5

Early Agriculture (8000-3500 BCE)

 

 

 

Strikingly, agriculture arose independently in at least four and possibly seven places around the world in a time frame of about 8,000 years. Before 10,000 years ago (8000 BCE) virtually everybody lived on wild foods. By 2,000 years ago, the overwhelming majority lived by farming. Viewed against the 5 million years of hominid history, or even the 100,000 to 200,000 years of Homo sapiens, these 8,000 years represent an amazingly rapid rate of change, so rapid that historians call it the agricultural revolution, a fateful transition in human history.¹

Why would people successfully adapted to a hunter-gatherer style of life abandon it in favor of farming all over the world within a few thousand years? This complex question brings us ever closer to our own time, for the turn toward agriculture began only about 400 generations (10,000 years) ago.

We are so accustomed to enjoying the food produced by farming that it is difficult to imagine ourselves sitting around the fires of hunter-gatherers. Unpalatable though their diet may seem to us, archaeologists now believe that changing to domesticated food may have represented a decline in the quality of diet, and certainly it meant an increase in the per capita workload.

Why would people do it? No one knows for certain, but much new evidence has come to light in the last thirty years. The simple answer seems to be that people had to, in order to survive. Those who did not make the switch died.

The complex reasons for why people would gradually abandon hunting and foraging can be discussed around the idea of a food crisis. The first priority for humans, like other animals, is to locate enough food; the more they find, the more children they have, keeping them ever urgently seeking food.²

By about 9000 BCE groups of people in many places began to feel a pinch in their food supplies. There were no longer as many abundant areas into which to move; other people were already there. From an estimated 50,000 Homo sapiens at the time of the expansion from Africa, the human population had reached 5 to 6 million by 9000 BCE. During the period of hunting and gathering, the population had grown slowly, but over time the increase was significant. The Earth may have been reaching its human carrying capacity under the techniques of the hunting and gathering life.

Population pressures were not the whole story, however. As described in the last chapter, the climate on Earth was changing faster than usual. From about 9000 BCE the last ice age receded as temperatures rapidly warmed around the globe. This warming affected people in many ways; humans everywhere used their ingenuity to take advantage of the new circumstances as rising seas pushed people inland and rising temperatures changed plants and animals. Building on their previous achievements—the use of fire for cooking and clearing land, the use of language for social cooperation, the development of tools for solving problems—and responding to what plants and animals did, many people over the next few thousand years transformed themselves, and were transformed, from wandering bands of hunter-gatherers into settled villages of herders and farmers, who could produce a surplus of food, at least temporarily.

Plants and Animals Enter Domestication

Humans are not the world’s first, or only, farmers. Ants grow plants (fungus) and tend animals (aphids). They collect seeds and store them in chambers near their nests. At least 225 genera of plants are dependent solely on the activities of ants for their propagation. Like ants, people became involved in the life cycles of certain plants and animals, and what we call agriculture resulted.³

In the past fifty years the work of archaeologists has greatly increased our knowledge of the beginnings of agriculture. For evidence they rely on the remains of animals (bones) and plants (seeds and pollen). For example, the warming of the climate 11,000 years ago was documented in 1968 by the analysis of pollen in two lake beds in Iran. Other evidence is often fossilized human feces, called coprolites, which reveal what plants have been eaten. The best sites for recovering this evidence are located in dry regions. Radiocarbon dates are reliable to within a few hundred years if different materials from the same site yield the same dates.

The domestication of animals and plants was a long, unintended, reciprocal, evolutionary process. Various local groups of people may have exchanged ideas about how to do it, but it seems to have occurred independently at different times in at least four different locations: southwest Asia (the Fertile Crescent), China, and southeast Asia; Africa; and the Americas (Fig. 5.1).

The reason for the simultaneous appearance of agriculture in different areas was the warming climate, during which the plants and animals that survive most frequently are those that display traits of flexibility and non-specialization. These traits characterize the young of most species; hence, warming climate produces animals that retain their juvenile traits (called neoteny), including docility, lack of fear, dependence, and early sexual maturity. Animals evolved the traits that predisposed them to domestication.⁴

Domestication can be defined as a kind of genetic engineering in which humans gradually take control of the reproduction of an animal or plant that is predisposed to engagement with humans, separating it from its wild species in order to control its development into a new species with the characteristics that humans desire.

The first animal to enter into domestication was none other than people’s best friend, the dog. The ancestors of dogs are gray wolves, found around the world after evolving in North America. Wolves gradually evolved into dogs in the Americas in about 11,000 to 10,000 BCE and in present-day Iran a little later. It is easy to imagine that dogs, as the climate changed, also hung around human campfires and hunting sites looking for food and interacting with people. Dogs adapted themselves easily to human activities. They were pack animals that followed a leader, and accepted a person as a surrogate pack leader. Captured puppies could easily be cared for until adulthood. As tame adults, dogs helped in hunting and later, as other animals were domesticated, played a vital role as guards against predators and as allies in herding. Dogs were helpful scavengers, cleaning villages by eating human feces. They were eaten in some cultures but not in others.

5.1 The Origins of Agriculture

(Source: David Christian, 2004, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 213.)

As one might expect, the domestication of cats occurred much later, even though cats evolved into their present state as long as 3.4 to 5.3 million years ago. It was probably Egyptians who domesticated cats in order to protect their granaries against rodents, a practice documented by 1500 BCE. Although cats are solitary as adults, they are sociable as juveniles; that seems the key to their domestication. Domestic cats have been documented in Greece and China from 500 BCE.

Only about thirteen large mammals (those weighing over one hundred pounds) permitted themselves to be domesticated. The big five were sheep, goats, cows, pigs, and horses. The other eight were two kinds of camels, donkeys, llamas, reindeer, water buffalo, yaks, and Bali cattle. All these animals entered into domestication between 8000 and 6000 BCE. All shared the following characteristics: they ate plants, grew quickly, bred in captivity, would not kill their keepers or themselves trying to escape, and had a social structure (herd) that made them easy to manage. Most large mammals were not willing or genetically suitable for domestication; otherwise we might have hippopotami producing our milk and be riding zebras in our parades.

Each region in which herding emerged had its distinctive animals. The earliest region was southwest Asia—or the Middle East, as it is often known in the United States.^b

5.2 Ancient Southwest Asia

In certain areas of the Fertile Crescent people were able to settle in villages without the domestication of plants or animals. They collected and stored enough wild grains to supplement their abundant hunting, mainly of gazelles. This step is called complex foraging, as contrasted with simple foraging, which is characterized by no storage or long-term settlement.

Two wild animals in the Fertile Crescent were willing to get closely involved with humans—sheep, beginning in about 9000 BCE, and goats, in about 8000 BCE. Since both sheep and goats were able to digest many more kinds of grasses and foliage than humans, they became an efficient way for turning inedible plants into protein for people, who gradually learned to herd them from area to area and eventually to enclose them and protect them from predators. The willingness of sheep and goats to become dependent on humans ensured their evolutionary success. The population of each now exceeds 1 billion, while their wild counterparts teeter on the brink of extinction.

The process of domesticating sheep and goats may have started with men guarding a herd as it moved. Men then herded groups of animals within certain locations, began feeding them, and then corralled and housed them in permanent settlements.

The domestication of plants took place in an equally long, slow process. People carefully observed the wild grasses as they collected seeds to grind and eat. According to the rubbish heap theory of plant domestication, they first noticed wild seeds growing at their campsites where the seeds not consumed had been dumped. Women probably carried out the early sequences in plant domestication, since they were usually the gatherers in hunter-gatherer groups.⁵ They must have observed that some grasses had larger seeds, easier than others to harvest and process into foods. Some grasses had heads that shattered easily and dispersed their seeds; others held the seed firmly until maturation.

Women in the Fertile Crescent learned to seek out three kinds of wild grasses—emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, and barley—as well as two forms of wild legumes, lentils and chickpeas. Gradually, after gathering these wild forms, women learned to tend and protect them. They noticed where they grew and where the seeds sprang up the next year. Eventually women learned to save some seeds and sow them in areas in which they would grow, to water and weed them, to choose the largest seeds and the healthiest plants, and to store the surplus. Men continued to hunt, and women supplemented their kill with increasing supplies of wheat, barley, and peas.

By about 7500 BCE in the Fertile Crescent, people settled in permanent villages, tending crops and animals. Keeping goats and sheep and growing wheat and barley, they were able to produce more food from a smaller area than they had been able to by hunting and gathering. In this gradual process, many villages of complex foragers were abandoned as people returned to simple foraging; not all villages could or would make the transition to agriculture. There is evidence of extensive use of female infanticide as early villagers struggled to limit their population to the food available.

In statistical terms, one hunter-gatherer needed about ten square miles of favorable territory to collect enough food to live. One square mile of cultivated land, however, could support at least fifty people. Hence agriculture could support a human density fifty to a hundred times greater than hunting and gathering could.⁶

By about 6000 BCE settled life was becoming the norm in the Fertile Crescent. All the suitable crops and animals in the region had been domesticated, and they became the basis for the adoption of agriculture in adjacent areas: Europe, where different adaptations were necessary, and in the Nile Valley, almost unchanged.

In 6000-5000 BCE Greece and the southern Balkans, where the climate was similar to the Near East, shifted to agriculture and probably domesticated cattle. Archaeologists have hotly debated whether agriculture spread by people circulating the knowledge by word of mouth or by people themselves moving into new areas. But genetic research has revealed unequivocally that people themselves moved rather than just talked about how to do it.

The movement of agriculture into central and northwest Europe took about 3,000 years after its adoption in Greece. By 4000 BCE farming had moved into the river valleys of central Europe—the Rhine/Danube and the Vistula/Dniester areas. Between 3000 and 2000 BCE it had been adopted in northwest Europe and a thousand years later in Denmark and southern Sweden. In these areas forests had to be cleared by slash and burn techniques, with permanent fields coming later when population pressures increased. Oats and rye, which grew as weeds in the Middle East, proved to be the food crops that flourished in the cooler, wetter climate of northwest Europe.

As farmers fanned out from the Middle East and Turkey, they took with them their language, called Indo-European. One of perhaps ten protolanguages spoken in the world at that time, Indo-European was used in parts of the Near East and around the Caspian and Black seas from about 8000 to 2000 BCE. Sanskrit evolved from it in about 1500 BCE or earlier, as did Greek in about 1450 BCE.

Agriculture waited some 2,000 years after its start in the Middle East to begin in the Nile River valley, in about 4300 BCE, based on barley, wheat, and cattle. Why farming took so long to get under way in a valley climatically suited for it is a puzzle. Cattle probably were domesticated independently in the Sahara as early as 7000 BCE, but as it dried up after 6000 BCE, cattle herders were forced to the fringes.

Africans domesticated the ass, as a beast of burden; the guinea fowl, a favorite dish of ancient Egypt and later of Rome; and cats, as mentioned earlier. Millet, sorghum, wild rice, yams, and palm oil are other foods domesticated in Africa. Yams belong to those plants that are propagated not by seeds but by stem cuttings, tubers, or roots. These plants include maniocs, bananas, sugarcane, and taro. Since these crops leave no seeds as evidence to find, African and Asian people may have cultivated them much earlier than can be known.

In Asia the evidence for early food production remains sketchier, possibly because the climate is warmer and wetter than in the Near East. The accepted picture is that millet and rice were domesticated in China in about 6000 BCE; soybeans did not appear until about 1100 BCE. Pigs and poultry were domesticated there. Rice seems to have been domesticated independently in India and possibly also in Southeast Asia.

People in the Americas developed their own gardens. By 6000 BCE people in the highlands of Mexico were cultivating up to thirty plants for food, medicine, and containers. These plants included maize (corn), chile peppers, tomatoes, five kinds of squash, gourds, avocadoes, papaya, guava, and beans. Maize emerged slowly; gene study shows that domestication began about 7000 BCE. In the wild the cob was about the size of a human thumb. Gradually larger cobs with higher yields were developed, until about 2000 BCE when the production of maize sufficed to support village life. Since there were no suitable animals to be domesticated, other than dogs and turkeys, hunting continued as long as possible. Cotton and peanuts were also cultivated.

In the mountains of Peru (including large parts of present-day Bolivia and Ecuador) another set of domesticated crops and animals developed. The llama and alpaca were used as beasts of burden, not as food. People based their diet on potatoes and quinoa, a protein-rich seed grain. Maize spread to Peru by about 1000 BCE.

In the long view of time, the domestication of plants and animals leading to agriculture as a mode of production occurred nearly simultaneously in various parts of the world. In the short view of time, however, within a few thousand years some areas lagged behind others with fateful consequences. Because people in the Americas had no suitable grains and animals for early domestication, the evolution of complex societies there began 3,000 to 4,000 years later than in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. As a consequence, when Europeans arrived in the Americas in 1500 CE, they found societies in many ways comparable to those of the Middle East in about 2000 BCE. With their horses, guns, and diseases, products of their more evolved agrarian societies, Europeans were able to strangle the more slowly emerging civilizations of the Americas.⁷

People’s experiments with plants between 9000 to 3000 BCE were so successful that no new basic food plants have been domesticated since then. The only exceptions seem to be cranberries, blueberries, and pecans, which were gathered by native North Americans but have been domesticated only in the last two centuries.

Out of approximately 200,000 species of flowering plants, only about 3,000 have been used extensively for human food. Of these, only fifteen have been and continue to be of major importance: four grasses (wheat, rice, maize, and sugar), six legumes (lentils, peas, vetches, beans, soybeans, and peanuts), and five starches (potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, maniocs, and bananas).⁸

Three Small Towns

One excavation in particular reveals the process of people turning to farming as a way of life: the village of Abu Hureyra in modern-day Syria. This site was first occupied in about 11,500 BCE as a small village settlement of pit dwellings with reed roofs supported by wooden uprights. Inhabitants collected and stored wild barley, wheat, and rye. They hunted Persian gazelles that arrived from the south each spring, killed them en masse, and stored their meat, preserving it by drying and salting. Abu Hureyra slowly increased to 300 or 400 people who, in about 10,000 BCE, when the climate temporarily cooled, abandoned their village to return to nomadic life—still an option when difficulties like cooling of the temperature or depletion of the adjacent firewood arose.

About 500 years later (about 9500 BCE) another village arose on the same location. At first the village inhabitants hunted gazelles intensively, but in around 9000 BCE they switched to herding domesticated sheep and goats and cultivating wheat, chickpeas, and other cereals. They built rectangular, one-story mud brick homes of more than one room, joined by lanes and courtyards. The homes had floors of black, burnished plaster, occasionally decorated with red designs. They seemed to be dwellings for a single family. The town, eventually covering nearly thirty acres, was abandoned by about 5000 BCE for no known reason.

Two other villages in the Middle East that became towns in these early years have been extensively excavated—Jericho on the west bank of the Jordan River and Çatal Hüyük (pronounced Cha-TAHL-hoo-YOOK) in central Turkey.

The settlement at Jericho, at a bubbling spring, extended over at least 9.8 acres by 7000 BCE. Here people built a massive wall around their settlement. They cut down into the rock about 9 feet (2.7 meters) deep and about 10 feet (3.2 meters) wide, then bordered it with a stone wall 10 feet high, complete with 25-foot towers. Inside the wall were clustered beehive-shaped mud brick homes. Why people built such a wall remains a mystery; possibly it was a means of flood control or a defense against other people eager to steal food. The wall attests to communal labor well organized and supported by surplus food.

At Jericho the dead were deposited within the settlement, often with the head severed from the rest of the body. Sometimes modeled heads were made in painted plaster. These may have indicated differences of status; there were no other indications in the burial goods.

Settlers at Jericho herded sheep and goats that, by about 6500 BCE, constituted 60 percent of all meat consumed. Presumably the gazelles were becoming depleted. Cattle and pigs seemed to be coming under increasing control by people, who were also cultivating wheat, barley, lentils, and peas, rotating crops to keep yields high. Considerable trade occurred—obsidian from Turkey, turquoise from Sinai, and seashells from the Mediterranean and Red seas. Small clay spheres, cones, and disks suggest a simple recording system for keeping track of something—perhaps commodities traded?

The obsidian used at Jericho came from Turkey, probably from its largest trading center, Çatal Hüyük. Some of Çatal Hüyük’s prosperity resulted from the trading of obsidian quarried in nearby mountains. Obsidian forms when molten lava flows into a lake or ocean and cools rapidly, producing a glassy rock. It was much valued for its propensity to split, creating sharp edges, and its ability to be polished brightly in the creation of high quality tools, weapons, mirrors, and ornaments. The site at Çatal Hüyük, first excavated in 1961 to 1963 CE, revealed the details of how humans adapted to a settled existence and created beauty in doing so.⁹

Çatal Hüyük spread over an area of thirty-two acres on the Konya Plain of south central Turkey near a marsh surrounded by well-wooded areas. Excavations show that it was rebuilt, presumably when houses began to crumble, at least twelve times between 7000 BCE and its abandonment around 4500 BCE. Constructed of sun-dried mud bricks made in molds, the houses were designed to back into each other with occasional courtyards. The roofs were flat and were entered by a ladder to an opening in the roof. The outside walls of the outermost houses provided a kind of defense for the town.

The food supply in Çatal Hüyük was based on domesticated sheep, goats, and pigs, and on two kinds of wheat, barley, and peas. Some hunting of red deer, boar, and onager went on, while some wild plant life, such as grasses and acorns, was collected and stored. There are some indications, not conclusive, that flax (a plant from which linen and linseed oil is made) may have been grown.

Men in Çatal Hüyük grew to an average height of 5’7”, while women reached an average of 5’2”. Men lived an average of 34 years, while women averaged 30 years. These averages include a high rate of infant and child death. The skeletons found at Çatal Hüyük reveal some arthritis but no rickets or vitamin deficiency. An overgrowth of the spongy marrow space of the skull does reveal, however, that about 40 percent of the adults studied suffered from anemia, which implies that malaria was endemic. The population is estimated as having started at about fifty people in 6500 BCE and reaching nearly 6,000 in about 5800 BCE, but this estimate is shaky.

The objects found in Çatal Hüyük suggest a high level of achievement in creative activities. The town, too small in population to feature the specialization found later in cities, seemed to have no dominant class or centralized political structure. Burial goods indicate social equality. Apparently everyone participated in the creative, artistic activities made possible by a settled life still focused on hunting and gathering but supplemented by herding, cultivating, and trading.

People in Çatal Hüyük made coil-based pottery, not yet the wheel-turned variety. People constructed baskets and wove textiles of wool or flax. They chipped exquisite knives and spears, carved stones and bones, worked leather and wood, and created jewelry and cosmetics. Objects of copper and lead, which occur naturally in almost pure form, were found at Çatal Hüyük as decorations and ceremonial objects.

The representational art at Çatal Hüyük reveals how powerfully people were still oriented toward hunting. Paintings on plastered walls depict hunting scenes, with men and women draped in leopard skins. Other scenes depict vultures cleaning bones, apparently human ones. Men were buried with weapons rather than with farm tools.

Women were often buried in special rooms that archaeologists interpret as shrines. Forty of these rooms have been excavated—one for every two houses in Çatal Hüyük. They feature sculpted heads of wild bulls, relief models of bulls and rams, depictions of female breasts, goddesses, leopards, and handprints. Since fat, fertile, female figures far outnumber those of males, experts believe that inhabitants gave top honors to a goddess. Since women are buried in these rooms, one may deduce that they created the rituals and served as priestesses. Some pictures depict a woman giving birth to a bull. Several sculptures show a woman with each arm resting on a leopard, apparently with the head of an infant appearing between her legs. Do the leopards, representing death, depict death intertwined with life? Or does the leopards’ support show the power of the goddess over nature? It’s anyone’s guess.

What people in Çatal Hüyük believed about death cannot be known, except that food offerings have been found with the bones, suggesting they believed in an afterlife. Their murals indicate that after death, the bodies of people in Çatal Hüyük were exposed to vultures. When the bones had been cleaned, they were buried in the shrines or under the sleeping platforms in the houses that they had occupied in life.

For unknown reasons people abandoned the site at Çatal Hüyük sometime in the fifth millennium BCE.

Effects of Settling Down

As people began to settle in villages and towns to cultivate plants and tend to animals, unforeseen transformations occurred in their lives. The complexity of these changes, which we live with still, defies analysis and can only be suggested by describing certain aspects of social life and some impacts on Earth itself.

The advantage of agriculture—more food per unit of land—meant that people had to figure out how to store and preserve food. They had to defend their towns against large animals and other people, since they had too much to lose to pull up and move on. They needed people who specialized in creating storage (pottery, baskets, and storage bins) and in defending the town. Surplus food could be used to support these specialized people. It could also feed babies; with cereal available, they could be weaned earlier, and women could produce more children closer together.

Cultivation, however, also meant that people had to work harder. They had to learn to exercise internal restraints on themselves, such as working long hours when they would rather be sleeping or socializing, or not eating the best seeds on long winter nights because the seeds had to be saved for spring planting. People had to spend long hours grinding seeds and weaving cloth, possibly not their favorite activities. Once they had domesticated animals and plants, they, too, had become domesticated in a mutual exchange.

Once settled in towns, people had to interact with several hundred to several thousand other people, rather than with thirty to fifty. Modern analysis suggests that about 150 people is about the limit that an individual can deal with on a personal basis; after that rules, guidelines, and policies need to be developed. In larger groups people have to create mechanisms for solving disputes; protolawyers and protojudges emerge. Ceremonies are created, and the people who carry out the ceremonies assume a kind of authority. At some point the idea of private property arises—a house belongs to someone, or a patch of land, or a number of animals. New rules had to be made about ownership and control of land. Families had to be defined more tightly and decisions made about who would live with whom. People, no longer limited by what they could carry around, began to acquire more physical objects. Garbage and human waste began to be issues.¹⁰

Because textiles are perishable, they are not as well documented as pottery. The earliest known textile was found in 1993 in southern Turkey, at a place known today as Çayönü. It is a fragment of white cloth, about an inch and a half by three inches, wrapped around a handle of a tool made from antler. The cloth, semifossilized from contact with calcium in the antler, probably is a piece of linen, woven from the fibers of the flax plant. It has been dated at 7000 BCE by radiocarbon testing.¹¹

Experts believe that from the time that people settled in villages they extended their basket-weaving techniques to crude fabrics. This consumed many hours of labor, possibly as many as pottery and food production combined. Cloth became an essential part of human society as clothing and adornment that indicated social rank.

As people settled down and reduced the portion of wild meat in their diet, they had to look for supplies of salt. The body of an adult contains three or four saltshakers worth of salt. The body loses salt through perspiration and cannot manufacture it but must replace it to live. Eating solely wild meat provides enough replacement salt, but adding cultivated crops to the diet meant that people had insufficient salt and had to locate it in the Earth. The animals they cared for also needed salt; a cow requires ten times the amount that a person does. Villagers could locate supplies of salt, probably by following wild animal trails, but people in towns, and eventually in cities, faced a bigger problem. Eventually salt became one of the first international commodities of trade and the first state monopoly—in China in 221 BCE.¹²

In the early days of plant and animal domestication, people saw that the females of every species produced new life. What did they think about the role of the male in producing offspring?

That humans were aware of men’s role in reproduction cannot be documented until written history. Astonishingly, a few present-day hunting-and-gathering people seem not aware that men are required for human reproduction. Yet archaeologists believe that by herding animals, most groups had made sufficient observations to understand the connection.¹³

As people became involved in the daily lives of animals, they exposed themselves to animal diseases. Plant pests cannot make the leap to humans, but many animal diseases can. One form of tuberculosis came with milk from cows and goats. Measles and smallpox came from cattle. A form of malaria probably came from birds, while influenza came from pigs and ducks. These diseases have played a vital role in the human story.

Life in villages and towns became precarious in ways different from the life of hunting and gathering. The possibility of disease became a cause for anxiety. The vagaries of the weather became a daily concern: Would the rain fall at the right time? Would the temperature be too hot or too cool for the crops? Hailstones could flatten a crop, as could an attack of insects or fungi. Wild game could decline or disappear; a sudden flood could surge through. Human lives were always at stake.

People settling down must have felt at the mercy of the Earth itself. Their focus shifted from placating wild animals to honoring the source of life itself and asking assistance from this source. Associated with the shift from hunting to cultivation, archaeologists have found many figures of fertile females with huge breasts and buttocks. These figures have been found across the Middle East and central Europe, dating from the period of transition, from about 8000 to 3500 BCE.

It is impossible to know exactly what these artifacts meant to the people who created them, as discussed in chapter 4, but it is difficult not to conclude that some respect for fertility is being shown. Some people must have imagined the whole Earth itself as a goddess of fertility; this idea has come down to the time of written records as the Greek goddess, Gaia. Since women give birth to new life, the spirits that people appealed to seem to have taken the form of goddesses of fertility, so vital to newly settled people. Goddess figures are associated with early agricultural societies from the Aegean Sea to Indonesia, in the form of the rice goddess, Dewi Sri, daughter of Vishnu.

As cultivation began to produce a surplus of food, a few people could specialize in creating rituals and the art associated with them. As at Çatal Hüyük, these first specialists, or priestesses, seem likely to have been women.

Women scholars have conducted research over the past forty years hoping to find evidence of some societies in which women controlled political power. They have not found evidence for any such matriarchies. Apparently by the time human density had increased enough to require centralized political power, women were limited by the increasing numbers of children, and men were powerful enough as farmers, military leaders, and priests to control political power.¹⁴

And the number of children did increase. At the beginning of experiments in settling down, the world’s total population was estimated at 6 to 10 million, about half the current size of Mexico City. By about 4000 BCE the rate of change had increased dramatically. By 1000 BCE the population was approaching 50 to 100 million. Humans were off and running on a staggering adventure into density and complexity.

Some of the costs of switching to a settled way of life may have been apparent to people undergoing the changes. They were working harder and were more at the mercy of the weather. They had more disease and less variety in their days. They may have told nostalgic stories about the hunting-and-gathering days of their ancestors.

Other costs, however, must have remained hidden to them, apparent only much later in the perspective of time. These were the costs of damage to the environment, to the fertility of the Earth itself. Among these environmental costs was deforestation, which began occurring even before plant and animal domestication, when people set fire to areas of trees to create meadows that would attract grazing animals. People increased this burning of trees when they wanted to create areas for cultivation; until metal axes there was no reasonable alternative. Trees were also burned for cooking and heating. Negligible at first, this destruction increased as the population slowly mounted.¹⁵

Destruction of trees also occurred through the intensified herding that took place during periods of drought, when goats would climb trees to eat foliage and consume every seedling. Where goats are herded regularly, forests cannot regenerate. Sheep, too, are a force for destruction, since they eat grass by the roots, pulverizing the soil.

The simplest kind of cultivation eroded the soil. The moment the structure of the soil was disturbed, even by a digging stick, it became subject to being blown or washed away. Such effects, again negligible at first, grew with the human population into calamities, as soil became depleted and rivers silted.

A perspective on the damage to Earth by cultivation was offered in about 1872 by the Native American leader, Smohalla, who protested a proposal to turn his people, the Plateau Indians of the Northwest, from hunting to cultivation: “You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s breast?” ¹⁶

Persistent Hunter-Gatherers and Nomads

Not everyone, as the words of Smohalla indicate, turned to a settled way of life between 8000 and 3000 BCE. Many areas of the world were simply not suitable for cultivation; the soil was too hard and unfertile, suitable grain grasses were not present, and the rainfall and temperature would not permit crops to mature to harvest. Other areas produced such abundance that farming was not necessary. In these regions of the world people continued their hunting and gathering, or they combined it with nomadic herding of some kind.

In the cold tundra regions of Eurasia it appears that reindeer were domesticated to pull people’s sledges by 9000 to 7000 BCE. In the upper reaches of the Nile Valley and across the rift valleys and plains of eastern and southern Africa, people developed cattle herding cultures.

A key animal in herding turned out to be the horse. North of the warm fertile agricultural areas stretched vast grasslands, from central Europe to eastern Asia. This kind of area proved too cool for agriculture. People in grasslands continued their hunting and gathering until all the large mammals died out except the horse, which did most of its evolving in North America, then went extinct there. In about 4000 to 3500 BCE the people of the grasslands, or steppes, of southern Ukraine began to protect and feed horses in exchange for milk for human babies, dried dung to burn as fuel, and meat, especially in winter when food was scarce. Thanks to this relationship, the population of both humans and horses in the sparsely settled grasslands began to increase. Later, with the development of iron and the invention of the stirrup in central Asia in about 500 BCE, the horse nomads of central Asia would become a central force in human history, trading with and sometimes plundering settled areas.

The peoples of the grasslands of North America did not domesticate horses, which died out on that continent where they had originated, the victims of changing climate and hunting by humans. People there continued hunting and gathering with some cultivation of plants first domesticated in Mexico until horses were reintroduced by Europeans after 1500 CE. Many people in South America continued hunting and gathering, with cultivation in the Peruvian Andes and perhaps in some tropical areas.¹⁷

The decision of a group of people to commit itself to cultivation and settlement can never have been an easy one. Even if settlers succeeded in producing enough food for themselves, they still faced raids by herders or hunter-gatherers desperate for their stores of grain and animals. Intergroup conflicts became more frequent and threatening.

The oldest literature in the world contains stories of conflicts among hunter-gatherers, herders, and agriculturalists and the conflicts within individual people as they made these choices. The most ancient of this literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, was written about 2100 BCE by the Sumerians, the people of the first city-state, Sumer, located at the mouth of the Euphrates River in present-day Iraq. The stories in oral form went back at least to the seventh millennium (6999-6000 BCE) when people were beginning the domestication of plants, animals, and themselves.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is organized around the life of a historical man, Gilgamesh, who ruled the city of Uruk sometime around 2750 BCE. The existence of the epic has been known to the modern world only in the last 130 years, since shortly after cuneiform writing was deciphered in 1857 from clay tablets found at Nineveh, the ancient capital of Assyria, north of Uruk in present-day Iraq. At present only about two-thirds of the text is available in continuous form; other sections contain many gaps.¹⁸

In the story, Gilgamesh is portrayed as a superhero, one-third human, two-thirds divine, extraordinarily handsome and strong. The goddess of creation, Aruru, has also created a wild man, Enkidu, strong and handsome as well who lives in nature, wears animal skins, and drinks water with the gazelles.

Gilgamesh sends Shambat, a sacred prostitute and priestess of the goddess Ishtar, to seduce Enkidu and bring him to the city. She teaches him to wear clothes, cut his hair, drink wine, and be civilized. Enkidu challenges Gilgamesh to a wrestling match in which Gilgamesh prevails.

After Enkidu has been assimilated into urban life, he and Gilgamesh go on adventures together. First they kill the demon, Humbaba the Terrible, who guards the Cedar Forest, and they cut down the sacred cedar trees. Back in the city, the goddess Ishtar wants Gilgamesh to marry her. When he refuses, she sends down the Bull of Heaven to wreak havoc in the city. The friends manage to slay the bull. Their relatives and their dreams warn them beforehand that they should not cut down the trees or kill the bull. The gods are not amused with these deeds and in punishment decree that one of the friends, Enkidu, must die a long and painful death, attended by Gilgamesh.

These stories in The Epic of Gilgamesh seem to express the ambivalence that people were feeling about cutting down forests and domesticating wild bulls. The same conflicts are echoed in the ancient Hebrew myth of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This story was not written down until about 1000 BCE, but it was based on stories that circulated much earlier in Babylonia, which followed Sumerian civilization at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in present-day Iraq.

In the story of Adam and Eve, people are presented in their original condition as hunters and gatherers in the natural world, the Garden of Eden, where food can simply be gathered in abundance. The metaphor of the garden refers not to a human-made garden but to God’s natural garden before agriculture.¹⁹

In the story, Eve presents Adam with an apple from a tree representing the knowledge of good and of evil. God has specifically forbidden the fruit to people. When Adam consents to eating the apple, God punishes the couple by banishing them from the abundance of nature and condemning them to laborious toil in the production of their food.

In this story about the transition from foraging to herding and farming, the apple tree represents plants once gathered but now cultivated, primarily by women. The apple tree may not only be symbolic but also specific; apples seem to have originated in the mountains of Kazakhstan and spread across to the Caucasus Mountains.²⁰

The apple tree also represents the knowledge of good and evil in the sense that when people settle down to a life of cultivation they must designate which of their behaviors are good (helpful) and which are evil (harmful). They must develop rules and guidelines for human behavior in larger, settled groups with a surplus of food for the first time. Previously, in smaller groups, the whole range of human behavior could be mostly accepted, and when it could not be, people could leave for other groups or start a new one. Elaborate rules about behavior were not necessary.

In the story of Adam and Eve, God is not pleased with people learning to cultivate plants. He punishes them by throwing them out of his garden and forcing them to work for their food. The narrator seems aware of the costs of settling down—the increased labor and the constraints on behavior.

The story continues with the sons of Adam and Eve, who are Cain and Abel. Cain, the elder, becomes a tiller of the ground, while Abel chooses to be a keeper of sheep. When they each offer a gift of their labor to God, he refuses the gift of Cain but accepts the animals of Abel’s flock. Out of jealousy, Cain kills Abel, becomes alienated from the ground, and is forced to return to wandering. The God of the Hebrews is not pleased with the farmer, with the transition to agriculture. The Hebrews remained a herding, nomadic people until after they conquered the Canaanites, who were agriculturalists worshipping goddesses; eventually the Hebrews, too, had to settle down into agriculture.

In the metaphors of The Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of Adam and Eve, we hear the laments of people who are no longer hunters and gatherers, people conflicted about their new arrangements and haunted by doubts about what they have done. Yet they press forward to create what they can from the abundance of the soil, the water, the sun, and all the plants and creatures sharing the living Earth. By about 3500 BCE something we call civilization has emerged.

Unanswered Questions

1. Did the Americas and Asia remain in contact after the initial colonizing of people from Asia?

This tantalizing question remains open, for there is some evidence, but not sufficient to be conclusive, that contact continued. The Chinese melanotic chicken, with black bones and dark meat, existed in the Americas, where it was sacrificed but not eaten, just as it was in China. A few scholars argue that the Mayan calendar probably came from Taxila in present-day Pakistan, and that four of the twenty names given to the days of that calendar were borrowed from Hindu gods. Some evidence suggests that the peanut plant found its way from America to coastal China and that American cotton got to India. Perhaps more evidence on this question will be forthcoming in the next decades.

2. Can the Garden of Eden and the Biblical flood be located historically?

Scholars believe that the Garden of Eden may have been located along the shores of Iraq where the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers flow into the Persian Gulf. This shoreline must have provided abundant food to hunters and gatherers, but as the seas rose people were forced to move inland to drier, already populated areas. Some may have found refuge on the edges of the small lake that would become the Black Sea. Melting water from the glacier did not flow down the Dniester, the Dnieper, the Don, or the Volga rivers because it was being diverted westward by a bulge in the Earth’s soft interior formed by the previous weight of the glacier. In about 5600 BCE the rising water of the Mediterranean Sea suddenly overflowed to the northeast, forming the Black Sea over the course of two years, forcing refugees to move in every direction, including into present-day Iraq. Whether this constitutes the Biblical flood is pure speculation, but the timing is right for the story of that flood to circulate orally until recorded in the Old Testament documents.²¹