Neanderthals, Bandits, and Farmers

 

 

Colin Tudge wrote Neanderthals, Bandits, & Farmers, a book that presents his theories on the dawn of progress and perpetual growth, focusing on how agriculture really began.  At the time, he was employed by the London School of Economics, an institution focused on capitalism, not ecological sustainability.

The book vibrates with cognitive dissonance.  Tudge has been studying agriculture for many years.  On one hand, it was a magnificent achievement that threw open the door to the wonders of modernity.  On the other hand, modernity has become a victim of its own success, with seven billion humans dangerously rocking the boat.  As Pandora once discovered, some magnificent achievements are best left in the box.

For most of the human journey, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, whom Tudge likens to bandits.  They lived by their wits, snatched what the ecosystem had to offer, and had plenty of leisure time in their lives.  The prudent path was to live within the carrying capacity of their ecosystem.  If they had been ambitious and hard working, they would have wiped out their prey and starved.

Farmers were ambitious, hard working control freaks.  They manipulated the ecosystem to increase its carrying capacity, temporarily, via soil mining.  More work produced more rewards, and more food could feed more people.  Wild critters frequently molested their precious crops, so farmers responded with pest control — overhunting.  Eventually, the human mob got large, wildlife became scarce, wild land became cropland, and returning to hunting was no longer an option.

Agriculture emerged independently in at least six widely scattered locations.  It was not invented in Uruk by a demented genius.  It began maybe 10,000 years ago in the Middle East.  Tudge suggests that it developed gradually, as proto-farming, starting maybe 40,000 years ago.  Even primitive yokels could see that plants grew from seeds, and that clearing other vegetation away from food plants promoted their growth.  Proto-farming was done on a small scale, a pleasant hobby that left behind no enduring evidence for scientists to discover thousands of years later.

In Europe, Neanderthals had been big game hunters for hundreds of thousands of years.  While surviving a roller coaster of climate shifts, they lived within carrying capacity and did not wipe out the game.  Cro-Magnons were the Homo sapiens that later migrated into Europe, maybe 45,000 years ago.  Tudge theorizes that these foreign immigrants were proto-farmers.  Because they could produce their own food, they were less vulnerable to the consequences of overhunting.  Big game species began blinking out.  This eliminated the food supply for the Neanderthals, who were forced off the stage into oblivion.  (Stringer and Finlayson have other views on Neanderthals.)

By and by, proto-farming metastasized into a more virulent form, agriculture.  The economists leap to their feet with enthusiastic applause and cheering.  Civilization, here we come!  Whee!  The fuse was lit for a joyride of skyrocketing growth — onward to ten billion!  Well, this is the schoolbook version that everyone knows, and most believe.  (See Cohen on the shift to agriculture.)

Now, the plot thickens.  A growing number of scholars have been poking holes in the glorious myth of growth and progress.  Farming was miserable backbreaking work.  While hunter-gatherers benefitted from a diverse and highly nutritious diet, the farmer’s diet was the opposite, majoring in a few staple foods.  Farmers were shorter and less healthy.  In their remains, we find that “the toes and knees are bent and arthritic and the lower back is deformed.”

Tudge acknowledges the revisionists.  “People did not invent agriculture and shout for joy; they drifted or were forced into it, protesting all the way.”  Here’s my favorite line in the book: “The real problem, then, is not to explain why some people were slow to adapt agriculture but why anyone took it up at all when it was obviously so beastly.”

He believes that overhunting was the sole cause of the megafauna extinctions.  Native Americans had little self-restraint when it came to hunting mammoths and mastodons.  There is no evidence that climate change played any role in the die-off, he says.  But, at the end of the ice age, as the land warmed up, large areas of tundra were gradually replaced with dense forests.  This put the squeeze on species adapted to living on the tundra.

Did scruffy rednecks with homemade spears really hunt the speedy horses of North America to extinction — but not the bison, elk, and deer?  We’ll never know the full story, but I would be wary of dismissing the impact of radical climate swings, or the importation of Old World pathogens for which the American fauna had zero immunity.  (See Kolbert on extinction.)

Anyway, agriculture took root, because it worked more often than it failed.  Population gradually grew, which required more and more cropland and pasture.  Each expansion raised carrying capacity a bit, while soil depletion reduced it.  The growing mob had to work harder, and grow more.  In the cult of economists, “growth” is the god word.  Unfortunately, perpetual growth becomes a vicious spiral.  Tudge winces at the paradox.  “To condemn all of humankind to a life of full-time farming, and in particular arable farming, was a curse indeed.”  (See Montgomery, Manning, Dale, and Postel on agriculture’s drawbacks.)

Animal domestication, on the other hand, greatly benefitted the critters we enslaved, says Tudge.  For example, wild wolves are vanishing, but domesticated dogs have zoomed past a half billion.  Similarly, domesticated sheep can breed far more when well fed and defended.  If the population of a critter explodes, this is called biological success.  Dogs are a great success story, but their luckless wolf relatives keep smacking into bullets, stepping in traps, and eating poisoned bait.  Oddly, neither dogs nor sheep could survive in the wild, apart from humans.  (See Shepard on animal enslavement.)

It’s a great tragedy of history that the wild folks who adapted to their ecosystem, and lived within its carrying capacity, have been unable to withstand the constant pressure from growing mobs of farmers.  When Tudge wrote, we were approaching six billion.  The spectacular success of growth and progress was beginning to look like a Pyrrhic victory.  We might actually have real limits!  (See Bourne and Cribb on Peak Food.)

Clouds of doubt swirled in his head.  “Our earliest hunting ancestors must have been lazy, as lions are.  Perhaps we should learn from them.”  It’s touching and illuminating to watch the poor lad struggle with the conflict between powerful cultural myths and his growing awareness of reality.  This struggle is a necessary challenge on the path to growth and healing.  We must stand against the strong current.

The book is just 53 pages, and easy to read.  It would be a good text for courses in eco-psychology, environmental ethics, and critical thinking.

Postscript.  In a recent online video, Tudge reveals his grand solution, Enlightened Agriculture — small organic family farms raising a wide variety of crops.  By 2050, 9.5 to 10 billion will be coming to dinner.  Can we feed them?  “The answer is a resounding yes!”  We can feed them for decades, maybe indefinitely.  Profit-driven, energy-guzzling monoculture agriculture is fantastically unsustainable.  All we need is simply a total revolution in how we live, think, breed, and produce food — as soon as possible, please.

Tudge, Colin, Neanderthals, Bandits, & Farmers — How Agriculture Really Began, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998.





Where the Wild Things Were

For the first billion years of life on Earth, all of our ancestors were single celled.  One day, we aren’t sure why, a hungry organism ate a delicious bystander, and became the first predator.  Predation inspired evolution to become very creative.  Some organisms became mobile by developing cilia or tails.  Others shape shifted into multi-celled life forms.  Critters developed scales, spikes, shells, fangs, and many other clever defenses.  Thus, one group survived by dining on the unlucky, and the bigger group survived by evolving every imaginable trick for cancelling lunch dates with predators.

When predators became too powerful, they would wipe out their food supply, blush with embarrassment, and starve.  Prey that managed to survive evolved stronger defensive capabilities.  But if they got too good at this, their population would explode, deplete the available nutrients, and the vast mob would perish in an undignified manner.

Thus, evolution is an elegant balancing act.  If the prey gets one percent faster, the predator gets one percent faster, not two.  This balancing act is the subject of William Stolzenburg’s book, Where the Wild Things Were.  More specifically, the book focuses on how humankind uses its brilliant technological innovations to bypass the limits of our current state of evolution, upset healthy balancing acts, and devastate ecosystems, often unintentionally.

In the early 1970s, zoologist James Estes travelled to the Aleutian Islands of Alaska to do research on sea otters.  Sea otters can grow up to four feet long (1.2 m), and they have incredibly soft fur.  Stylish women with too much money loved wearing fur coats, and for 150 years, from Alaska to Baja, otter hunting was a serious business, and very profitable.  Somewhere between 500,000 and 900,000 otters lost their hides to the fashionable dames of high society.

The island of Amchitka had a healthy population of otters, and this is where Estes began his study, scuba diving in frigid water.  Beneath the waves were thriving jungles of kelp, a popular hangout for a number of aquatic herbivores.  Kelp can grow up to 200 feet tall (61 m).  Urchins enjoy dining on kelp, and sea otters enjoy dining on urchins.  What Estes observed was a healthy balance between the kelp, urchins, and otters.

Later, he spent some time on the island of Shemya, where the great extermination had wiped out the otters.  Only a few had since recolonized there.  The ecosystem here was stunningly different from Amchitka.  In the absence of otters, the urchins exploded in numbers, and many were huge in size.  The sea floor was wall-to-wall urchins, and there was no kelp at all. 

So, when the keystone predators (otters) live in peace, the ecosystem is healthy and balanced.  When they are eliminated, the ecosystem becomes a train wreck — a chain reaction known as a trophic cascade.  Predators are essential.

A similar scenario occurred when Zion National Park was established in Utah.  To make the park safe for tourists, the cougars (mountain lions) were exterminated.  In their absence, the population of mule deer exploded, and the land was stripped of vegetation.  The forests were dying, because young seedlings were devoured by deer.  Meanwhile, over the hill in North Creek Canyon, the cougars had been left alone, and the land was remarkably alive and healthy.

The Kaibab Plateau in Arizona became a game preserve in 1906.  Deer hunters were kept out, and 6,000 large carnivores were deleted.  The deer population skyrocketed from 4,000 to 100,000, and the vegetation was promptly vacuumed up.  In the winters of 1924 and 1925, 80,000 deer starved to death.  Ecosystems pay an enormous price for the stunning ecological ignorance of literate, educated people, who spend years in miserable classrooms carefully absorbing spooky illusions.

Wolves and grizzlies had been absent in the Tetons for quite a while.  Then, a few began drifting in from Yellowstone.  At first, the moose and elk had no fear of them.  Wolves calmly strolled into the herd and snatched their young.  Before long, they learned that fearing predators was beneficial.  Something similar to this innocent fearlessness likely existed in every ecosystem when humans first arrived with their state-of-the-art killing technology.

In the 1950s, Paul Martin connected some archaeological dots.  The megafauna of the world, that had survived almost two million years of ice ages, suddenly blinked out whenever armed humans arrived in a new region.*  This realization gave birth to his Pleistocene Overkill hypothesis, “that man, and man alone, was responsible for the unique wave of Late Pleistocene extinction.”  Despite many loud objections, it has generally been accepted, but it fails to explain the large numbers of mammoths and rhinos found in Siberia and Alaska.  It also causes those who worship at the crumbling Temple of Human Omnipotence to become moody and irritable.

Whatever your opinion on this controversy, it’s easy to argue that during the long era of warm weather (since 9600 B.C.), the pristine state of America was the Pleistocene, not 1492.  In 2005, a group of biologists published a paper on rewilding in the journal Nature.  It recommended the reintroduction of missing species like cheetahs, camels, lions, and elephants.  The mainstream crowd soiled their britches and howled hysterically.

It was, like, totally groovy to reintroduce pretty butterflies, but the huge backlash boiled down to “no lions in my backyard!”  This was the lively kickoff for what will be a long and bumpy process of attitude evolution — or a fierce backlash from those who have yet to free themselves from the tiny cage of anthropocentric hallucinations.

I wonder if the systematic extermination of millions of predators over the years is associated in any way with the current explosion in the human population.  When climate change forced our ancestors onto the savannah, evolution had not prepared us for living amidst fast, powerful, heavyweight predators.  We developed a highly unusual dependence on technology in order to survive, thereby knocking over the evolutionary balancing act.  “They would eventually wield the power to level mountains, to dam the biggest rivers, to coat entire continents in concrete and crops, to alter the climate as it had once altered them.”  The chapter on how we morphed into apex predators is fascinating.

Today, we almost never encounter man-eating predators running lose.  We no longer have to pay careful attention to reality, ready to react at any moment, fully present and alive.  The world has become safe for pudgy cell phone zombies — an empty, dull, and lonely place.  This is seen as normal.  I disagree.

* Megafauna survived in Africa because they evolved together with hominids, but there’s more to the story.  Lars Werdelin, a specialist in African carnivores, has learned that there used to be far more large carnivores.  Between 2 and 1.5 million years ago, many large carnivores went extinct.  This is about the time that tool-using, meat-eating Homo erectus appeared.  (Werdelin, Lars, “King of Beasts,” Scientific American, November 2013, pp. 34-39.)

Stolzenburg, William, Where the Wild Things Were, Bloomsbury, New York, 2008.