Wild Free and Happy Sample 32

[Note: This is the thirty-second sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 202 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Plant Domestication

The domestication of crop plants is an enormous subject.  It has enabled and accelerated a long sequence of unfortunate unforeseen consequences over the centuries.  Of course, the same could be said for the domestication of animals.  If domestication had never occurred, life in the twenty-first century would look nothing like the world outside your window.  There would be no windows.

Our population would not be zooming down the fast lane to eight billion, nine billion….  We would not be helpless sitting ducks today, standing in the path of an onrushing out of control climate shit storm.  Wild folks would have never conjured techno-nightmares like automobiles, cell phones, cities, nuclear bombs, or pesticides.  Agriculture produces megatons of surplus food, which enables societies to feed and clothe herds of nerds, who are highly skilled at maximizing unsustainability in every imaginable way.

Agriculture was not an amazing invention created by a brilliant mad scientist.  For four million years, every hominin who had more than two brain cells clearly understood that plants grew from seeds.  Agriculture was not an awesomely cool fad that spread like wildfire around the world.  As long as wild foods were adequate, it would have been ridiculous to deliberately shift to tedious, miserable, backbreaking work. 

When hunters have an unlucky day, they can lose a day’s work.  When farmers have bad luck, they can lose more than a year’s hard work, and have no safety net to catch their fall.  Crops can be zapped by drought, deluge, late frost, early frost, fire, storms, plant disease, enemies, wildlife, insects, and so on.  High rewards came with high risks.

Kat Anderson described how hunter-gatherers in California “tended” the wild landscape to encourage the growth of wild plants that were useful to them.  They didn’t strip the living green skin off the land, pulverize the naked soil, and plant seeds.  That would have been ecologically insane.  They had no need to do that.  They had plenty to eat because their time proven culture was well adapted to their land, and because they hadn’t stumbled into the trap of domestication.

Mark Nathan Cohen wrote an important book that described how agriculture emerged independently in several different regions.  It was a jarring transformation for humankind.  Hominins had been hunters for four million years, a highly successful strategy.  Until 10,000 years ago, everything on the menu everywhere was wild foods.  By 2,000 years ago, most of humankind depended on food produced on farms.

Preceding this shift, hunters had spread around the world.  They had gotten very good at killing large game, and a number of megafauna species had been driven into extinction.  Also, as the ice age weakened, the climate got warmer, and forests expanded into steppe and tundra regions.  Forest was not prime habitat for herds of horses, reindeer, and mammoths.  These herds shrank or dispersed.  So, the menus had to be rewritten to include more offerings of stuff like waterfowl, fish, crustaceans, small reptiles, mollusks, and plant foods. 

Barry Cunliffe noted that the recovering forests of Europe were home to more solitary game like aurochs, boars, elk, deer, and small animals.  The total biomass of these forest animals was only 20 to 30 percent of the biomass of the tundra herds they replaced.  Less meat led to a significantly smaller population.  It was easier to survive in locations close to coastlines, lakes, rivers, and wetlands, where a year round supply of a wide variety of foods could be gathered.

This new way of living apparently worked well enough for a while.  No wild plants suitable for agriculture were domesticated in early Europe.  At the time, much of the continent was still forest.  The primary food of civilizations is grains.  Grains are produced by grass species like wheat, oats, barley, and so on.  For this reason, large scale agriculture did not emerge in forests or jungles. 

Meanwhile, to the east, in the awesome grasslands of the Fertile Crescent, there was so much wild plant food that some groups had the option of giving up the nomadic life and settling down in delicious locations.  Cohen noted that the seeds of wild wheat (emmer and einkorn) and wild barley provided storable starch (calories).  Storable protein was provided by peas, beans, lentils, and vetches.  In North America, the primary starch was corn, and beans were the main source of plant protein.  Grasslands were also excellent places to hunt.

Cohen noted that the practice of agriculture migrated from its birthplace in the Fertile Crescent.  It moved into southeastern Europe between 7000 and 5000 B.C.  It then spread along the Mediterranean coast, and into the Danube river watershed.  At the time Europe was already inhabited by scattered communities of hunter-gatherers. 

Whether agriculture primarily spread through Europe by migration or diffusion is controversial (probably both).  In Australia, it spread by migration, when outsiders from Britain brought their dirty habit with them.  In North America, it apparently spread by diffusion, as corn and beans spent centuries gradually making a long pilgrimage from Mesoamerica to Ontario.

Diana Muir wrote an environmental history of New England, from the ice age to today.  On the tundra, folks hunted mastodons, horses, bison, and four species of mammoths.  There were sabertooth cats, giant bears, giant beavers, and musk oxen.  As the climate warmed, forests spread northward, gradually displacing tundra.  The elk, moose, and tropical primates managed to survive.  As megafauna declined, folks hunted for deer, bear, beaver, moose, waterfowl, turkeys, and heath hens.  Rivers had huge runs of salmon, shad, and alewives.

Eventually, the seeds of corn (maize), squash, and beans reached New England.  Tribes that got addicted could produce far more food per acre, and support a larger population.  Their new diet had nutrient deficiencies which had health effects. 

I’ve already mentioned ideas from Mark Nathan Cohen’s book, The Food Crisis in Prehistory, in which the archaeologist and anthropologist explored what drove the transition to agriculture.  Twenty-two years later, he published Health & the Rise of Civilization, which extensively examined how health declined in agricultural societies.  The healthiest people were the hunter-gatherers who dined on large game.

The shift to agriculture took a toll.  Teotihuacan was a city located not far from today’s Mexico City.  It was home to a culture of pyramid builders.  At its prime around A.D. 500, it had about 125,000 people, and was the biggest city in the world.  Cohen wrote that it had very high rates of malnutrition, stunted growth, deciduous tooth hypoplasia, and infant and child mortality.  I’ll have much more to say about human health in a later chapter. 

Anyway, there is strength in numbers, and farmers trumped hunters.  In any region that was suitable for the agriculture of the day, the hunters were in danger.  A dozen healthy, well-nourished hunters were unlikely to triumph against 100 malnourished corn farmers with bad teeth.  Corn typically depleted soil fertility in a few years, so clearing new fields was an ongoing necessity.

Farmers were not friendly new neighbors.  Over time they were more like an uprising, a steamroller.  Muir described how the corn powered Iroquois gathered momentum over time, pushing out the tribes of Algonquin hunters.  Cunliffe wrote that when agriculture moved close to your home sweet home, you had four choices: (1) exterminate them, (2) take up the dirty habit, (3) flee, or (4) be overrun.

Mesopotamia

James Scott, a political scientist, studied the dawn of agriculture in southern Mesopotamia, because it was the birthplace of the earliest genuine states — hierarchical societies with rulers and tax collectors, sustained by a mix of farming and herding.  The primary food of almost every early state was wheat, barley, or rice.  Taxes were paid with grain, because it was easier to harvest, transport, and store than foods that were more perishable.  An entire field of grain ripened at the same time, which enabled one sweep harvesting.

Today, southern Mesopotamia is largely a treeless desert, and many assume that it always has been.  Actually, it used to be wetlands, a cornucopia of wild foods, a paradise for hunters and gatherers.  There was so much to eat that it was possible to quit wandering and live in settled communities.  Edible plants included club rush, cattails, water lily, and bulrush.  They also ate tortoises, fish, mollusks, crustaceans, birds, waterfowl, small mammals, and migrating gazelles.  The ecosystem was generous, and life was good.

In this region, communities of sedentary hunter-gatherers began appearing by maybe 12,000 B.C.  The first evidence of domestication appears around 9000 B.C.  Then, it took another four thousand years (160 generations!) before agricultural villages appeared.  The first states emerged around 3100 B.C.  In the Middle East, it does not appear that early cultivation was encouraged by declining availability of wild plant and animal foods.  Contrary to common beliefs, in Mesopotamia, cultivation seems to have emerged in regions of abundance, not scarcity.

In the early days, there was no need for irrigation.  Stream banks and river deltas were covered with alluvium — a moist and highly fertile deposit of clay, silt, sand, and gravel that was delivered by annual floods.  It was a soft and loose soil that was ready for sowing.  So, in addition to the wild grains they enjoyed, it was fairly easy to sow seeds in the fresh deposits of alluvium.

Scott mentioned archaeologist Hans Nissen, who studied the ancient Near East.  Nissen noted that for quite a while, the climate had been wet and warm.  With adequate rains, abundant water moved through the streams and rivers.  The Tigris and Euphrates watershed emptied into the Persian Gulf.  Nissen measured the accumulated sediments on the floor of the Gulf.  Thicker layers of organic matter indicated times when lots of water was moving lots of silt.  This study illuminated climate patterns.

Prior to roughly 3500 B.C., so much water flowed into the Gulf that its water level was 10 feet (3 m) higher than it is today.  The north shore of the Gulf expanded quite a ways into southern Mesopotamia.  Much of the region was then wetlands, and folks resided on islands.  It was a paradise for happy wild people — plenty to eat year round.

But then, climate trends gradually shifted toward cooler and dryer.  Less rain led to lower water tables.  The Gulf’s shoreline retreated.  Wetlands began drying out.  It became possible to plant seeds on the highly fertile, newly exposed soil.  For a while the alluvial soils were a sponge that held enough moisture that crops could be grown without irrigation, but this situation was temporary.

Nissen noted that wild grains still grow in Mesopotamia.  Today, in remote locations, folks can gather two or more quarts (or liters) of grain in an hour — a decent supply of calories for minimal effort.  On the other hand, cultivated grain grown in irrigated fields can produce far higher yields, sometimes two or three harvests per year.

Here is where the domestication of wheat played an important role.  Wild wheat grass readily drops its ripe seeds, which maximizes reproductive potential — evolution’s goal.  But this minimizes efficient harvesting.  Lots of seeds drop to the ground and are not collected.  So, over time, selective breeding favored plants that retained their seeds. 

Also, wild wheat seeds are coated with hard husks, which reduce the risk of premature germination.  Farmers have to remove these husks.  This can be accomplished by pounding or roasting, but then the seeds are less likely to germinate.  So, over time, selective breeding favored plants that produced seeds having less troublesome husks.

Annual grain yield was important, but effective storage was equally vital.  The primary objective of agriculture was not to produce millions of morbidly obese rats, or impressive heaps of stinky rotten wheat.  Grain was best stored in large closed vessels of fired clay. 

Gold is dense and shiny, but you can’t eat it.  Its only value is when you find odd people with vivid imaginations who believe that a shiny yellow stone is something of immense value.  Stored wheat, on the other hand, is something you can eat, food that can sustain your survival.  A full granary is truly precious to folks who enjoy being alive, it is a genuine treasure.

History is clear on one thing — stored treasure is fantastically tempting to ambitious hard-nosed folks untroubled by morals, like Vikings, Mongols, or billionaires.  Tacitus, writing in A.D. 98, described the wild German tribes.  “They actually think it tame and stupid to acquire by the sweat of toil what they might win by their blood.”

What may be the world’s oldest story was found etched on clay tablets in southern Mesopotamia — the Epic of Gilgamesh.  It’s the saga of slimy King Gilgamesh who clear-cut ancient forests, triggered massive floods and erosion, and built the city of Uruk.

Nissen spent a lot of time digging up stuff in Uruk, which is now scruffy ancient ruins surrounded by a barren brown wasteland.  [LOOK]  In the days of its glory, was a highly advanced place.  Nissen called this era “the beginning of early high civilization.”  It had writing, large artworks, and monumental architecture.  Gilgamesh built a wall around Uruk that enclosed an area of 1,360 acres (5.5 km²).  The wall included at least 900 semicircular towers.

Around the world, throughout history, it is no coincidence that settlements with stored treasure (especially granaries) have commonly been surrounded by walls, moats, palisades, and so on.  Alfred Crosby wrote a tragi-comical history of the evolution of weaponry, from stones to hydrogen bombs.  Many, many centuries were devoted to a tireless arms race — ongoing efforts to use new tricks for destroying walls, and new countermeasures for defending the stored treasure.

OK, back to Mesopotamia.  As the climate got cooler and dryer, rain decreased, river flows decreased, and the water level of the Gulf dropped.  Less water was available for irrigation.  Plus, as river flows dropped lower, their channels dug deeper into the soil.  This caused even more water to be drawn away from the surrounding land.

In the driest regions, agriculture could not survive without irrigation.  Over time, an enormous canal system was built in Mesopotamia.  The unintended consequence of this brilliant technological masterpiece was catastrophe.  Regular irrigation led to salt buildup in the soil (salinization), which rendered it permanently infertile, killing the golden goose.

Salt-nuked cropland had to be abandoned, forcing folks to concentrate in more urban settlements.  With more people crammed together, conflict levels increased.  To avoid social meltdown, conflicts needed to be brought under control.  This need encouraged the further intensification of civilization — powerful leaders, laws, enforcers, obedient tax-paying citizens, and hard-working slaves.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 11

[Note: This is the eleventh sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 199 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Social Structure

You and I are tropical primates, and our family tree originated in Mother Africa.  Africa played a primary role in the evolution of our bodies and minds.  Our ancestors were hunter-gatherers for at least two million years.  Because they were predators on the savannah, they could not live in large herds.  Too many hunters spoil the ecosystem.  Their ability to function as high level predators was heavily dependent on powerful technological crutches.  At the same time, they were pitifully slow, plump, juicy, walking meatballs.  They were far too vulnerable to survive as solitary predators, like tigers or bears.

The key to success was to live in small groups of maybe 15 to 30, work as a team, and move elsewhere when food got scarce.  The normal daily experience of wild hominins included constant exposure to a wide variety of other species.  In the family of life, we were a wee minority group, not the dominant animal.  Ancestors spent every day of their lives in a healthy natural habitat, not an ugly noisy stinky industrial gulag of concrete and steel.

Joe Kane spent time in the Amazon rainforest.  He noted that, prior to contact with outsiders, most Huaorani never encountered more than seventy or eighty people during their entire lives, most of whom they knew by name.  Imagine that.  Mentally, we are far more comfortable being in small groups where we are known and respected.  It’s not groovy being a stranger in a vast mob of strangers, day after day, year after year.  You might feel like a zoo animal, serving a life sentence for being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Functioning as a wild hunting and foraging team was very different from civilized life.  Sharing was essential.  Nobody went hungry unless everyone did.  Louis Liebenberg mentioned a study of San hunters.  Of those aged 15 to 38, just 17 percent of the hunters were responsible for 70 percent of the kills, while half of the hunters killed nothing at all.  If meat was not shared, many would starve, and the community would blink out.  Cultures had different methods for distributing portions of the meat, but this task was never a job for the day’s lucky hunter, and his portion was never the largest. 

It was essential for effective teamwork to avoid personal conflicts, and to promptly resolve the ones that occurred.  Clans typically had time-proven strategies for nurturing good interpersonal relationships.  A humble and respectful demeanor encouraged warm drama-free relationships.  Self-deprecating discourse (the opposite of boasting) was common among wild people.  Peter Freuchen wrote that when an Eskimo hunter brought home a primo feast, he would shamefully apologize to the others for bringing back crappy meat that was unfit for dogs.  The people nodded and smiled.

Bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers had no tolerance for bigheads.  Whenever someone displayed the first symptoms of pride, they were mocked, teased, or shunned — whatever was needed to restore the swollen head to normal size.  Then came reconciliation and forgiveness.  Uppity males who could not be reformed might be deported to other clans.  Incurable jerks sometimes had to be euthanized.

Christopher Boehm described how an American anthropologist created an ugly scene while staying with the Utku Eskimos of northern Canada.  She behaved in an ordinary American manner, sometimes a bit moody, occasionally displaying a flash of anger when irritated.  This was totally uncool in a culture where folks spent long, dark, frigid winters in close company.  Folks were expected to smile, laugh, and joke — to display good manners. 

Everyone’s highest responsibility was to maintain the stability of the group.  In the Utku culture, except for childish outbursts, it was rude to show your emotions, because strong thoughts can kill or cause illness.  Anger was dangerous juju, highly toxic.  Eventually, the natives ran out of patience with the American drama queen, and she became a nonperson. 

A primary benefit of nomadic life was that you couldn’t have more belongings than you could carry in both hands.  This avoided all of the bad juju of hoarding, inequality, and hierarchy — the core curse of modern society.  In regions having abundant wild food, like the Pacific Northwest, tribes became sedentary, lived in permanent dwellings, and became able to hoard stuff.  Those with lots of stuff tended to look down on folks who don’t.  Inequality was a reliable cause of resentment and conflict.

Vine Deloria noted that everyone is a descendant of tribal ancestors.  In each tribal homeland, unique spiritual traditions emerged, fine-tuned to its landscape, ecology, and climate.  Every homeland had sacred places where the community participated in special ceremonies.  All members of the tribe had deep roots in the homeland, and all shared the same worldview.  A tribal person “does not live in a tribe, the tribe lives in him.”

In modern society, neighborhoods are constantly-changing swarms of occupants having highly diverse incomes, ethnicities, religious beliefs, and political views.  People may live side by side for years, yet have nothing in common, and sometimes intense differences.  Many do not know the names or faces of most folks in their neighborhood.  This is not a coherent community sharing a profound sense of responsibility for the wellbeing of their ecosystem.

Colin Turnbull wrote that in the Pygmy world, it’s hard to see a clear boundary between work and play.  The vital task of maintaining social harmony required generous amounts of singing and dancing, followed by gathering ripe fruit, or hunting, or fireside chats, or teaching the children.  They enjoyed a society harmonized by a common set of beliefs, values, and lifestyles.  Everyone was on the same channel.

Modern society is a cranky boisterous mob of numerous cultures, classes, ideologies, and religious beliefs.  We are expected to accept diversity, and even take pride in our tolerance of those who are different.  Turnbull realized that “a society that was not bound together by a single powerful belief is not a society at all.”  It was just a mob of folks kept under control by law and force.

Turnbull spoke fondly of Father Longo, a Catholic missionary.  Pygmies had no word for evil.  “In order to convert them, then, he would first have to teach them the concept of evil, and that he was not prepared to do.”  He left them unmolested.

John Gunther saw that folks in the wild animist tribes of Africa were of one mind.  When missionaries taught them Christianity, it was highly disruptive, because it taught the importance of the individual, a foreign idea.  While you might have a salvation experience, your friends and family might not.  The unity of the group could be rubbished by spiritual discord.

In modern society, everyone is an individual, and we spend our lives competing with everyone else to climb the organizational ladders, and proudly display our glittering status trinkets.  Self-centeredness is the norm.  Jay Griffiths wrote that missionaries in South America often provided the natives with mirrors, to heighten their sense of individuality.  She learned that in Peru, four Christian groups used helicopters and speedboats in their fierce competition to locate uncontacted tribes.  They fully understood that they would inevitably be sharing the diseases of civilization, but they didn’t care.  In some places, half of the natives died within two years.

Daniel Everett was sent to the Amazon to translate the Bible into the language of the illiterate Pirahã hunter-gatherers.  Eventually, overwhelmed by the absurdity, he became an atheist, abandoned the project, and lost his family.  “I would go so far as to suggest that the Pirahãs are happier, fitter, and better adjusted to their environment than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known.”

Jean Liedloff described the natives she met in South America.  The Tauripan people of Venezuela were the happiest people she had ever met.  All of their children were relaxed, joyful, cooperative, and rarely cried — they were never bored, lonely, or argumentative.  The Yequana people seemed unreal to Liedloff, because of their lack of unhappiness.  As an expedition was moving up a challenging jungle stream, she noticed that the Italians would get completely enraged at the slightest mishap, while the Yequana just laughed the struggles away.  Their daily life had a party mood to it.

Colin Turnbull spent years with the Mbuti Pygmies.  He was amazed by their joyful way of living.  They would laugh until they could no longer stand, and then sit down and laugh.  We tend to regard our childhood as a golden age of innocence and joy — before we’re shipped off to dreary schools, jobs, and nursing homes.  The Pygmies did not idolize childhood, because they spent their lives in a place of wonder, and with each passing year, the wonder of it all kept growing.

Robert Wolff described the Sng’oi people of Malaysia.  They knew each other’s unspoken thoughts, communicating telepathically.  “They had an immense inner dignity, were happy, and content, and did not want anything.”  They loved to laugh and joke.  They were often singing and smiling.  Angry voices were never heard.

Lewis Cotlow visited Eskimos in arctic Canada.  One night, he spent several hours talking to local officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  They kept repeating one idea in different ways: “The Eskimos are the happiest people in the world.”

Knud Rasmussen traveled across the arctic, from Greenland to Siberia, from 1921 to 1924.  He enjoyed the Eskimo people.  “A notable feature was their lively good humor and careless, high-spirited manner.”  The women worked very hard, but “they were always happy and contended, with a ready laugh in return for any jest or kindly word.”  Eskimos perceived whites to be uptight and coldly impersonal.

Peter Freuchen spent a lot of time with the Eskimos, and married into their culture.  He wrote that “they always enjoy life with an enviable intensity, and they believe themselves to be the happiest people on earth living in the most beautiful country there is.”  Inuit women had “perpetual smiles,” and “they seem to have more natural grace, more zest for life than their white sisters.”

Joe Kane was impressed by the fact that Huaorani men and women enjoy equal status.  It was always unacceptable to give orders, or to raise a hand against a woman or child.  Family harmony was important. 

Richard Lee spent time with the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert.  He noted that the women were quite independent from their parents and husbands.  “The many forms of sexual oppression that women experience in other societies, such as rape, wife battering, purdah, enforced chastity, and sexual double standards are absent in !Kung society.”

 

Against the Grain



James C. Scott teaches political science and anthropology at Yale.  He’s a smooth writer and a deep thinker.  A while back, he decided to update two lectures on agrarian societies that he had been giving for 20 years.  He began studying recent research and — gasp! — realized that significant portions of traditional textbook history had the strong odor of moldy cultural myths.  So, a quick update project turned into five years, and resulted in a manuscript that I found to be remarkably stimulating, from cover to cover —  Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.

While the human saga is several million years old, and Homo sapiens appeared on the stage maybe 200,000 years ago, the origin myth I was taught began just 10,000 years ago, with domestication and civilization.  We were transformed from hungry, dirty, dolts into brilliant philosophers, scientists, and artists, who lived indoors, wore cool clothes, and owned lots of slaves.

As a curious animal interested in ecological sustainability, I’m amazed that every other animal species has, for millions of years, lived on this planet without destabilizing the climate, spurring mass extinctions, poisoning everything, and generally beating the <bleep> out of the planet.  These are the unintended consequences of our reckless joyride in a hotrod of turbocharged progress.  They define the primary aspects of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, the era when tropical primates with huge throbbing brains left permanent scars on the planet.

Experts argue about when the Anthropocene began.  Did it start with the sorcery of nuclear fission, or the curse of fossil-powered industry?  Many point to the domestication of plants and animals, and the birth of civilization.  Scott is among the few who say it began with the domestication of fire, which occurred at least 400,000 years ago, sparked by our Homo erectus ancestors.  Every other species continues to survive via the original power source, the sun’s wildfire.  Plants grow green solar panels that produce the nutrients that keep the fauna alive and happy, a perfectly brilliant design.

Imagine waving a magic wand, and eliminating everything in the world made possible by domesticated fire — no metal, no concrete, no plastic, no glowing screens.  Would humans still be around?  Fire historian Stephen Pyne concluded, “Without fire humanity sinks to a status of near helplessness.”  We wouldn’t be able to survive outside the tropics.  The plant and animal species that enabled civilization lived north of the tropics (see THIS).  Without domesticated fire, we’d still be wild and free — and far less crowded.

Scott focused on southern Mesopotamia, because it was the birthplace of the earliest genuine states.  What are states?  They are hierarchical societies, with rulers and tax collectors, rooted in a mix of farming and herding.  The primary food of almost every early state was wheat, barley, or rice.  Taxes were paid with grain, which was easier to harvest, transport, and store than yams or breadfruit.  States often had armies, defensive walls, palaces or ritual centers, slaves, and maybe a king or queen.

The moldy myths imply that domesticated plants and animals, sedentary communities, and fixed-field agriculture emerged in a close sequence.  Wrong!  There is scattered evidence of sedentary hunter-gatherers by 12,000 B.C.  Domestication began around 9000 B.C.  It took at least four thousand years (160 generations!) before agricultural villages appeared, and then another two thousand years before the first states emerged, around 3100 B.C.

Moldy myths assume that the Fertile Crescent has been a desert since humans first arrived.  Wrong!  Southern Mesopotamia used to be wetlands, a cornucopia of wild foods, a paradise for hunters and gatherers.  There was so much to eat that it was possible to quit wandering and live in settled communities.  “Edible plants included club rush, cattails, water lily, and bulrush.  They ate tortoises, fish, mollusks, crustaceans, birds, waterfowl, small mammals, and migrating gazelles.”  In a land of abundance, it would have been absolutely stupid to pursue the backbreaking drudgery of agriculture.

Moldy myths often give us the “backs-to-the-wall” explanation for the shift to agriculture, which was far more work.  Simply, we had run out of new alternatives for feeding a growing mob, while hunting was producing less meat, and wild plants were producing less food.  We had no choice!  But in the Middle East, there appears to be no firm evidence associating early cultivation with the decline of either game animals or forage. 

Cultivation seems to have emerged in regions of abundance, not scarcity.  Every year, floods deposited silt along the riverbanks, moist fertile soil ready for sowing.  So, flood-retreat farming would have required far less toil than tilling fields, while producing useful nutrients.  More nutrients enabled further population growth, which eventually pressed the shift to miserable labor-intensive irrigated agriculture.

The root of “domestication” is “domus” (the household).  In early Mesopotamia, “the domus was a unique and unprecedented concentration of tilled fields, seed and grain stores, people, and domestic animals, all coevolving with consequences no one could have possibly foreseen.”  As a result of living on the domus, animals (including humans) were changed, both physically and behaviorally.  In this process, wild species became domesticated.  Over time, some species became “fully domesticated” — genetically altered, entirely dependent on humans for their survival.  Domestication was also about deliberate control over reproduction, which “applied not only to fire, plants, and animals but also to slaves, state subjects, and women in the patriarchal family.”

Domesticated sheep have brains 24 percent smaller than their wild ancestors.  Pig brains are a third smaller.  Protected from predators, regularly fed, with restricted freedom of movement, they became less alert, less anxious, less aggressive — pudgy passive dimwit meatballs.  They reached reproductive age sooner, and produced far more offspring.

“The multispecies resettlement camp was, then, not only a historic assemblage of mammals in numbers and proximity never previously known, but it was also an assembly of all the bacteria, protozoa, helminthes, and viruses that fed on them.”  The domus was a magnet for uninvited guests: fleas, ticks, leeches, mosquitoes, lice, and mites.  Unnatural crowds of animals spent their lives walking around in poop, and drinking dirty water.  It was a devilishly brilliant incubator for infectious diseases.  Humans share a large number of diseases with other domus animals, including poultry (26), rats and mice (32), horses (35), pigs (42), sheep and goats (46), cattle (50), and dogs (65).

Other writers have noted that, prior to contact, Native Americans had no epidemic diseases.  With very few domesticated animals, they lacked state of the art disease incubators.  Scott goes one step further, asserting that prior to the domus, there was little or no epidemic disease in the Old World.  “The importance of sedentism and the crowding it allowed can hardly be overestimated. It means that virtually all the infectious diseases due to microorganisms specifically adapted to Homo sapiens came into existence only in the past ten thousand years, many of them perhaps only in the past five thousand.”  Thus, the humans that first crossed from Siberia to North America 13,000 years ago were free of disease because little or no infectious disease existed anywhere in the world!

Dense monocultures of plants also begged for trouble.  “Crops not only are threatened, as are humans, with bacterial, fungal, and viral diseases, but they face a host of predators large and small — snails, slugs, insects, birds, rodents, and other mammals, as well as a large variety of evolving weeds that compete with the cultivar for nutrition, water, light, and space.”  Once harvested and stored in the granary, grain could be lost to weevils, rodents, and fungi.  The biggest vulnerability of states was that they were almost entirely dependent on a single annual harvest of one or two staple grains.  Crops could be wiped out by drought, flood, pests, storm damage, or crop diseases.

Mesopotamian life was largely human powered.  Workers grew the grain that the tax man hauled away to the plump elites.  More workers meant more wealth and power for the big shots.  In screw-brained hierarchical cultures (including ours), it’s impossible to have too much wealth.  Therefore, peasants and slaves were husbanded like livestock.  The diabolical “more is better” disease was devastating.  Some believe that monumental walls were built as much for defense as to prevent taxpayers and slaves from escaping to freedom.

Early states were vulnerable in many ways, and they frequently collapsed.  Collapse sounds like a tragedy.  But it could simply mean breaking up into smaller components.  Larger was not necessarily better.  A drought might cause a state’s population to disperse.  For the non-elites, life in a Mesopotamian state could be oppressive and miserable.  Sometimes, collapse was a cause for celebration.  Yippee!

Anyway, the book is fascinating.  Readers also learn about the tax game, the vital slave industry, trade networks, deforestation, erosion, soil salinization, irrigation, looting and raiding, mass escapes of workers, the challenges and benefits of being surrounded by large numbers of aggressive nomadic herders, and on and on.  It’s an outstanding book!

WARNING:  The expensive Kindle edition contains numerous charts, maps, and diagrams.  When downloaded to the Kindle for PC application (v 1.20.1), most are unreadably small, even on a 24” monitor.  Clever nerds can tediously capture the images to another application, expand them, and read them.  Strong reading glasses (3.75 lens or higher) also work with a big monitor.

Scott, James C., Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2017. 

Four Domestications is a free PDF download, the 48-page text of a lecture Scott gave at Harvard.  It includes some of the foundation ideas for his new book.

Seeing Like a State is a free PDF download of Scott’s 1998 book, a companion for his new book.

Hierarchy in the Forest

Christopher Boehm is a professor of anthropology and director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at the University of California.  He has read hundreds of anthropological studies on a variety of human societies.  He also spent time with Goodall at Gombe National Park, observing the behavior of wild chimpanzees.  These experiences inspired him to speculate on our evolutionary journey, and to attempt the daunting challenge of defining “human nature,” the core essence shared by all humans.  He presented his ideas in Hierarchy in the Forest.

Before we begin, the goal of my work is to help people who are interested in learning about ecological sustainability.  Boehm’s book pays little attention to ecology, and I quit reading about 75 pages before the end.  Folks who are eager to learn about the various trends and controversies in cultural anthropology should put it on their reading list.  I was intrigued by some of the passages I read.  My plan is to jabber a bit about these, and then call it a day.

There are numerous types of societies, ranging from egalitarian (no bosses) to hierarchical (some have more power than others).  Among hierarchical societies, some have many layers of rank and status, like wolf packs.  At the extreme, despotic societies have a dominant alpha to whom all others must submit, like chimps or Nazis.  Boehm presented theories on the evolution of politics and morality among chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and humans.  Based on how the four species behave today, he imagined that the common ancestor of all four, who lived seven million years ago, was innately despotic — and that all four today remain near the despotic end of the political spectrum.

He believed that humans took a strange path.  In the beginning, we were hierarchical.  Later, for much of the hunter-gatherer phase, we were egalitarian.  Then, around 12,000 years ago, with the domestication of plants and animals, hierarchy returned to ascendance, and grew to monstrous proportions over the centuries.  This was not black and white, some early societies of herders or horticulturalists remained egalitarian, despite having private property and unequal wealth.

Oddly, egalitarian societies were also hierarchical.  Civilized societies have pyramid-shaped hierarchies, with the powerful at the top, and the dominated masses spread out below.  Egalitarian societies have an upside down pyramid, a “reverse dominance hierarchy.”  When someone began behaving in an inappropriate manner, the entire group united to confront the misbehaving oddball.

Cooperation was fundamental to the success of hunter-gatherer societies, so conflict avoidance was imperative.  Upstart males, exhibiting impulses to dominate others, were a serious threat to the stability and survival of the society.  Nothing was more uncool.  The antidote to disruptive upstarts was sanctions — criticism, ridicule, disobedience, ostracism, shunning.  Sanctions often helped the upstart get the message, and return to conformity.  If these failed, the upstart might move to a different group.  If all else failed, he might be executed.

Hunter-gatherer cultures had time-proven methods for encouraging conformity, and discouraging the impulses of problem personalities.  It was always uncool to be boastful, arrogant, or overbearing.  When a hunter brought home excellent meat, he would apologize for the worthless crap that was unfit for dog food.  Self-depreciation helped to level out differences, and discourage painful swellings of pride.

Once upon a time, Boehm had succeeded in earning the trust of Navajo elders, in his quest to learn about mental illness in the tribe.  One day, he realized that he had left a watermelon in his car, which he had bought to be a gift.  He ran out, got it, ran back, offered it to the elder — and immediately obliterated the trust he had carefully earned, terminating his research.  His action had been too sudden, and was perceived as aggressive.  The Navajo have a low opinion of white people, and are highly distrustful of them.  In Indian country, people are expected to be calm, composed, dignified, and respectful.

One passage especially touched me.  Jean Briggs was an anthropologist who spent more than a year with the Utku Eskimos of northern Canada.  She apparently behaved like an ordinary American, who had moody days, and sometimes displayed a flash of anger when irritated.  This freaked out the Eskimos, who sometimes ran out the cabin when she was crabby and hissing.  In that society, folks were expected to smile, laugh, and joke — to behave like happy people.  Nothing was more uncool than showing your emotions, because strong thoughts can kill or cause illness.  Anger was dangerous juju, highly toxic.

The Eskimos tolerated a lot of extremely inappropriate behavior, because Briggs was a visitor from a tribe that was notoriously loony.  They gave her hints for behaving more politely, but she missed their meaning.  Eventually, they reached their limits, and Briggs became a nonperson.  She simply could not learn how to conform.

Briggs was brought up in a hierarchical culture, where we all compete against one another to acquire, hoard, and display the most status trinkets.  Self-centeredness is the expected norm.  Most of us live amidst hordes of perfect strangers, and the sight of strangers must make our tropical primate brains squirm and sweat.  When chimps see a strange male, they don’t welcome him with smiles and hugs; they kill him.  Gorillas are also impolite unknown visitors.  Of course, humans take great delight in savagely killing foreigners by the millions.

It’s hard for us to imagine spending our entire lives among a small group of people, where survival depends on cooperation, where competition and conflict were toxic.  The Eskimos were not merely “acting” happy.  They were raised in a culture where it was normal and healthy to mindfully maintain respectful relationships with all others.  They had to spend long dark winters in close quarters, so it was impossible to tolerate selfish spoiled brats or infantile tyrants.  Everyone’s highest responsibility was to maintain the stability of the group.

Boehm’s book was published in 1999.  Most research on wild bonobos occurred after 2003.  Early studies had to be abandoned, because of a civil war that raged between 1994 and 2003, claiming three million lives.  Based on incomplete information, Boehm assumed that bonobos were at the despotic end of the spectrum, but later research revealed that they were remarkably egalitarian.  Also, they were not egalitarian in the sense of “reverse dominance hierarchy.”  For bonobos, egalitarian behavior was normal, natural, almost effortless.  Humans are closely related to both despotic chimps and egalitarian bonobos.

Why are chimps and bonobos so different?  Ecology may be the primary factor.  Bonobos enjoy an ideal habitat, with abundant food, and no serious competitors in their niche.  Chimps live in leaner lands, and compete for food with gorillas and baboons.  Scarcity creates tensions, and territorial boundaries must be aggressively defended against trespassers.  Crowding is the mother of conflict.  Extreme crowding turns humans into bloodthirsty mass murdering maniacs.

Boehm, Christopher, Hierarchy in the Forest, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1999.