A man, possibly representing a priest or God, feeding a flock of sheep on an Uruk-period marble cylinder seal, accompanied by its impression in clay.

2

FARMING AND DIVISION OF LABOUR, 10000–5000 BCE

The work of hunter-gatherers largely consisted of an extensive search for means of subsistence. When food became scarce, this pursuit moved further afield. The starting point for this search was Africa but, progressively, Homo sapiens spread throughout the Old World, south of the Great Northern Ice Sheet. At the same time, people were constantly having to adapt to different circumstances – climates, flora and fauna – and implement landscape management with the help of fire. Consequently, the daily diet varied enormously between Tasmania in the south-east and Ireland in the north-west, between South Africa in the south-west and Japan in the north-east; that is to say, in those parts of the world inhabited by humans around 20,000 years ago.

Around 12,000 years ago, or 10000 BCE, a gradual change in human food supply becomes visible, with humans effecting great changes in flora and fauna – far more than their hunter-gatherer forebears – and, consequently, in the utilization of available energy.1 The qualitative transition in question is that of human consumption and the switch from wild plants to cultivated plants and from wild animals to domestic animals (cattle) and their products, resulting in a sharp decrease in the consumption of wild animals (except for fish).

Map 2. Origins of domestication and spread of some grains and goat/sheep.

Our unit of analysis becomes smaller in this chapter. From the labour relations within the band of hunter-gatherers we now switch to those within the peasant household, producing for its own consumption. These relations continue to be reciprocal, although gendered task divisions become more prominent. The next question, then, is how labour relations developed between these peasant households, united in ‘tribes’ of hundreds or thousands of households. Those between peasant households and emerging specialists like blacksmiths, potters and weavers may be envisaged – parallel to the Indian jajmani system (p. 143) – as the reciprocal local exchange of products and services outside of markets. With the relations between more and less successful farming households we encounter two models: the African (or Bantu) model, where inequality was insignificant for thousands of years, probably because of low population densities and ample opportunities for mobility; and the ‘aggrandizer model’, evidence of which is found in parts of Eurasia, mainly in the form of clear status differentials in burial practices.

A brief overview of what the specialists have to say about the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ (pp. 48–56) is followed by a much-needed concretization of what agricultural work entails (pp. 56–61). On that basis, we can reflect on the division of labour between men and women with respect to food production (pp. 61–5) and the link between the Neolithic Revolution and the unequal remuneration for efforts between households (pp. 65–72) that possibly emerged during it. This division of labour occurs within the wider context of the tribe and relationships between food-producing and other households, and also tentatively between leaders and their households, on the one hand, and their co-tribespeople or compatriots expected to pay on the other.

The Neolithic Revolution

The circumstances in which farmers and livestock breeders lived for thousands of years alongside hunter-gatherers and only later became dominant is a question that has occupied generations of archaeologists and is still not fully resolved.² Two assertions stand out, however: climate change and overhunting. The climate change that occurred some 12,000 years ago caused a clear, albeit gradual, rise in global temperature.3 These temperature increases initially facilitated population growth and further migration across the globe, quickly followed by an intensification of human work. The climate shifted from cold and dry to warm and wet, creating an environment in which plants and animals could thrive and, in turn, greater prosperity for our hunting and gathering forebears. Population growth due to the vast increase in plant foods on the steppes of south-eastern Europe and Siberia resulted in more contact and thus uniformity of products, for example, the similarly shaped microliths of the Early Natufian communities in the Middle East (12,300–10,800 years ago).

Prior to this climate warming, however, as we have seen, there was also a radical change in hunting methods.⁴ As evidenced by the famous cave paintings of animals in various poses, prehistoric hunters had a strong preference for the meat of large-hoofed mammals. This preference remained unchanged during major climatic fluctuations until, from 30,000 years ago, the share of these meat supplies in the human diet declined dramatically, as demonstrated for several locations in western Eurasia. Given that the climate then stayed relatively stable and that there are no indications of culturally determined changes in taste, the most likely explanation for this appears to be overhunting of the largest animal species. As we saw in the previous chapter, this was superseded by individual hunters scouring for small animals and the increasing importance of the proceeds of gathering for the food supply. As will become clear, these shifts in the diet stimulated the domestication of plants and animals.

What we refer to as the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ is a fundamental change in our means of subsistence from extensive food-extracting (‘living off the land’) to intensive food-producing economies, in which humans took responsibility for the reproduction of their food through the domestication of plants and animals. While neither a revolution in the classical sense (a radical change in a short time) nor an invention, and certainly not the disappearance of hunting-gathering as a source of income, in the long run, the implications of this change for human history and certainly for the history of work are profound. Hence, in the absence of better knowledge, my use of the familiar metaphor, the Neolithic Revolution.

For several reasons, it is not easy to summarize this process, so essential to the history of work, briefly. Not least because it is unbelievably complex. That said, it is certainly not due to a lack of good, modern research; on the contrary. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to state that no subject dealt with in this book has been so rigorously overhauled in recent decades as the Neolithic Revolution. And it continues to be the case – it is not easy for a general historian to keep up.

The study of the origins of agriculture is no longer predominantly limited to the Near East, and prehistoric science is now actively practised all over the world. Moreover, it has rapidly become interdisciplinary, as illustrated by a symposium held in Mexico in March 2009, where participants included archaeologists, archaeobotanists, archaeozoologists, geneticists and physical anthropologists.5 While the attendant specialists provided greater insight into the domestication of crops and animals, they were unable to agree on the reasons why hunter-gatherers swapped their stable mode of existence for the many insecurities of farming life. On the one hand, the simultaneity of many of the new ‘inventions’ in the cultivation of wheat, rice, sheep and cows in earth’s far-flung places requires the search for a common cause. On the other hand, several specialists remain sceptical or find this premature and prefer to look for causes that apply to a more limited area.

In the search for causes, climate improvement (followed by population growth) and overhunting are primary factors, but the consequent human behaviours are also determinant. The periodic surpluses that were made possible by agriculture had to be divided, just like the proceeds of hunter-gathering. Since there are no indications of private ownership of land or herds in the first millennia of the Neolithic Revolution or in Africa until much later, the question arises about how these surpluses were distributed, and about how farmers dealt with windfalls. As we will see, for thousands of years, in Africa, when the group managed to, say, kill a large animal, the spoils were shared by way of redistribution. In Eurasia, however, a new phenomenon materialized, that of aggrandizers, who acquired a disproportionate share of the harvest for themselves and for their households.

While the reasons why hunter-gatherers became farmers may still be the subject of debate, the most important consequences are now established. This change in the means of subsistence initially represented great success for the human species: according to some authors, the global population increased tenfold from 8 million at the start of the Neolithic to 85 million in 5000 BCE.⁶ At the same time, a gradual process of sedentarization and hence the accumulation of goods occurs, firstly of food and subsequently also of household effects and even valuables. It started with the semi-permanent establishment of hunter-gatherers in places that were so rich in natural nourishment that they no longer had to constantly hunt for their food. But this only became possible for larger parts of humanity with the development of agriculture.

This, too, was a lengthy process. In many parts of the world, farmers who employed the slash-and-burn method remained highly mobile. Every year, or every few years, an area of forest was burned down and crops were sown in the fertile ash. These farmers were thus continuously changing land. The specialization of certain farmers as pastoralists also involved a high degree of mobility. Finally, permanently established farmers could decide to move for all kinds of reasons – as evidenced by the immigration from the Old to the New World following Columbus’s discovery of that continent.7 These caveats aside, it remains the case that, since the Neolithic, humanity has become considerably more place-bound, which has had an enormous impact on the organization of work. It was a long-term process not least because it was by no means straightforward. Sometimes, farmers would even become hunters again.⁸ That often happened when hunters had something to offer a neighbouring farmer. These hunters began to specialize, so that they could exchange their products with farmers such as the Athabaskans, who became bison hunters 1,250 years ago, and, later, the ‘trappers’ around the Arctic Circle.⁹

The Neolithic Revolution occurred in different locations in the world, independently of each other. It always went hand in hand with trial and error and it always took a very long time. Prior to the emergence in the Near East of agricultural economies based on domestic crops and livestock, there had been roughly 4,000 years of stable and sustainable subsistence economies founded on a combination of free-roaming, managed and fully domesticated resources.¹⁰ In fact, three processes had to be completed before we can really talk about the predominance of the farming and/or herding activities of a particular community determining diet (up to this point associated with the products of hunting and gathering).¹¹

First was plant and animal management – that is, manipulation of and some degree of control over wild species of plants or animals but without cultivation or morphological changes. This involves the systematic collection and consumption of the largest, tastiest seeds and fruits from wild plants and, subsequently, facilitating (unconsciously) their reproduction through defecation and by spitting out these superior seeds in close proximity to one’s dwellings.

The next step was cultivation, or the intentional preparation of the soil for planting (initially) wild and (later) domesticated plants. This began with the conscious and literal weeding out of competitors in the vicinity of the increasing number of better yielding plants – also called ‘plant nurturing’ in ‘wild gardens’ – extensively applied in the Amazon region where cultivated plants such as cassava, cacao, coca and pineapple occurred.12 Both of these steps promoted the growth of the most beneficial mutants of these plants.

Only then did the step of actual domestication, involving morphological or genetic changes in plant and animal species, take place. It is much easier to domesticate plants than animals. Plants rather quickly exhibit distinct morphological changes as a consequence of cultivating the best varieties, by selecting and sowing or planting seeds and rhizomes.

There are three distinct pathways in the animal domestication process.¹³ Firstly, that of ‘commensals’, such as dogs, cats, guinea pigs, fowl and probably also pigs, adapted to a human niche. Then came the taming of goats, sheep and cattle. While commensals initiated the human–animal relationship by feeding on refuse around human habitats, these animals were initially focal prey hunted by humans for their meat. Subsequently, they were domesticated for a more stable and permanent supply. The third track is the ‘directed pathway’, whereby free-roaming animals (donkeys, horses, camels) are domesticated in order to obtain specific resources or ‘secondary products’,¹⁴ for instance milk and derived products, wool, traction, and riding and pack transportation. The domestication process continues to this day: ‘Humans and their domesticates exist in the symbiotic relationship of mutualism, as each species benefits from the other, in terms of its reproductive success. . . . It continues with each generation, as humans, plants and animals interact and certain phenotypic forms and behaviors are selected for.’¹⁵

Farming was only able to develop on the basis of all these steps, encompassing all the activities to obtain food by means of cultivating plants and the controlled herding of animals. Today, we know of at least twelve different places in the world where agriculture developed independently.¹⁶

It is simply not feasible to deal with all these fascinating innovations, even briefly. The first cases in the Middle East do, however, deserve a short discussion, partly because we now know that, throughout the Fertile Crescent, the management, cultivation and later domestication of plants and animals more or less went hand in hand.¹⁷ Plant management had already started there ten thousand years before domestication. The actual domestication of cereals (einkorn and rye, followed by barley, emmer and oats) and thereafter pulses (lentils, chickpeas and faba beans) and figs, dates from at least 11,500 years ago. In some places, almonds and pistachios were also added early on.

At roughly the same time, we see the domestication of caprines (sheep and goats), cattle and pigs a little further north in the Fertile Crescent. In this case, it was preceded by centuries of management strategies by hunters, who mainly selected young, male animals as prey, thereby promoting the preservation of female breeding stock. Meanwhile, it is estimated that the transition from hunting to herding goats on the upper reaches of the Euphrates, in present-day Turkey, occurred already 10,500 years ago. In the first instance, wild goats were caught alive and fed in captivity. In a subsequent phase, more tame specimens were selected with a view to, ultimately, breeding domestic animals. Later, the same method was applied to sheep and then to cattle in the Zagros mountains on the border of Iran and Iraq. Pigs also belong on this list, although the starting point for their domestication (as in the case of dogs) should perhaps be seen more as the systematic feeding (and, ultimately, outmanoeuvring) of commensals scavenging for food around human habitations. In the case of pigs, the first form of management would have consisted of chasing young males. But this method is not appropriate to domesticate all animals. Captives such as cheetahs, falcons and elephants cannot be domesticated through selection and breeding over time; rather, wild specimens must each be tamed and trained individually to perform the desired tasks.18

Although these steps were taken sooner or later for all the different crops and domestic animals, in all parts of the world, Eurasia arguably still has an advantage over the Americas, tropical Africa and Oceania.¹⁹ This has everything to do with its location parallel to the equator. This location along longitudes, not latitudes, means that the climate-dependent technique of domesticating animals and plants could spread rapidly over enormous distances. This, in turn, increased the chances of cultural cross-fertilization and of new inventions.

We can consistently distinguish three phases.²⁰ First, a crop or an animal is successfully domesticated in a particular area, in a process that takes thousands rather than hundreds of years. In the second phase, this invention is successfully imitated elsewhere within the same climate belt and, ultimately, a new species can be domesticated in this new location. The third phase now requires less time because the principle of domestication is already known.

The first phase of the independent domestication of crops and animals took place in western Eurasia and it commenced in the Fertile Crescent, where the Natufians were the first hunter-gatherers in what today is Israel, Lebanon and Syria. They lived in fixed settlements where they actively managed local wild plants for many generations, finally resulting in full-fledged agriculture.21 Something similar occurred later in the east, in the river valleys of China, and, later still, elsewhere in the world, in New Guinea, the Americas and Africa. For example, in the Andes and Amazonia humans first managed manioc (5000 to 4000 BCE), and later potato, sweet potato, oca, quinoa, lima bean, common bean, peanut, and cotton barbadense as a fibre crop, and guinea pigs, llamas and alpacas became domesticated animals. The inhabitants of the Amazonian savanna subsequently developed a sophisticated system of ponds, canals, mounds and causeways to profit from the annual river inundations, thus maximizing fishing yields.²²

The order in which new crops were developed and where exactly this happened is not particularly important per se. It is not a competition. Much more significant is the fact that the domestication of plants and animals occurred roughly at the same time and that people domesticated the same plants and animals independently of each other. The American archaeologist Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, an expert in zooarchaeology, commented on this with respect to Africa:

[The] choice of animals and plants is strongly driven by considerations of efficiency . . . not the abstract efficiency of deterministic processual modeling, but the household manager’s day-to-day assessment of marginal gains in time or nutrients that a new species, breed or strain offers. Quotidian agricultural and pastoral workload falls most heavily on reproductive-age women who also, in nearly all known cases, manage food resources at the household level, even among strongly patriarchal cultures.²³

The second phase, the spread of domestic crops and animals from the Fertile Crescent across the rest of the world, was not simple one-way traffic from a unique centre, because elsewhere, such as in Africa, China and India, new crops were also being developed and new species of animals were being tamed and bred.²⁴ From the Fertile Crescent, grain cultivation spread in three different directions: from 9,000 years ago, simultaneously to Africa, via Iran to South Asia and via Anatolia to Europe.25 The first farmers to head east reached the Indus Valley, where they mixed with the hunter-gatherers and introduced the winter rainfall crops wheat and barley and adapted them to the different climatic circumstances of the sub-continent, with its monsoon summer rainfall. At the same time, millet was being grown in northern China and rice near the Yangtze River. Both are monsoon summer rainfall crops, and their culture developed independently. From China, farmers spread these new crops in the direction of South East and South Asia around 5,000 years ago, and much later to Korea and Japan. Indian agriculture thus became a fortunate admixture of crops from two different and faraway sources.

A few centuries later, the urban Harappa culture, symbolized by the zebu, blossomed in the Indus Valley. These hump-backed cattle, domesticated locally, later spread to western parts of Asia and Africa. This is an example of the third domestication phase, which includes local domestications following the arrival of founder crops from elsewhere.²⁶ But the developments in the Fertile Crescent did not stop. Later, olives, almonds, grapes and date palms were introduced, and these products subsequently spread to neighbouring regions.

Today, we see these distribution patterns everywhere and, of course, they continue, albeit in a systematic and industrial way. The spread of, for example, the sweet potato from South America across the world in three waves is fascinating.²⁷ It initially spread from Peru-Ecuador, in a westerly direction, to Polynesia, between 1000 and 1100 CE, and from there to Hawaii in the north and New Zealand in the south. Thereafter, around 1500, the Spanish exported it from the Caribbean via the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean to South Asia, from where the new fruit eventually ended up in New Guinea. Finally, a generation later, it moved from Mexico, across the Pacific Ocean, to the Philippines and then on to China, Japan and, for the second time, to New Guinea.

Similar patterns of domestication and assimilation of plants and animals adapted elsewhere took place in all parts of the world.²⁸ Unfortunately, this concise history permits only a few examples. In the more spectacular cases it produced a single agricultural system with a dominant language family, such as the Indo-European language family in the west of Eurasia, the Niger-Congo language family in sub-Saharan Africa, and the Austronesian in the Pacific. In lowland South America, this is not the case, nor is there strong and large-scale socio-political formation, hence the diversity of crop systems that has prevailed in Amazonia for the last 5,000 years.29

The function of this rather long list of ‘agricultural inventions’ for this book is manifold. Firstly, it follows that the Neolithic Revolution is a global phenomenon that took place everywhere, from 12,000 years ago onwards, except for far beyond the northernmost and the southernmost latitudes. Furthermore, it is an infinite process, as it were, and, after a false start, it was also an irreversible one. We still have many peasant families, farmer workers and plantation slaves to meet in this book, but for now it is important to understand how dynamic their role has been and how their work has changed over time.³⁰ Whether we take population size, the share of agriculturalists, cropland and pasture per capita, or pasture as a percentage of global land area, all these indicators demonstrate how agricultural productivity has increased over time. They also show how the landscape has been increasingly determined by agriculture, despite the percentage decrease in the population employed in this way in recent centuries. In short, although farmers play a leading role in this chapter but receive less attention later in this book, their work is not only indispensable for feeding the world’s population, but their work is also incredibly dynamic.

Finally, the Neolithic Revolution led to great differences everywhere in the organization of human labour, although, as we have seen above, it did not extirpate hunter-gatherers initially. But before examining these social implications, we must look more closely at the most important type of work in human history – the work of farmers and livestock breeders.

Farmers at work

What do farmers do exactly? Let us begin this exercise in imagination with arable farming and, as in the previous chapter, with hunters and food gatherers, analogy will be employed where archaeology falls short. The last chapter relied heavily on more recent ethnological descriptions but, fortunately, regarding agriculture, we now also have access to descriptions from thousands of years ago. I will employ both here to conjure up an image of the earliest farmers.

Arable farming has a time horizon of at least one year. Of course, investments in buildings, equipment, wells, land improvement and irrigation also require a longer time perspective, but crops are alternated depending on the annual recurring seasons. Peak weeks, when there simply aren’t enough hours in the day, are punctuated with months when farmers can only wait to see what their crops are going to do. Schematically, the following successive activities appertain to every crop: working the soil by digging it, but mostly by ploughing or harrowing, followed by or in combination with fertilizing; the sowing, weeding and irrigating of growing plants, followed by harvesting and for many crops threshing; and finally, the necessary processing for food preparation, such as the milling of flour.31

For slightly larger areas, the farmer swapped a spade for the ard (a simple scratch plough) and later for the deeper pulling plough, usually pulled by animals (initially cattle and much later horses, donkeys or camels). People also strained in front of the plough, as was the case in certain parts of China until the beginning of the last century.³² Thanks to draught animals, arable farming and animal husbandry came together nicely from around 5000 BCE.³³ One medieval writer had an eye for the necessary skills in this regard: ‘The skill of the drivers lies in knowing how to drive a team of oxen level, without beating, goading or ill-treating them. They should not be mournful men or wrathful, but cheerful, singing and joyous, so that by their tunes and songs the oxen may in some measure be heartened.’³⁴ Fertilizing with, among other things, mud and night soil (human manure) ensured that arable farming and cattle raising naturally functioned together. Before the invention of the cart, it was not possible to transport a lot of manure over longer distances.³⁵ There was usually a somewhat quieter period after the sowing or planting season, but since the crops needed water and it frequently rained too much or too little, water management was a key concern, especially when irrigating crops such as rice. Unfortunately, at the same time as the desired crops appeared, so did the weeds, making weeding an inevitable task. Crops, such as flax, that were sown using the broadcast method also needed to be thinned out.

Just how labour-intensive irrigation can be is clear from the description below of farming in the Azamgarh district (north of Varanasi, India) by the British colonial civil servant J.R. Reid in 1881.³⁶ At that time, mainly cereals, and in particular barley, were grown there. Where the fields could not be irrigated directly from nearby rivers and streams, water was collected in tanks and from there was raised into the fields, or from one channel into another at a higher level, by bailing.

In bailing, round shallow baskets made of wickerwork or of bamboo-matting, and called daurís, are used. Attached to the baskets are four strings, one of which is held in either hand by two labourers who stand opposite to each other on either side of the station [a small water reservoir] in little niches called chaunrhá or paunrhás. The basket is swung between the men, being carried above the water in the back stroke, and into it in the forward stroke. In finishing the latter, the labourers bring the basket up with a jerk, which throws the water that the basket carries with it on to the top of the lift (called títhá or chaunrhá). Fully two gallons of water are thrown up with one basket at each stroke, and from twenty to twenty-five strokes are made in the minute, according to the height to which the water has to be jerked. The height of the lifts varies from two to five feet, and the number of lifts is proportioned to the elevation above the stream or lake at which the fields to be irrigated lie.37

But that is only the start, because the water must now reach the plants:

There are two special methods of spreading tank or well water over dry fields. In one of these, known as kíárí, the field is divided by little mounds, made with a kind of rake called pharuhí, into small rectangular plots (kíárís), and the water is allowed to flow of itself into these plots and fill them one after another. Poppy and all garden crops are watered in this way, and in the watering of sugarcane and indigo it is often adopted. The other method is by háthá. A convenient number of furrows or temporary water-ducts having been made across the field, a number of little round hollows or reservoirs are made at intervals along them. The water, having been turned into the ducts and reservoirs, is thrown from the latter over the parts of the field that are within reach by the distributor with a long wooden shovel or háthá. Less water is consumed in this method than in plot irrigation, and the distribution with the shovel is more equal than it would be, were the diminished quantity of water allowed to find its own way over the ground. . . . Barley, peas and other field crops, except rice, are irrigated with the shovel. In watering rice crops the tank water is simply bailed over the high mounds that surround the rice fields.³⁸

These are long descriptions, but I include them deliberately. They demonstrate how much work something as simple as a good water supply can involve; and, equally, that each activity has its own techniques, equipment and specialized vocabulary. And this concerns just one of the multiple sub-operations involved in growing wheat or other crops. You don’t need to have had an extensive education for this, but nor can it be called simple.

The subsequent processing, reaping and gleaning naturally appeal most to the imagination, because they encompass the reward for all that toil. A passage from one of the oldest poems in the world is appropriate here. Homer’s Iliad (c. 750 BCE) reveals the apparent workings of a large grain farm:

Another field rose high with waving grain;

With bended sickles stand the reaper train:

Here stretch’d in ranks the levell’d swarths are found,

Sheaves heap’d on sheaves here thicken up the ground.

With sweeping stroke the mowers strow the lands;

The gatherers follow, and collect in bands;

And last the children, in whose arms are borne

(Too short to gripe them) the brown sheaves of corn.

The rustic monarch of the field descries,

With silent glee, the heaps around him rise.

A ready banquet on the turf is laid,

Beneath an ample oak’s expanded shade.

The victim ox the sturdy youth prepare;

The reaper’s due repast, the women’s care.39

This verse mentions the sickle, but grains and grasses can also be cut with a scythe.⁴⁰ For other activities too, there are many different approaches and many different tools, depending on the crops, the soil, climatological circumstances and, of course, the time.⁴¹ For example, threshing can be done by slashing with a flail, or with an animal-driven roller or board on a threshing floor.

The time horizon of the cattle breeder also covers a year, from the mating of the female animals to the moment when the young males, no longer of use, are ready for slaughter. At the same time, a cattle farmer must look ahead a number of years, or even beyond his own lifespan, on the one hand producing animals over several years that provide milk, wool or pulling power before subsequently being slaughtered – so after their peak reproduction years – on the other hand, fostering gainful characteristics over generations of breeding.⁴² Daily care, of course, includes either feeding and watering or pasturing and possibly milking (including processing milk into butter and cheese). There is also periodic medical care and hygiene, including brushing and hoof care. In terms of breeding, mating is supervised once a year and, in areas with a temperate climate and therefore food shortages during the winter, the end of the year means, in principle, the slaughter of all male animals that are not necessary for breeding or otherwise (as a draught or riding animal).

There are perhaps bigger mutual differences in the work of livestock farmers than in the activities of arable farmers due to the generally lower mobility of the latter. The Russian anthropologist and historian Anatoly Mikhailovich Khazanov subdivides pastoral work into what he calls ‘traditional societies’.43 He assumes a general balance between agriculture and pastoralism within the food-producing economy of traditional societies, which, in turn, relates to the degree to which a community is sedentary. He thus distinguishes five types of pastoralism, depending on the importance of pastoralism for the community and, at the same time, according to the mobility involved. In terms of the type of work, it is directly related to how much the herdsmen must walk.

Firstly, there is sedentary animal husbandry in the form of household-stable animal husbandry. Depending on the climate, for one part of the year the livestock graze in pastures adjacent to the household’s dwellings or the settlement and they usually return daily. For another part of the year they are kept in stables and enclosures and fed with stockpiled fodder.

Secondly, Khazanov distinguishes sedentary household husbandry, or stock breeding, with free grazing and without stables or stockpiled fodder. This form of animal husbandry is probably the oldest form of pastoralism and demands a lot of work from herdsmen.⁴⁴

Thirdly, there are communities involved in herdsman husbandry or distant-pastures husbandry. This demands even more work from herdsmen. These communities fall into two interdependent sections. While the majority is engaged in sedentary agriculture, a minority of specialized herdsmen takes care of the livestock in pastures, sometimes quite far from the settlement. For part of the year, however, the animals are kept in enclosures, pens and stalls and fed with fodder. A special and well-known form is transhumance or ‘yaylag’ pastoralism. This enables people occupied with agriculture to use other areas, such as mountain pastures, as seasonal pastures when they are at their most productive. When the livestock return from the mountains they stay in lower zones near to the herders’ villages.

Fourthly, semi-nomadic pastoralism may develop from the above-mentioned situation when agriculture (or hunting or fishing) is only secondary and supplementary, and pastoralism occupies most of the time of community members.

Finally, there is nomadism proper, whereby the whole community roams around and thus the term ‘herder’ acquires an entirely different social meaning, since it now means living close to the household or clan, who also roam with him. This specialism is the newest development and came into being later than the period covered by this chapter (the same might also be true for semi-nomadic pastoralism, see Chapter 3).

Returning to arable farming in general, the oldest farming communities remained highly vulnerable, especially to contagious diseases associated with farming. Agriculture also created a new sense of time, because people were no longer following their food – instead, the work now came to them, as it were, in seasonal peaks. And it went away again too. Put simply, farmers in the Northern Hemisphere worked ridiculously long days in the summer and had a lot of time off in the winter. This created an annual rhythm, dictated by the seasonal nature of staple foods. In medieval Europe, this meant that harvest holidays, followed by a series of festivals between Christmas and Mardi Gras and from Easter to Pentecost, occupied the low points in agricultural work. Midseason holidays like Midsummer, or, in England, Wakes week in August, corresponded with lulls in farm work or with annual fairs for hiring work folk.⁴⁵ These traditions are, of course, much older than Christianity.

Division of labour between men and women

The Neolithic Revolution was radical, but it took a very long time. In Mesopotamia, it took as long as 5,000 years before the overproduction was so large that the first cities could emerge; that is to say, before there were significant concentrations of people who did not grow their own food. During this long period between the first agriculture and the first cities, members of farming families, together with their neighbours, continued to hunt for a long time. Both modes of existence occurred in parallel and complemented each other. Nevertheless, specialization in work was gradually taking place, initially between men and women.

From the outset, there were differences between many activities of men and women, but, as we have seen, the differences for hunter-gatherers were still minimal. With the advent of agriculture, however, they became visibly bigger and the foundations were laid for the gender differences currently so central to societal debate.

One of the consequences of a better food supply, in particular the larger supply of grain, was the introduction of ‘baby food’ (for example, porridge), which meant that weaning could happen much earlier. After all, the availability of rich, soft carbohydrate weaning foods among agriculturalists resulted in shorter periods of lactation.46 This led to another sharp reduction in the birth interval. Better-nourished mothers had more babies.⁴⁷ In hunter-gatherer communities, women can only take care of one child at a time, because they always have to carry the child with them during the search for food – despite the care of ‘alloparents’. Only when the child can walk independently is there room for a younger brother or sister. In practice, this means that the interval between hunter-gatherer children is around four years. Among farmers, who live near their fields and orchards, the birth interval is reduced to, on average, two years.⁴⁸ Moreover, the menarche among women hunter-gatherers occurs later (about age sixteen) and their menarche–first-birth interval averages about three years. For present-day Euro-Americans, this interval is, on average, ten years and often exceeds twenty. Hunter-gatherers have a higher number of births, about six (as opposed to two now), and they nurse longer, typically about three years (as opposed to three months now), and more intensively. Finally, their menopause is usually earlier, in their mid-to-late forties (as opposed to early fifties now) – hence the lower risk factors related to women’s cancers.⁴⁹ The Neolithic Revolution therefore meant an increase in women’s work insofar as it concerns pregnancy, giving birth and raising children.

Infant mortality, however, remained enormous (up to 50 per cent). One reason for this is that early weaning replaces hygienic, easily digestible and nutritious mother’s milk with ‘an alternative that may be none of these’.⁵⁰ Early weaning, then, has both positive and negative consequences for mother and baby. Nevertheless, in net terms, more children remained alive and the population was still able to grow.⁵¹ That said, life expectancy was short – indeed, half of ours. Variations in latitude and season aside, hunter-gatherers had a healthy diet with much less total fat, less saturated fat and less salt than, certainly, modern Americans. They took a lot of exercise and suffered far less from killer diseases and disorders like obesity, diabetes, hypertension, coronary heart disease and cancers, yet they still died early. This was the result of risks at work from dangerous and poisonous animals, but especially the inability to prevent or treat infectious diseases, specifically contamination from living in close quarters with domesticated animals. In contrast to the increase in reliable food production since the Neolithic Revolution,52 there were many new risks, like an increased intake of salt and fat (from dairy foods, thanks to domesticated herds), alcohol and tobacco consumption and changing reproductive features.⁵³

The necessarily greater stability of farmers, and certainly of arable farmers, meant they started investing in improvements to farmlands, building durable homes, and the possibility of stockpiling emerged. Many authors assume that this heralded the idea of ownership, including the idea that women represented a value and even that they could be owned by their husband. Consequently, sexual norms became stricter and virginity before marriage highly valued.⁵⁴ As we will see, there is evidence for this relation between the Neolithic Revolution and growing social inequality. We must exercise caution, however, as Africa demonstrates that there is no inescapable causal link between the two.

In most cases, while certainly not impossible, it is difficult to prove these theories about agriculture necessarily enhancing social inequality in this period. This shift has only been demonstrated convincingly for the so-called Yamnaya culture of predominantly male-oriented Indo-European pastoralists that spread over Europe and northern India 5,000 years ago (pp. 84–5, 89). In simple terms, this redirection, postulated for many parts of the world, from matrilinear to patrilinear lineage systems and from matrilocality to patrilocality means that, on her marriage, a woman went to live with her husband and therefore with her in-laws.⁵⁵ Alloparenting, which became even more important due to early weaning, was now de facto the task of the grandmother on the father’s side.⁵⁶ More successful farmers (the ‘aggrandizers’, see pp. 69–72) expressed what they believed to be a bride’s value by offering a bride price to her father, who was about to lose her labour.⁵⁷ In more extreme cases, this could even lead to polygyny. After all, if you can ‘buy’ one wife, why not buy more?⁵⁸

Hrdy summarizes these processes succinctly as a ‘great leap sideways’.⁵⁹ There are various reasons for this. Not only did more frequent pregnancies now place a much greater burden on a woman; a woman became more subordinate to the man within marriage, and the family of the man and therefore the mother-in-law increasingly determined the life of a married woman. Within the farm, this demanded more time than was previously the case with hunting and gathering, and it likely led to the development of more pronounced male and female tasks. Moreover, hunting became the exclusive domain of men, and greater demands were now made on child labour.

One of the consequences of this sideways leap pertains to the transfer of knowledge about crops. This proceeds differently in patrilinear and matrilinear societies, as has been demonstrated for many societies. Manioc cultivation in modern-day Gabon provides a good example – manioc being a staple food, originally brought by the Portuguese from Brazil. As is usually the case in Africa, the women are responsible for the food supply, and knowledge of food crops is passed from woman to woman, but in two different ways.60 In the matrilinear communities south of the Ogooué River, a mother gives her daughter a few manioc cuttings when she moves to her groom’s village. When the bride subsequently spots an interesting variety in a neighbour’s garden she asks for a few cuttings to experiment with. Consequently, there is a much greater variety of species in the south than in the north. In Fang-speaking patrilinear societies to the north, a new bride arrives empty-handed and she receives her first manioc cuttings from her mother-in-law. She is thus initiated into her new clan, whose land she will work and to whom her children will belong. Here in the north, too, experiments are conducted with new cuttings from neighbours, but the choice is, of course, much smaller. As a result, the genetic diversity of this crop is also demonstrably lower there.

There are several reasons to assume that women in farming households now occupied a different position. But it is more difficult to ascertain what this meant in terms of concrete tasks. Were they, as valued ‘property’, watched more closely, and was their work restricted to the farm and its immediate environment? Collective hunting was, in any case, a thing of the past, and the significance of the band had also declined. Households became units in their own right. But, again, this was a very slow development, with many regional variations, and it must be located in the subsequent period rather than the earlier one. Farming communities do not necessarily consist of separate farms; they can now also live together in large houses. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was fascinated by what he called ‘house societies’ and, indeed, many Neolithic ‘great houses’, which could accommodate an entire community, have been excavated.⁶¹

Of course, women were responsible for more than their pregnancies and their children on the farm. The earliest ‘solid’ evidence of this dates back to the beginning of grain growing in south-west Asia. Based on bone fragments, it has been observed that among the earliest rye growers in Syria, around 10000 BCE, women were responsible for milling grain. In this early phase, the still hard seeds required intensive rubbing or grinding to make flour and, in turn, porridge, which is easier to consume and possibly also to facilitate the weaning of babies. The women in particular show traces of this heavy work in the bones of their back, toes and knees. On this basis, we can assume ‘a clear gender division of labour by the Neolithic . . . at least, while women processed food and attended their ever-increasing broods of children. For women, the Neolithic revolution meant a steady increase in labour, in both the work and the child-bearing senses’.62

That farming was primarily women’s work is substantiated by similar research in North America. The starting point is the observation that highly mobile humans develop a long ridge down the length of the femur.⁶³ Conversely, this ridge disappears once we become sedentary under the influence of the agricultural revolution. Interestingly, this process does not always occur simultaneously among men and among women. And that is precisely the case among the people of the Cochise culture in what is now south-eastern Arizona. They switched to farming 3,500 years ago, but apparently farming was typically women’s work, because only the men kept their pronounced ridges. This suggests that these men continued to hunt, perhaps for a thousand years or more. By the time the Spanish arrived, it was still the American Indian women doing the farming work (with the exception of the Pueblos). This implies a long – 3,000 years – sustained division of labour in that part of America between men who hunted and women who farmed.

In all cases, farm work meant an increased effort from every member of the household.⁶⁴ Time-budget studies show that peasant farmers and herders may have spent more, rather than fewer, hours per day at work than hunter-gatherers did. This is one of the reasons why, despite living alongside farmers, not all hunter-gatherers simply switched to farming. Finally, more work also meant a greater call on children, once they were old enough to help.

Division of labour between households and the seeds of inequality

It is important to emphasize that throughout the period covered by this chapter, we are, in principle, only talking about rural areas, because there were no really large agglomerations anywhere in the world. Jericho had 500 inhabitants in 9600 BCE and may have reached 70 houses with a thousand residents a few centuries later. Three thousand years later, ‘Ain Gazal had three to four times as many inhabitants for a while. In sum, the cities in the Fertile Crescent at this time had a few hundred residents rather than a thousand or more. The oldest Chinese cities, which emerged much later, were certainly no bigger. In short, the largest agglomerations in the world at that time (including Jericho) were places that today we would call villages.65

If the Neolithic Revolution had such an impact on the division of labour between men and women, what impact did it have on social relationships beyond the household?⁶⁶ Bands – that is, units in which members of different households worked collectively at chasing their food – were being eroded, but what were they replaced with? While agricultural working units were certainly smaller than bands of hunter-gatherers, we may surmise that these peasant households did not operate totally autonomously. Two social developments with major implications for the history of work deserve our attention here: labour specialization between households and social relations between households that influence the rewards for labour.

Division of labour between households

Where farmers were so successful that they produced more food than they needed themselves, and where their numbers grew so much that concentrations of population became possible, certain people within their community could, in principle, be freed up for other work. That means specialization in the sense that ‘fewer people make a class of objects than use it’.⁶⁷ In this early period, we are talking about pottery making, housebuilding and associated technology and textile skills. As we have seen for before the Neolithic Revolution, all of these techniques are found in various locations around the world but were not yet widely disseminated. The oldest fibres found date to 36,000 years ago, the oldest pots to 22,000 years ago and house floor plans or traces of housing are even older. Of course, there are also the stones and wooden implements (large-scale metalworking dates from a little later).⁶⁸ The question here, however, is whether these specialisms were already so developed that they were people’s sole occupation or whether they were ancillary activities of farmers or possibly hunter-gatherers. In other words, were farmers and hunter-gatherers the only specialists (with typically male or female tasks) at this time, or were there already more?

In general, archaeological data suggests that, apart from potters and weavers, there were no other clear professional specializations in the first millennia of the Neolithic Revolution, although by the end of it some exceptions to this rule have been found in China. The reason for this general rule is simple: there was not enough demand for it. This is partly due to low agricultural productivity and partly to do with the climate zones in which agriculture developed. As will be elaborated in the next chapter, it was only from the seventh millennium that agriculture spread slowly from West Asia and Thessaly in a northerly direction to heavily forested regions, such as Europe. The necessary grubbing of forests led to such a demand for stone axes that specialized mining and production centres developed in the following millennia.69 There were certainly also forests in the Fertile Crescent, but the areas where the earliest farming developed were nevertheless described as park and steppe landscapes.⁷⁰

The Israeli archaeologist Gideon Shelach-Lavi notes that, remarkably, the construction of houses and settlements among the oldest farming populations in north-east China appear to have been carefully preplanned: ‘houses and domestic structures are coordinated with each other; there also seems to be a clear separation between private and public spaces, production sites, ritual areas (including cemeteries), and so on’.⁷¹ It seems to me, however, that this is not the earliest indication of a project developer and of contracting companies with carpenters, but rather a joint venture of farmers living collectively. Towards the end of our period, there is evidence of complex wooden structures of pile dwellings with mortise and tenon joints in the lower Yangtze River region. Perhaps we can rightly call their creator a carpenter.⁷²

The long history of pottery making among hunter-gatherers in China led a little later to what we might call the first real potters. This is evident from the appearance of more sophisticated pottery, such as legged vessels, but especially of coloured decorations in the fifth millennium BCE. These were achieved by oxidizing iron minerals, requiring a high degree of control over the atmosphere inside the kiln. The subsequent standardization of pottery also points to the functioning of professional potters.⁷³ A product of another branch of the ceramic industry, the oldest bricks – not yet baked but unmoulded, unbaked mud bricks – had already been used for the first time a few millennia earlier in Baluchistan; nevertheless, the nature of the simple technique must be seen as an ancillary activity of the resident grain farmers.⁷⁴

The further development of spinning, carding, twining, knitting, mending, weaving and other textile techniques was, above all, a domestic affair in which households primarily provided for themselves. Originally, clothing would have consisted of processed animal skins, as depicted in Palaeolithic rock drawings. In addition, the technique of braiding flax and hemp stems (then still wild plants) developed, as well as that for making rope, used for, among other things, fishing nets.75 Neither technique yielded any fabrics, but they were steps in the right direction, whereby spinning and weaving developed separately and in combination with each other.

With the Neolithic and the emergence of regular agriculture, wool became much more available, and more regularly, than the felted wool collected from hunting and foraged from nature after moulting. In addition, industrial crops such as flax and hemp were grown. The decisive steps to spinning and weaving were probably first taken in the Near East. It has been documented for the Jordan Valley, with the oldest cotton fabric recorded, while the earliest woollen fibres are found in Central Anatolia, spinning stones in Kurdistan, linen yarns in Egypt and raffia weaving and bark cloth in Africa. All these finds and their dating continue to be modified almost daily due to new excavations, but apparently the Fertile Crescent was at the forefront of more than just agriculture. The next big leap was the invention of the hand spinning wheel in India in the first centuries of our era. In sum, such a low degree of specialization meant there was little room for large-scale exchange between households of farmers and specialized craftsmen. The trade flows during this period were still very thin and mainly concerned valuables such as semi-precious stones.

Still, there remains a possibility of professional specialization among farmers (and within this group possibly for arable farmers and livestock farmers) and hunters, who exchanged products with each other.⁷⁶ This may have happened in the broader context of other exchanges, such as that of marriage partners. Modern palaeogenetic research offers ever more examples of this, but such a scenario has also been reconstructed based on other data, such as from linguistics.⁷⁷ In Kenya, for example, in the first millennium CE, arable Luyia women went as wives to pastoral (proto-) Kalenjin. Christopher Ehret, an American scholar of early African history, deduces this from the fact that ‘in contrast to the wide range of Kalenjin loanwords in Luyia, the Luyia words adopted into the proto-Kalenjin language, with one exception, relate to the activity that is and was anciently women’s work in the Luyia societies. This set of loanwords consists principally of cultivation and cooking terms’.⁷⁸

The exchange between farmers and hunters was not always easy to achieve, one of the reasons being that hunter-gatherers were often very wary. Where they fear the disadvantages of trade for their egalitarian existence, such as the last representatives of this way of life in South America, there is the alternative of the widely reported practice of ‘silent trade’, in which hostile parties exchange products without meeting face to face. For example, the elusive Mlabri of northern Thailand at the beginning of the twentieth century left beeswax and honey on paths and received cloth, metal and salt in return. Some direct trade with neighbouring Hmong started only in the 1930s.79

The most extreme option is no trade at all. Amazonian foraging groups, like the Huaorani in eastern Ecuador, put more value on transferability than on use value in a deliberate attempt to distinguish themselves from settled horticultural neighbours and to refuse trade. The Huaorani and similar peoples refuse not only trade but also generosity, which is donor-initiated, hence potentially coercive: ‘Sharing transactions, with their emphasis on entitlement (the donor’s obligation to share, and the recipient’s right to receive), form the basis of personal autonomy and egalitarianism.’ This case provides a warning to interpretations that explain hunter-gatherers’ societies exclusively in terms of want, thus robbing them of agency and history.⁸⁰

Social relations between households: The seeds of inequality

The nature of hunter-gatherer societies is the starting point for the development of social relations. This is generally characterized as ‘egalitarian’, as we have seen in the previous chapter. There is a view that the term egalitarianism is used too widely: that it is ‘best applied to simple hunter/gatherers or immediate-return societies, where there is no significant private ownership, no economically based competition, few wealth differences, and usually few prestige items’. The term ‘transegalitarian’ is used to describe the transitional form of more unequal societies, in the sense that: ‘Where significant ownership of resources, economically based competition, and wealth differences occur but are not institutionalized as class distinctions, we refer to such societies as “transegalitarian” societies.’ Even more unequal societies have been called ‘chiefdom organizations’.⁸¹ For the time being, however, we should not regard the concept of ownership as the ownership of the means of production (land, cattle), but as control over harvest surpluses. Signs of unevenly distributed property only come later.⁸² The question now, then, is how to characterize the gradual transition between hunting-gathering and agriculture along these lines.

Let us again start from the important observation that the Neolithic Revolution created possibilities for saving food, much more than was the case among most hunter-gatherers. That also meant the possibility of enriching individuals and households to which they belonged and, consequently, of social differences. Not unimportant in this context is the fact that the strong numerical expansion of the now sedentary cohabiting group of housemates was made possible by the sharp increase in the labour productivity of agriculture. Hunter-gatherers lived together in groups of a few dozen people, in which household, extended family and band more or less coincide, but agricultural settlements in the Neolithic were already reaching hundreds to thousands of people.83

Higher production created opportunities not only for population growth, but, under specific circumstances, also for enrichment – in particular for the most successful and skilled farming households – as well as the desire and even necessity for it. After all, farming humans are, in a way, more vulnerable than food gatherers, as we have seen already. If the harvest fails or a herd is ravaged by an infectious disease then there is a danger of famine, not to mention the farming human’s own greatly increased susceptibility to diseases.

The increased food production due to the Neolithic Revolution came at a price, however, not just economically but also in social terms. Saving for a rainy day became second nature to us, and if that means that someone else has to work harder for it, so be it. Perhaps this is the real beginning of human competition (often summarized simply as ‘survival of the fittest’). Or it is the start of what De Waal calls the ‘comeback’: ‘Social hierarchies may have been out of fashion when our ancestors lived in small-scale societies, but they surely made a comeback with agricultural settlement and the acculturation of wealth. But the tendency to subvert these vertical arrangements never left us. We’re born revolutionaries.’⁸⁴

Robert Kelly summarizes the differences between hunter-gatherers and farmers as follows:

Evolutionary ecology predicts that territoriality will result when resources are sufficiently dense and predictable to make the costs of defense worthwhile, and when population is high enough that, for someone outside looking in, the cost of trying to acquire a denied resource is worth the potential benefit. But the land that foragers need to survive is often so large, and population density so low, that physical defense of a perimeter is impossible, yet the cost of allowing unregulated visitors in can be too high.85

With the Neolithic Revolution and – despite all the risks of crop failures, livestock diseases, and so on – the greater chances of food surpluses, social inequality became feasible. The way in which that happened, however, reveals infinite variations, as a comparison of different criteria in early agricultural societies in diverse parts of the world makes clear.⁸⁶

Tropical Africa offers the most impressive case; in particular, the expansion of Bantu-speaking agriculturalists over Central, Eastern and Southern Africa between 3500 BCE and 500 CE, but without the emergence of inequality. Throughout these millennia, these societies maintained a matrilineal (sometimes also matrilocal) and politically decentralized way of life, inclined to redistribution of resources, rather than to individual accumulation. Shifts to patrilineal and patriclan societies with greater inequality occurred rapidly in sub-Saharan Africa, albeit unevenly, from the late first millennium CE. This contribution of Africa to world history dismisses the still popular idea that humans took a wrong turn when we gave up hunting-gathering. Agriculture and egalitarianism are compatible.⁸⁷

Where inequality developed, for example in the Fertile Crescent, it did so very slowly. Among the Natufians in the Levant (12500–9700/9500 BCE), a more favourable climate led to prosperity, characterized by the burial of the dead decorated with marine shells and bone and animal teeth pendants indicating differences in status, as well as through labour-intensive works such as the building of larger houses and the manufacture of mortars in addition to the older grinding slabs. These could have played a role in public feasting, but the evidence for large-scale food storage is currently lacking.

After a colder period came the millennium of the domestication of plants and animals (9600 until 8500 BCE). Settlements could encompass hundreds of people, ten times more than Natufian hamlets, helped by the fact that cereals are among the most suitable weaning foods. Food storage can now be demonstrated, as well as the exchange of exotic materials, but not yet the relationship with social hierarchy. Although there are clear signs of sharply declining mobility and possibly the emergence of permanent ownership, we must not forget that these villages had a lifespan of only a few hundred years.

Specific indications of inequality only become convincing in the last two millennia of the early Neolithic period (up to 6300 BCE). This is demonstrated in excavations from ceremonial centres such as in Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. An organized labour force was involved in the construction of this ‘shrine’. The burials (accompanied by, among other things, exotic materials) reveal extreme status differences, and also distinguish poor and rich houses, the latter in the vicinity of cult places. Plastered skulls of adults and children belonging to a clear sub-group might point to a social elite. Despite all this, Price and Bar-Yosef remain cautious: ‘In spite of the variety of evidence of the Near East, a fully convincing argument for social inequality in the Neolithic remains is hard to convey. One of the major difficulties in identifying emergent social differentiation likely lies in the simple fact that it is emergent and difficult to recognize.’88 Strong evidence from sub-Saharan Africa, as we have seen, underscores their warning.

Feelings about what is socially just, and therefore also about what is a fair reward for work, are deeply anchored and therefore do not change effortlessly. So, we must seriously ask ourselves how people from more egalitarian societies, as described in the previous chapter, could resign themselves to strongly increased inequality; or, in the words of the American anthropologist and archaeologist Mark Aldenderfer: ‘So, just how do some individuals get others to relinquish the fruits of their labour?’⁸⁹ According to him, we cannot ignore religion.

Of course, we can argue that ‘aggrandizers’, the men who managed to gain more of the wealth surplus, created social obligations of debt – frequently by offering feasts – which the many others unable to repay in kind had to provide in labour, but: ‘How is it that individuals and groups come to accept that their debt is a “natural” condition?’ In this case, religion can be seen as a powerful ‘enabler’ for cultural change, both for the aggrandizers who try to achieve this and for those threatened by change. If we assume that, in this period of thousands of years, social differentiation was repeatedly given a chance in Eurasia (but not in Africa), albeit without achieving a breakthrough, how, then, did it become acceptable? How could people accept that the work of one person was rewarded less than that of another, that one might even be able to force the other to do certain work? This requires a new system of norms and values, deviating from the egalitarian principles that had prevailed thus far.

Given that it is difficult to answer this question on the basis of archaeological remains from the time of the Neolithic Revolution, Aldenderfer has resorted to ethnographic material that describes comparable processes during the last centuries in the Americas and on New Guinea, borrowing the example of the Enga peoples in highland New Guinea and the religious changes that aggrandizers in the east of that region effected with the spread of the sweet potato and of pig farming. The extant Kepele cult, originally a simple boy’s initiation ceremony, was expanded with a mythical, but direct, representation of wealth. In Aldenderfer’s words:

Importantly, much of this wealth was reinvested, in a sense, through the sponsoring of feasts, dances, and other performances. While the cult may not have extended hierarchy in the sense of big men to take on new social roles, it served as a justification for their continued violation of the egalitarian ethos. Ultimately, this allowed them to extend their efforts to participate in regional trade networks and to finance other major ceremonial events related to warfare and war reparations, among other things.90

But it wasn’t only big men who attempted to move religion in a direction that was more in line with the new social relationships. Others with the same means could try the opposite. The Ain cult that emerged in the same area overtly challenged new big man-sponsored cult practices. For example, ‘one of the cult prophets exhorted its followers to “continue killing pigs for the sun and eating meat until all are consumed; the sky people will replace them”. Instead of alliances, hard work, and exploitation, wealth would be created simply by belief.’⁹¹

In this chapter, we have seen the first big change in the history of work. By gradually switching from hunting and food gathering to farming and animal husbandry, not only did food, health and population size change, but humans also became sedentary, the division of labour between men and women became sharper and the first cautious professional specialization occurred, as well as, in some parts of Eurasia, the seeds for social inequality. These may already have been sown within farming households due to the increasing division of tasks between men and women but were also evident between households in several places. This happened towards the end of this period as a result of unfair remuneration for work performed by the many for the few. Whereas before the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry remuneration was directly connected to the efforts made, from now on efforts and reward could diverge (although it took quite some time). So-called aggrandizers tried to take a large share of the surpluses that now existed, although they had to try to cover up this violation of one of the most fundamental social norms with generosity. In the words of the sixteenth-century judge and founder of modern political philosophy in France, Étienne de la Boétie:92 ‘theatres, games, plays, spectacles, marvellous beasts, medals, tableaux, and other such drugs were for the people of antiquity the allurements of serfdom, the price of their freedom, the tools of tyranny’.

Nevertheless, it seems fair to say that for thousands of years after the introduction of agriculture social equality persisted, certainly in Africa. Two other themes that we have developed for hunter-gatherers, based on, in particular, anthropological analogies, are less clearly documented for this period: in addition to the sorrows, the pleasures that accompany agricultural work as such, and the prevalence of working in the fields and with tamed animals. However, I am inclined to think that the numerous innovations not only in agriculture but also in the earliest crafts make this more than likely.

Does the story end now that we have become acquainted with the work of both hunter-gatherers and farmers, and of the few specialists outside agriculture (the carpenter, the potter and perhaps the priest)? According to the British archaeologist Steven Mithen: ‘by 5000 BCE there was very little left for later history to do; all the groundwork for the modern world had been completed. History had simply to unfold until it reached the present day’.⁹³ The groundwork perhaps, but it is precisely in that unfolding that we find the fascinating history of work, as De la Boétie suggests and as Karl Marx (Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right), Antonio Gramsci or Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) have not neglected to convey over and over again. Humanity appears to be able to organize the work at hand in infinite variations.