, but good for Susan’s case of gaining kudos for her family business, some humans decided it was time to have fun on farms. To be fair, this may have been because there was something of a crisis in the prehistoric world. The trouble with being successful at hunting is, given the growing numbers of humans, there’s less meat to go around. The animals you prey upon may start falling in numbers, too. Or perhaps the climate takes a turn for the icy, as the Earth did when it had its last ice age, between about 110,000 and 12,000 years ago. In such situations, the animals you hunt might all die, or move to sunnier climates. Your foraging community might die away on the spot.

It’s scenarios such as those above that many scholars believe explain the culture shift from hunting and gathering to farming. The evidence in the archaeology shows this. The world centers of the origin of farming are thought to be the Fertile Crescent, around 10,000 BC; the Yangtze and Yellow River basins, about 7000 BC; the New Guinea Highlands, between 7000 and 4000 BC; Central Mexico, between 3000 and 2000 BC; Northern South America, between 3000 and 2000 BC; sub-Saharan Africa, between 3000 and 2000 BC; and finally eastern North America, as late as 2000 to 1000 BC. By the time Penny’s family had begun farming in Nebraska, humans had been at it for well over twelve thousand years.

So, in a number of different places about the globe, humans began to domesticate plants and animals. This change sounds quite simple, but it’s also believed by scholars to have led to the most important developments in human history, such as writing, society, private property, and mathematics (this last development no doubt came as a disappointment to many but could have represented a tremendous boast for Susan at the wedding, had she done her homework). And all this started around twelve thousand years ago, just after the end of the last ice age maximum.

Fertile Crescent and the Animal Lottery

Susan should know that the area of the Fertile Crescent is of special interest in the history of farming. This crescent-shaped region of southwest Asia proved a particularly suitable site for the Agricultural Revolution, as it’s called. (Indeed, one can easily imagine Susan declaring, “Well of course, our family is in the long tradition of farming that runs back to the Agricultural Revolution, don’t you know.”) Modern-day countries with appreciable land within the Fertile Crescent are Iraq and Iran, Syria and Cyprus, Lebanon and Jordan, Egypt and Palestine, as well as the southeastern fringe of Turkey. Incidentally, the term Fertile Crescent was popularized by the early twentieth-century American archeologist James Henry Breasted. In his 1916 book, Ancient Times, A History of the Early World, Breasted wrote, “This fertile crescent is approximately a semicircle, with the open side toward the south, having the west end at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean, the center directly north of Arabia, and the east end at the north end of the Persian Gulf. It lies like an army facing south. . . . This great semicircle, for lack of a name, may be called the Fertile Crescent.”

“What makes the Crescent so special?” Susan could ask, as she holds forth on the topic. For one thing, ancient civilizations, such as Sumer and Ancient Egypt, flourished in the region due to the inundations from the surrounding rivers of the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Nile. The area is also geographically key as a “bridge” between Africa and Eurasia. This central position may have led to a greater amount of biodiversity than either Europe or North Africa. The Crescent had many diverse climates, and its variety in elevation has gifted it a number of “founder” crops for early farming, including barley, flax, chick pea, pea, and lentil, with a high percentage of plants that can self-pollinate.

The Mediterranean climate has a long dry season, and a short season of rain. Scholars think this may have favored the small plants with large seeds, like wheat and barley. The variety in elevation of Crescent land also promotes a range of different types of soil within it. And these conditions may have made farming easier for former foragers in the Crescent, compared with other areas with a similar climate.

Susan declares, “While it may be true that no smart-ass ever did a cave painting of a farm, at least farmers didn’t have to graze for nine hours a day, for heaven’s sake, as they did when foraging. But let me tell you about water! Water is needed before you settle a farm.” She then holds forth on how the geography of water worked well for the animals of the Fertile Crescent, too. There are nearly two million species of animals on our planet. And yet only 148 species are suitable for farming. Of those 148, only fourteen have ever been successfully farmed: goats, sheep, pigs, cows, horses, donkeys, Bactrian camels, Arabian camels, water buffalo, llamas, reindeer, yaks, mithuns, and Bali cattle. Only fourteen large animals in twelve thousand years of farming, Susan exclaims! And guess what, of the big fourteen animals, none was from North America, Australia, or sub-Saharan Africa. Even South America had just one: the llama. The other thirteen were all from Asia, North Africa, and Europe. And the big four livestock animals—cows, pigs, sheep, and goats—were all native to the Fertile Crescent. The area that was home to the best-irrigated crops in the world was also home to the best-watered animals. Little wonder it became known as the Fertile Crescent!

Susan decides to press home her point as to why farming in the Crescent was key to the development of farming elsewhere: “Now, any two points of the globe that share the same latitude also share the same length of day, and often share a similar climate and vegetation. Rivers and marshlands were crucial to the rise of civilization in the Crescent, and because there were more great rivers east and west of the Crescent too, where the farm animals and crops could also thrive, there was an explosion of civilization. These places were on the same latitude. They shared the same water access, and the same climate, so farming prospered east toward India, and west toward North Africa and Europe. Wherever there was water, our little old Agricultural Revolution changed the world!”

But wait. A nervous look hits Susan’s face. She’s seen the wicked glint in Sheldon’s gaze. Finally, the penny drops on the vulnerable point of her fun with farming story. Sheldon is no doubt about to say that if the big four livestock animals were used to pull a plough on elevated land in the Crescent, how come Penny knows so little about the tipping of cows, which may be easy on sloping ground but is obviously physically impossible on the level?