In my view, the single most effective cultural mechanism against collective violence in the Neolithic was the principle of safety in numbers: the ability to form large defensive groups which would outnumber male raiding parties and withstand their assaults.
Evolutionary ecologist Richard Alexander, from the University of Michigan, arrived at this conclusion in the 1970s. Alexander’s analysis of the Neolithic period convinced him that the emergence of extended family groups was not driven by the need for protection against nonhuman predators, but because large groups provided protection against human aggression and intergroup competition.732
Alexander’s hypothesis aligns with NP theory, which attempts to place collective violence into a plausible evolutionary context. But his suggestion that Neolithic humans grouped together in large numbers for mutual protection against the rampaging hordes of bloodthirsty savages presents a few problems.
Firstly, Mesolithic people didn’t possess the hierarchical, organisational and logistical strategies to support significant population intensification. The small groups of less than 50 people, in which they lived for millions of years, could not have increased to several thousand people—or several hundred thousand—without their acquiring a raft of new social and organisational skills. Realistically, large aggregations of people (society) require certain skill sets—such as social intelligence, leadership, common identity, reciprocity and good communications—to function effectively.
The Mesolithic people would have had to introduce organisational systems to store and protect food surpluses, as well as political systems to resolve intergroup conflicts and distribute shared resources. They would also have required stringent protocols to prevent hyper-aggressive males from dominating the group.
So it is very likely that, as the adaptive demands of population intensification mounted, increased selection pressure was generated for neural networks that would facilitate the hierarchical, linguistic, cognitive, organisational and socialisation protocols needed to sustain unprecedented population expansions. In other words, fear drove Mesolithic and Neolithic people together into artificially large cultural groups, and natural selection provided the glue that allowed these unnaturally large formations to stick. By the second millennium BC, according to Paul Bairoch in Cities and Economic Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present, the population of Babylon was more than 200,000.733
Sure, there are plenty of sociologists and cultural anthropologists who would argue that even today humans haven’t perfected the art of living together in super-sized groups. But, without the impetus for population intensification generated by hyper-aggression, we would probably still be members of small tribal groups scratching out a living hunting deer and digging for tubers.
Despite acquiring the necessary psychological, organisational, political and social protocols to support population intensification, these early humans had to overcome some serious practical problems, and this brings us to the sixth adaptation.
There are limits to the size of an economically viable nomadic hunter- gatherer group. Today, most consist of between ten to thirty individuals.734
At times, such as when prey animals are in large supply, larger temporary seasonal aggregations of 100 people or more may form. Throughout the Mesolithic, 100 was probably the upper limit to what traditional hunter- gatherer procurement strategies could sustain.735
Central to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was its nomadic nature, driven by the need to follow seasonal migrations of prey and find fresh hunting grounds. This raised the likelihood of groups coming into contact with marauding gangs of wild young men also roaming the countryside in search of fresh quarry.
Archaeologist Allen Johnson and economic anthropologist Timothy Earle, authors of The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, estimate that during the Neolithic, there were more than 100,000 small extended family groups.736 The chances are high that these groups would come into contact with each other at waterholes, on animal migration routes, and in rich foraging regions.
The prospect of violent encounters between family units and bachelor groups simply had to be addressed if childrearing in the Mesolithic was to remain viable. People encircled by pugnacious warriors could not rely on their large numbers or existing tactics such as threats, negotiation or pleas for mercy. They needed something else. Ultimately, only a physical barrier—something solid and impenetrable like a fortress—could provide any real protection. Ultimately, only tall sturdy walls could offer a defence against the hordes of males who were making their lives a misery.
Yet, as logical as this solution seems, it wasn’t feasible at the time because fortresses are fixed in the landscape and the Mesolithic people were nomadic. Even if they invented fortresses, how would they feed themselves? Hunting and foraging were simply incompatible with a sedentary existence within the walls of a fortress.
As a precursor to developing a stockade, our ancestors had to resolve the issue of food procurement and I suggest they achieved this by inventing agriculture. Agriculture was immediately adaptive because it allowed Neolithic hunter-gatherers to live in fortified compounds, while providing sufficient food for their group.
The theory that Neolithic people were forced to abandon their traditional lifestyle to reluctantly embrace agriculture and a sedentary lifestyle because it provided a buffer against male hyper-aggression is a radical hypothesis. But it does offer some answers to what has been described as the most intractable mystery of the Neolithic—what caused the agricultural revolution737—the extraordinary transition from hunting and gathering to farming.
Writing in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Brian Hayden from the University of Southampton observes, “Few topics in prehistory have engendered as much discussion and resulted in so few satisfying answers as the attempt to explain why hunter/gatherers began to cultivate plants and raise animals.”738 Applying the male hyper-aggression model to this truculent anthropological and historical problem is for me one of the most exciting applications of NP theory.
The only thing anthropologists agree on is that there is no consensus on what caused the agricultural revolution.739,740,741
Brian Hayden says:
Climatic change, population pressure, sedentism, resource concentration from desertification, girls’ hormones, land ownership, geniuses, rituals, scheduling conflicts, random genetic kicks, natural selection, broad spectrum adaptation and multicausal retreats from explanation have all been proffered to explain domestication. All have major flaws... the data do not accord well with any one of these models.742
Current opinions include that the “Neolithic revolution was opportunistic”;743 that it was the result of extinction of large herbivores,744 that it resulted from the “emergence of socioeconomic inequalities and competition among complex, economically specialised hunter/ gatherers,”745 and various other causes.746,747,748
For a while, because the shift to a settled agricultural lifestyle appeared to coincide with a period of climate warming (known as the Bølling-Allerød Interstadial), it was believed that agriculture was made possible by the improved climate. But carbon dating of pollen from ice core samples proves this wasn’t the case.
Another theory argues that the invention of agriculture caused the shift to new settlement patterns, but this too has been disproved. Nicholas Wade explains in Before the Dawn, “the reverse is true: it was not agriculture that led to settlement, but rather sedentary life came first, well before the Neolithic age began, and agriculture followed in its train.”749
Yet another theory argues that sedentism was a response to overpopulation,750 but we now know that populations increased only after the shift to agriculture.
One reason for this lack of consensus is that the shift to agriculture doesn’t seem to make sense. Palaeopathological and comparative studies show the health of populations that adopted cereal agriculture actually deteriorated.751 The spread of infections in crowded cities was a real problem—costing thousands of lives—as was the deterioration in the quality of food that accompanied cereal farming.752
Professor of Anthropology at State University of New York Mark Cohen asks, “If agriculture provides neither better diet, nor greater dietary reliability, nor greater ease, but conversely appears to provide a poorer diet, less reliably, with greater labour costs, why does anyone become a farmer?”753
This question has never been satisfactorily answered. Even after a lifetime studying the causes of the Neolithic revolution, archaeologist Richard MacNeish declares, “…after all these years of work on the problem of how and why agriculture began, I see no final answers.”754
The theory that humans invented agriculture (and adopted it grudgingly) because it allowed them to live in walled compounds for protection against hyper-aggressive men, can be tested against the archaeological record. For a start, it predicts there should be a sudden proliferation of walled compounds and forts at the same time as agriculture took off, which is the case. The earliest settlements of the Middle East—at Jericho, Uruk, Kadesh-Barnea, Troy, Aphek, Rehman Dheri, Tell Hamourkar, Asikli and Kalibangan—were all fortified with high walls and defensive trenches. The Syrian Neolithic settlement of Tell Hamoukar, for instance, which dates to around 4000 BC, was over 500 acres in size, and yet the entire settlement was enclosed by a defensive stone wall 4 metres (13 ft) thick and 3 metres (10 ft) high.
The concept of a walled fortress probably evolved through a process of trial and error. Consider, for example, Çatal Hüyük in modern day Turkey. Built about 8500 years ago, Çatal Hüyük (below) is thought to be the oldest human settlement on Earth. An analysis of its distinctive architecture reveals what I believe to be the first stage in the cultural evolution of the fortress. The city did not have an external defensive wall as such, possibly because it still hadn’t been conceived or that its inhabitants did not possess the political, social and logistical systems to organise and communally build something as complex as an encircling wall.
Eventually though, the need to protect themselves against male coalitions led to what, at the time, must have seemed an ingenious solution. Families built their individual houses next to each other in a cluster, so tightly packed together that there weren’t even any streets or passageways between them. That meant that the outside walls of the houses on the periphery formed a single unbroken barrier around the whole settlement, creating a de facto stockade wall.
This earliest attempt to build a defensive fortress would explain why the inhabitants of Çatal Hüyük did not put doors in their houses. And except for a few small air vents, there were no windows either—nothing big enough for an invader to climb through.
To enter their houses, the inhabitants had to climb down a ladder extending up through a small hole in the roof, making the houses dark, hot and airless. About 10,000 people crammed into the 10 acre site and, during its 1000 year occupation, they kept building on top of each other until they created a veritable warren 20 metres high. This design was hardly conducive to a healthy lifestyle but would have been worth it because it provided the citizens with a sense of security.
Ultimately, though, this clustered, doorless, windowless, airless, sunless concept of town planning proved too inconvenient, and it was up to the Neolithic city of Jericho (in the West Bank of the Palestinian Territories) to take the next creative step—a separate free-standing wall enclosing the whole settlement.
Jericho is a milestone in the history of human achievement. The entire 10 acre settlement was encircled by an embankment and two stone walls 15 metres (47 ft.) high and three metres (10 ft.) thick, surrounded by a dry moat and stone towers.755 This formidable wall (built 5000 years before the pyramids) represents an unprecedented engineering achievement and reflects the insecurity and anxiety of its ancient builders. That this three metre thick wall was built over 11,000 years ago is truly extraordinary.
The NP theory of the origins of agriculture makes another claim that can be tested. It asserts that Neolithic people did not want to give up their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They did it only in order to live behind tall protective walls—where they could feel safe, and where they could raise their children in relative peace. In all likelihood, they probably initially loathed living in such close confines, until it became a way of life.
Apart from new neighbours to push them and us buttons, a settled lifestyle also brought vermin and disease. Smallpox, measles and influenza were originally animal diseases but spread to the first human farmers with catastrophic consequences.756,757
Food waste, garbage, flies, rats and maggots had not been a problem for nomadic people, neither had raw sewage or the problem of fresh drinking water. Settled people not only took on these social hygiene problems but also had to make new social accommodations and com- promises. As Nicholas Wade puts it, Neolithic people “had to trade their prized freedom and equality for hierarchy, officials and chiefs and other encumbrances.”758
And farming was hard work. Archaeological data consistently shows that not only did farmers spend more time than hunter-gatherers procuring the same amount of food, but that their diet was less healthy and more prone to famine than hunter-gatherers.759,760
When archaeologist Andrew Moore excavated the Syrian Neolithic settlement of Abu Hureyra in the 1970s, he found evidence that the ‘daily grind’ of cereal grains was much more strenuous and labour-intensive than previously thought. Because seeds deteriorate once they are de- husked, this—and grinding—had to be done daily. But it took so long and placed such a strain on their bodies that, in many cases, the bones and muscles of the inhabitants became deformed.
The sacrifice and inconvenience were justified only by the measure of safety that such a sea-change afforded. For a while at least, it is likely that the first farmers continued to hunt to supplement their meagre agricultural efforts, and this too is confirmed by the latest archaeological evidence. It shows that in many cases, people (like the Natufians who occupied Jordan and Palestine) continued their reliance on hunting for some time after the shift to sedentism.761
In conclusion, while the ostensible cause of the Neolithic revolution was the need for walled enclaves to protect settled family populations, the underlying cause was male hyper-aggression, which has its evolutionary antecedents in Neanderthal predation.
The counter argument would come from scholars who interpret evidence of early walls, ditches, banks and palisades in a different light. Robert Evans and Judith Rasson’s review of the corpus of Neolithic research in southeast Europe devotes only two paragraphs to defensive structures, and mostly quotes scholars who argue the “identification of a community by a wall or fence may be symbolic (to create a sense of community) or functional (to keep animals in or out, for instance)”.762 A related argument holds that Neolithic walls, banks and ditches were not built as fortifications at all, but as a method of community ‘demarcation’.763
It is difficult to see why you would need a three metre thick wall to keep the goats in. It is equally difficult to resist the view that this interpretation of the evidence reflects an anthropocentric bias—that humans are too noble, intelligent, and courageous to hide behind walls and palisades. However, the weight of archaeological evidence supporting widespread intertribal conflict during the Neolithic is overwhelming.
From the Neolithic onwards, the construction of fortified settlements dramatically increased, driven by technological innovation and increased social organisation. But the need to construct these massive edifices also drove the technological advances and the complex social systems needed to fund and organise these ever-increasing constructions.
The Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989
Although condemned by the UN, Israel has recently built a wall twice as high as the Berlin Wall, through the West Bank and Jerusalem. Paradoxically, these walls don’t assuage the feelings of insecurity and paranoia—they exacerbate them.
Wooden palisades were replaced with stone forts, surrounded by water- filled moats, with drawbridges and towers from which invaders could be seen approaching. Castles, citadels, and fortified cities became a ubiquitous feature of the landscape from the Bronze Age onwards, peaking in the Middle Ages when almost every European city, port, monastery and rural settlement was fortified.
By the Late Iron Age, the threat no longer came from small nomadic gangs. It came from barbarian hordes or large invading armies, which changed the function of castles. They gradually became sanctuaries for farming folk from surrounding areas during times of conflict. The other change was that, as human culture spread across the globe and diversified, walled fortresses reflected emerging cultural identities.
At first glance, walled enclosures seem to be solely cultural artefacts. Their enormous cultural variety and form has obfuscated the evolutionary imperatives that motivated their construction. It could be argued, for instance, that the reason Byblos Castle in Lebanon (below left) was built by the Crusaders in the 12th century was simply as a defence against the armies of Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt. Or that the medieval moated Bodiam Castle in East Sussex (below right) was specifically built to defend the surrounding area from a feared French invasion. And while that’s correct, the ubiquity of fortress building around the world suggests it is also part of human nature. The anthropologist Lee Cronk has argued that when humans express a strong cultural attitude or when an aspect of culture is universal (such as gossip, dancing and belief in deities), it may have a biological origin.764
If, as NP theory argues, these constructions are subliminal expressions of teems that were encoded by the trauma of Neanderthal predation and Cro-Magnon hyper-aggression, then they are not just cultural. Although the fears humans inherited have been subsumed, redirected and concealed within cultural protocols, they nevertheless have their evolutionary origins in biology. The fear of the others is in our genes.
This would explain why, as munitions development rendered fortresses redundant in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and people stopped building castles, the innate fears simply found a new expression—in locked houses, burglar alarms, security guards, reinforced doors, grilled windows, padlocks, police, and guard dogs.
To understand why this nebulous biological fear of them inculcates culture to such an extent, it is important to understand the nature of teems.
Teems are inheritable packages of emotion, and provide only an emotional memory of a traumatic incident. Teems derived from Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons present only half the picture—and no details. They describe what the others felt like but not what they specifically looked like. To flesh out the details, Mesolithic and Neolithic humans had to use their imagination, or draw on their storytellers and mythographers (all aspects of culture) to give form to the demons, monsters and satanic creatures they believed lurked in the darkness beyond their walls. In other words, culture gives form to teems.
Even today, when modern humans attempt to identify the source of residual anxieties, they too must draw on their imagination, just as their ancestors did, or project their feelings onto one of the monsters from mythology, literature or the movies. Alternatively, they can select a convenient scapegoat from ethnic minorities, migrant groups, gays, women, members of religious communities and other minority groups and dress them in the feelings of their teems. The tragedy is that in each case, the real culprit has long gone.
These futile attempts to identify the invisible others that lurk just beyond the firelight continued unabated throughout the Neolithic, Mesolithic, Bronze Age, the Iron Age and finally into recent recorded history. In each culture, capricious vicissitudes nominated expedient scapegoats and personified them as monsters, fiends and demons.
In Europe, the others were identified as witches, warlocks, heretics, incubuses and werewolves—creatures who came out only under cover of darkness to wreak havoc on righteous people everywhere. At other times, the others included any and all foreigners. Often they were labelled barbarians—a subhuman race that sprang from dark satanic places to kill the innocents, defile virtuous women and eat babies.
Ammianus Marcellinus, a fourth century Roman historian, described how “a race of men, hitherto unknown, had suddenly descended like a whirlwind from the lofty mountains, as if they had risen from some secret recess of the earth, and were ravaging and destroying everything which came in their way.”
The Greek historian, Herodotus was no less kind:
Barbarians can neither think nor act rationally, theological controversies are Greek to them... Under the assault of their horrible songs the classic meter of the ancient poet goes to pieces... Barbarians are driven by evil spirits; ‘possessed by demons’, who force them to commit the most terrible acts… Barbarians are without restraint... they are given to gross personal hygiene... they run dirty and barefoot, even in the winter... They grease their blond hair with butter and care not that it smells rancid...Their reproductive energy is inexhaustible; the Northern climate of their native land, with its long winter nights favours their fantastic urge to procreate.
It would not concern these finger-pointing ancients that no such race as the barbarians ever existed. As historian David Willis McCullough points out, “there was no one group called ‘barbarian’ and no ancestral home- land of Barbaria.”765 They certainly didn’t refer to themselves as barbarians. That was a pejorative term first used by the Greeks and Romans, and simply meant anyone who could not be understood, either because they stammered, or their rudimentary language was so guttural and animal- like, no decent ‘civilised’ person could comprehend it.
To the ancients, barbarians included everyone they feared—Thracians, Egyptians, Persians, Berbers, Indians, Celts, Germans, Phoenicians, Etruscans, Romans, Carthaginians, Macedonians, Eleans and Epirotes. Later, Huns, Vandals, Saracens, Mongols, Scythians, Celts, Goths, Tartars, Christians and Vikings were added to the list
Much to the chagrin of Herodotus, the barbarians used basically the same term to express their own xenophobic perception of foreigners. The ancient Indians, for example, referred to foreigners as ‘Mlechcha’— barbarians. When the Portuguese sailors first arrived in Japan, they were called nanban, which means ‘barbarians from the south’. Not to be left out, the Persians considered Roman and Arab cultures to be so inferior to their own, they called them ‘Soosk’—‘barbarian’ in Farsi. In the east, the Han Chinese bestowed the term on Europeans, Mongols, Koreans, Japanese, Manchu, Tartars and Turks, while the cultural elite of the Italian Renaissance used it to describe anyone born outside Italy. Until recently, the Chinese used the pejorative term ‘yangguizi’ (which means ‘foreign devil’) to describe all foreigners.
While the term ‘barbarian’ lives on as a term of abuse to describe the typical suite of Neanderthaloid-Cro-Magnon attributes, the barbarians of those times have long gone. They morphed into solid, law-abiding farmers and denizens of the new cities that mushroomed around the world. But consistent with NP theory’s thesis that barbarians were only ever a cultural surrogate for deeper anxieties, new barbarians have resurfaced to take their place. They are sometimes real aggressors, reflecting the last vestiges of male hyper-aggression. But more likely, they are the alienated and marginalised victims of pogroms, persecutions and genocides, suggesting the cultural projection of innate fears remain a salient feature of human affairs.