Researchers have long wondered how a small, dispersed system of family agriculture like that practiced by present-day Maya farmers could have fed the hundreds or thousands of workers that had to be assembled onsite in pre-Columbian times to build the giant monuments of Mexico and Central America. The problem has become even more acute since the advent of archaeological excavations. They have taught us that Maya settlements were not simply royal residences or religious centers but true cities extending over several square kilometers and numbering tens of thousands of residents: lords, aristocrats, functionaries, servants, artisans. Where did their means of support come from?
In the last twenty years, aerial photography has begun to provide some answers. In Maya country and in some regions of South America that were formerly believed to have been occupied by very rustic societies, pictures taken from the air reveal the vestiges of astonishingly complex agricultural systems. One of them, in Colombia, covered over two hundred thousand hectares of floodplains. Between the beginning of the Christian era and the seventh century, thousands of drainage canals were dug; in between them, lands were cultivated on man-made embankments several hundred meters long, permanently irrigated and safeguarded from flooding. That intensive tuber-based agriculture, combined with fishing in the canals, could feed more than a thousand inhabitants per square kilometer.
On the banks of Lake Titicaca on the border between Peru and Bolivia, similar systems were recently discovered over an area of more than eighty thousand hectares. They had been in use between the first millennium BCE and the fifth century CE. Because of the arid climate and the long periods of frost due to altitude—the site is nearly four thousand meters above sea level—these zones are now only poor-quality grazing lands. The irrigation canals partly mitigated these climatic disadvantages. Their water kept things moist; in addition, it stored up heat during the day and released it slowly throughout the night, raising the ambient temperature by about two degrees. The tests done proved that these agricultural techniques would still be effective, and several Andean communities were persuaded to put them back into practice after centuries of disuse. The standard of living there improved considerably. Similar forms of intensive agriculture on a more modest scale existed and still exist in Melanesia and Polynesia.
Such observations oblige us to call into question the clear-cut distinction we are accustomed to make between so-called archaic societies and the rest. No doubt that first class of societies is not really “primitive”: all societies have an equally long history behind them. But we believe ourselves justified in calling by that term those societies that survived until recent times whose declared ideal was to remain in the state in which the gods or ancestors had created them. They took measures to limit and regulate the size of their population and maintained an unchanging standard of living, which their social rules and metaphysical beliefs contributed toward protecting. Granted, these societies were not immune to change, but, to us at least, it seems that they differed from our own, which tolerate a perpetual disequilibrium. The idea prevails in our societies that one must struggle simply to survive, that one must gain new advantages every day so as not to lose those already acquired; and that time is a rare commodity of which there is never enough. Are we to conclude from this that the two types of society are incommensurable? In addition to the fact that farmers and artisans in so-called developed countries had until recently a vision of the world and of themselves not very different from that attributed to exotic peoples, the relationship between the two types of societies is actually more complex. We do not know a great deal about the long period—some two or three thousand years—at the beginning of which hominids made their appearance, but we are better informed about the last hundred thousand to two hundred thousand years. And everything shows that during that period technology did not evolve at a steady rate. The evolution was discontinuous; leaps forward and long periods of stagnation alternated with each other. Technological revolutions were localized in space and time. For hundreds of millennia humankind’s ancestors confined themselves to selecting pebbles and making them sharp and easy to handle by chipping off flakes. With the “Levallois revolution” some two hundred thousand years ago, the technology became more complicated. Some fifteen distinct operations became necessary to process the block of flint in such a way that the flakes, used to manufacture tools of a determinate type, could be broken off with a stone hammer; then to refine these flakes with a hammer or bone needle. The flint pebble thus went from being a tool to being a raw material for making tools. “Blade” industries, which were even more economical in the use of material, coexisted with or replaced “flake-based” industries. Finally, the blades themselves became raw materials, broken into little pieces and fitted out with wooden or bone frames to make awls, arrowheads, saws, or sickles. These processes are called microlith industries.
There are sites in the Near East that are known to have been occupied continuously for tens of millennia, during which stone technologies and the form of tools did not change. By contrast, there were veritable technological explosions in prehistoric times, by both qualitative and quantitative measures.
In terms of quality, the most ancient jewelry known, dating to about the thirty-fifth millennium, came primarily from southwestern France but was made out of exotic materials imported from regions sometimes several hundred kilometers away. As for quantity, industrial ventures in the most modern sense of the term—though they date back to prehistoric times—are known to have existed in various parts of the world. They mass-produced certain types of objects or implements for the needs of the market. Intertribal fairs were held at the foot of the Pyrenees in southwestern France during the Magdalenian period, about fifteen thousand years ago. For sale there were seashells that had been imported from the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean, tools carved in a flint of nonlocal provenance, and spear throwers mass-produced by the hundreds, in all likelihood. Examples of these launchers, all the same model, were discovered at sites more than 150 kilometers apart.
In Spiennes, Belgium, an underground flint operation riddled with mine shafts and galleries more than fifteen meters deep extended over about fifty hectares. It included specialized workshops, some to rough out the miners’ picks and axes, others to give these implements their final form. In Grimes Cave in England, shafts by the hundreds allowed for the mining of thousands of cubic meters of chalk, from which flint nodules were extracted. In the protohistoric period, the mining and industrial center of Le Grand-Pressigny in the southern Loire Valley of France covered more than ten kilometers. It exported tools and weapons to as far away as Switzerland and Belgium; they were particularly valued because the color of the local flint resembled bronze. Stone imitations of metal weapons were thus being produced at a time when bronze was a costly material reserved for a minority.
Writing appeared in southern Mesopotamia in about 3400
BCE; for a millennium, it was used only to record merchandise inventories, tax revenues, land leases, and lists of offerings. It was not until about 2500
BCE that Mesopotamians began to transcribe myths, historical events, or texts we would call literary. All these examples show that a productivist mentality existed during various prehistoric and protohistoric eras and that it is not exclusive to the contemporary world.
Even peoples we consider archaic or backward were thus capable of mass-producing items as varied as stone tools, ceramic, and farm products, obtaining results that sometimes surpass our own. But that was not a gradual evolution always oriented in the same direction. Over the course of time, phases of rapid innovation were followed by periods of stagnation. Sometimes the two aspects even coexisted. There is not one type of evolution but a variety.
To understand that bewildering phenomenon, we may find inspiration in the thinking of certain biologists who challenge the hypothesis that the evolution of species comes about slowly and gradually, and that it retains from a multitude of small variations only those that offer a selective advantage, eliminating all the others. Plant or animal species can remain unchanged for hundreds of thousands, even millions of years. Individual variations within a population do not influence that stability: they offset one another and ultimately cancel one another out. By contrast, when changes affecting species do occur, they are very rapid (in geological time, that is); they probably come about when a few individuals find themselves isolated from the rest of their species, in a new environment to which they must adapt. Biological evolution, like technological evolution, occurs in fits and starts. Long periods of stasis are punctuated by short intervals during which massive changes occur (hence the name “punctualism” given to that theory). And that is not all: evolution, far from being homogeneous, assumes very different aspects depending on one’s perspective: within a population, it manifests itself in slow and gradual variations; within the species, in transformations whose adaptive value is unclear; and within groups of species, in the form of a macroevolution, even though each species taken separately may not be subject to change for prolonged periods of time.
It is now acknowledged that modern man—
Homo sapiens sapiens—appeared in the Near East, probably coming from Africa, about a hundred thousand years ago. But, based on the current state of our knowledge, we believe that his first aesthetic expressions (jewelry, sculpture, and engraved stones and bones) may not have appeared until sixty or seventy thousand years later—and they all appeared at once. Perhaps we ought to see this as an example of the “punctual” evolution known to biologists. So too the appearance in southwestern Europe fifteen to twenty thousand years ago of cave paintings of a dazzling perfection in, among other places, Altamira and Lascaux.
If the transposition of the punctualist hypothesis to human societies is legitimate, we would have to admit that the relationship between these societies and the environment, as reflected in their productive capacities and aesthetic expressions, has not always remained the same. We would have to give up the practice of placing human societies along a single continuum, classifying them as more or less developed. Rather, they would be seen to stem from heterogeneous models. And that is truly where the debates under way on the origin of agriculture lead.
It was long believed that, apart from the industrial revolution that began in the nineteenth century, the production of consumable goods never increased so rapidly and so massively as it did with the invention of agriculture. Thanks to farming, it was thought, human groups were able to become sedentary and to assure themselves a regular supply of food by storing grain. The population increased; societies, now in possession of surpluses, had the luxury of supporting individuals or classes—leaders, nobles, priests, artisans—who did not participate in food production but performed specialized functions. Within the space of four or five millennia, the momentum provided and maintained by agriculture would have led human beings from a precarious way of life constantly threatened by famine to a stable existence, first in village communities, then in city-states, and finally in empires.
Such were until recently the prevailing views. But now that simple and grandiose reconstruction of human history is under attack. Detailed investigations of peoples without agriculture have focused on their work time, the nutritional value of their food, and the quantities produced. Such studies demonstrate that most of these peoples lead a comfortable life. Geographical environments that we believe to be disadvantaged, given our ignorance of their natural resources, conceal for those who live there a profusion of plant species quite suitable for nourishment. The Indians in the desert regions of California, where a small white population has a difficult time subsisting, were familiar with and consumed dozens of wild plants of great nutritional value. In South Africa it was observed that, even during years of severe drought, millions of nuts of the genus
Ricinodendron—from which the Bushmen draw part of their nourishment—were rotting on the ground. Once their alimentary needs were met, no one bothered anymore to gather up the nuts.
It has been calculated that, among groups living primarily from hunting or from the gathering of wild products, one man provided for the needs of four or five people. That is, his productivity rate was higher than that of many European peasants on the eve of World War II. This was all the more true in that the time devoted to searching for food was no more than two or three hours a day on average, for a yield exceeding two thousand calories per person (an average that includes children and the elderly) of a very well-balanced diet. One Indian tribe in the Amazonian forest consumes daily more than twice the protein and calories required by international standards, and six times the vitamin C! If the time devoted to cooking the food and manufacturing the implements is added, several populations in America, Africa, and Australia have a work time that does not surpass four hours a day. In actuality, every active adult works six hours a day but only two and a half days a week. The rest of the time is spent on social and religious activity, rest, and leisure.
Nothing obliges us to think that these conditions of existence provide a picture of those that humanity as a whole experienced just prior to the dawn of the Neolithic period. Apart from Australians and a few others, most hunter-gatherers observed by contemporary ethnologists may be the product of a regressive evolution. They were also not immune to hard times. Granted, they knew how to keep the size of their population in equilibrium with the natural environment, thanks to their rules concerning marriage and their various other prohibitions, which limited demographic density to about one person per two square kilometers. It does not follow that all individuals drew an equal benefit from these measures.
In any event, these living conditions explain, at least in part, why these groups did not need or wish to cultivate land and raise livestock, even though preagricultural techniques were perfectly well known to them.
Peoples without agriculture know to burn fields of wild plants at the end of the season, to ensure a better harvest the next year. Near their houses they put in gardens of favorite foods, composed of transplanted specimens. They create original habitats for these species, such as garbage heaps, trails, and burned fields. Many plants that will later be cultivated have an affinity for disturbed soil of that kind and thereby acquire desirable morphological traits: gigantism, well-developed comestible parts, early maturation. These peoples also unintentionally propagate food plants by dropping part of their harvest on the ground. They know the plants, and they know how to help them survive.
The Australian aborigines, who lived without agriculture, were nevertheless metaphorical farmers, so to speak: they observed complicated rites to protect wild plants, to encourage them to grow and multiply, and to keep away parasites and natural disasters. Perhaps we ought to see a certain myth—of which many examples are known throughout the world—as a first image, it too metaphorical, of the domestication of animals. Its hero is endowed with supernatural powers. He pens up wild animals in an enclosure or cave, lets them out only one at a time to provide for his family, or keeps them all so as to cause famine. Fifteen or twenty thousand years ago, Magdalenian hunters may have been breeding livestock symbolically when, in the limited space of caves, they gathered together diverse figurations of animals to decorate the walls.
In short, all the mental faculties and most of the technologies required for agriculture and the domestication of animals existed in germ before these activities appeared. They cannot be considered the result of sudden discoveries. If hunter-gatherers do not cultivate the land, even though they would be perfectly capable of doing so, it is because—rightly or wrongly—they believe they live better without agriculture. Usually, in fact, they know of the farming way of life practiced by neighboring populations. But they refuse to imitate their neighbors because in their view cultivating the land requires too much work and leaves too little leisure time. And that is something that investigations in the field have abundantly confirmed: farming, even when practiced in a rudimentary manner, is harder and takes up more time than hunting and gathering, and it yields less.
Hence the problem raised by historians and ethnologists: If agriculture was neither necessary nor desirable, why did it appear? They have argued passionately about the matter for some thirty years, and it appears that what were formerly seen as consequences of the agricultural revolution are now perceived as its causes: demographic pressure, sedentism, the diversification of the social structure.
There were sedentary peoples who did not practice agriculture. The most famous examples were the fishermen of the Jōmon period in eastern Japan, several millennia BCE; and, until the early nineteenth century, the Indians of the Pacific Coast of Canada, who also lived by fishing, resided in large villages, and had a complicated social organization. It also seems that, in a few places in the Near East, life in permanent villages preceded agricultural economies.
An appealing theory has it that agriculture originated when small groups of people, displaced to a habitat different from their own, were compelled to maintain, despite unfavorable conditions, the preagricultural techniques they had already been practicing elsewhere. We would thus find on the order of culture the conditions that the punctualist biologists postulate to explain the appearance of new natural species. It has also been noted that originally, and for a very long time afterward, agriculture appears to have been limited to incidental products intended to supplement certain seasonal gaps in hunting and gathering.
But there is agreement that, when considered from a more general perspective, neither agriculture nor the domestication of animals was developed to satisfy purely economic needs. Domestic animals were a luxury, a sign of wealth, a symbol of prestige—as can still be observed in India and Africa—well before they were seen as a source of food or raw materials. In the Near East, the domestication of sheep dates back about eleven thousand years, but it was only five thousand years later that use was first made of their wool. In the Americas and in Southeast Asia, the first plants were cultivated less for their nutritional value than as luxury products: condiments, industrial crops, and rare species, isolated specimens of which were identified and protected. That was the case for chili peppers and sisals in Mexico; for cotton and calabashes in South America; for sunflowers, lamb’s quarters, and elderberries in the eastern part of North America; for betel or areca nuts in Thailand. Human beings set out to increase the number of rare plants rather than to propagate food plants that were abundant enough in their wild state to satisfy their needs.
The Indian tribes of California traded with one another to obtain not ordinary products for consumption but luxury items: minerals, obsidian, feathers, round shells, and so on. It is remarkable, in fact, that the technological discoveries that made possible the great arts of civilization, such as pottery and metallurgy, were at first used only to produce ornaments and jewelry. The most ancient chemical compound produced by industrial means may have been tetracalcium phosphate, a process entailing several stages. But it was not produced for economic reasons: about seventeen thousand years ago, the Magdalenian painters invented the process to obtain a pigment of a particular shade. They were motivated by aesthetic concerns.
We should not attempt to reduce all types of social development to a single model; rather, we should acknowledge that human societies have conceived of their productive activities in different ways. Hunter-gatherers and farmers do not represent different stages in an evolution obligatory for all. From several standpoints, agriculture was progress: it produces more food in a given space and time and allows for more rapid population growth, a denser occupation of land, and more extensive social groups. But seen from a different perspective, agriculture represented a regression. The human diet deteriorated as a result. It was henceforth limited to a few products rich in calories but poor in nutrients: of the some thousand plants known to be or to have been alimentary resources, agriculture retained only about twenty. And that is not all. In restricting its range of products, farming risks turning a bad harvest into a disaster. It also requires more labor. It may even be that, along with the domestication of animals, it was responsible for the spread of infectious diseases, as suggested by the coincidence in Africa, in both time and space, of the diffusion of agriculture and of sickle-cell anemia, the gene for which, if inherited from only one parent, offers protection against malaria, which progressed in tandem with the clearing of land.
Such phenomena do not belong to the past alone. In response to World War II, Argentina increased its cultivation of corn in order to export it to Europe. As a result, field mice proliferated, and with them cases of viral hemorrhagic fever, since the rodents are carriers of the disease. Other viruses spread by agricultural operations are now rampant in Bolivia, Brazil, China, and Japan. Indeed, carriers of infectious diseases thrive in ecological sites created by humans, such as garbage heaps, cleared land, stagnant pools of water, and so on.
In large modern societies, doing without agriculture is a luxury we can no longer afford: we have tens or hundreds of millions of mouths to feed. If our ancestors had dispensed with farming, as they still could have done, humanity’s evolution would have been different. When compared to the size of our population, that of hunter-gatherers appears derisory. But can we claim that the fantastic growth of the population over the entire expanse of the earth has represented progress? All the diverse forms of productive activity over the millennia constitute choices. Each offers advantages, but we must pay the price, consenting to endure the damaging effects.