sophiaserpentia | the domestication of the primate

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the domestication of the primate

Why did farming spread at all? The answer might seem to be obvious -- for example, that farming makes life easier or happier, or that it provides a genetic advantage to the people who practice it.

In fact, it seems that farming did not make life easier, nor did it improve nutrition, or reduce disease. The British science writer Colin Tudge (1995) describes farming as 'the end of Eden'. Rather than being easier, the life of early farmers was utter misery. Early Egyptian skeletons tell a story of a terrible life. Their toes and backs are deformed by the way people had to grind corn to make bread; they show signs of rickets and of terrible abscesses in their jaws. Probably few lived beyond the age of thirty. Stories in the Old Testament describe the arduous work of farmers and, after all, Adam was thrown out of Eden and told, 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.' By contrast modern hunter-gatherers have been estimated to spend only about fifteen hours a week hunting and have plenty of time for leisure. This is despite the fact that they have been pushed into marginal environments far poorer than those in which our ancient ancestors probably lived. Why would people the world over have given up an easier life in favor of a life of toil and drudgery?

Tudge assumes 'that agriculture arose because it was favored by natural selection' (1995, p. 274) and therefore looks for a genetic advantage. He suggests that because farming produces more food from a given area of land, farmers will produce more children who will encroach on neighboring hunter-gatherer's lands and so destroy their way of life. For this reason, once farming arrives no one has the luxury of saying 'I want to keep the old way of life.' However, we know from the skeletons of early farmers that they were malnourished and sickly. So was there really a genetic advantage?

(Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine p. 26-27)

This is a mystery to which there is no widely-accepted answer. It seems to me though that there must have been both opportunity and necessity.

Some theorists suggest that atmospheric CO2 levels shifted in a way that opened a window of opportunity for agriculture to develop. I haven't investigated this enough to form an opinion about its likelihood. But something special happened that led to the simultaneous development of agriculture in nine different places about 10,000 years ago.

I'm leaning towards a combination of population/resource pressure and climactic favorability, as the likely cause. Housing and clothing played a role, too; people in cultures with permanent housing and adequate clothing require 40% less food.

A couple of pages with notes about the origin of agriculture:

http://www.indyrad.iupui.edu/public/ebraunst/Agriculture.htm
http://courses.washington.edu/anth457/agorigin.htm

I recall being taught in sociology and anthropology class that the current theory about the origins of government, social stratification, and the division of labor is traceable to the development of irrigation systems. See for example this link. This thought might be worth exploring and examining further.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

ultimately, i think agrarian society flourished was dependability.

if you are a nomadic/hunter-gatherer tribe, you face more daily hardship and danger than you do if you are a clan of farmers. that is not to say that domestic farm life is without it's dangers or setbacks, but you are less likely to be mauled to death plowing your corn field, than you would be competing with other predators for prey.

all societal organization does go back to farming. in a hunter/gatherer setting, everyone has to pitch in to survive - everyone also must be a generalist of sorts. specialists need large food quotas supplemented. in a farming situation, you have room for specialists to develop, eve nto the point where they do not now the basic "survival" skills.

this allows the beurocrat class to emerge. all they do is organize, arbitrate and govern.

as you say, farming became prevelant due to the reproductive model. hunter gatherers were not living much past 30, with a higher attrition rate due to famine and accidents - but they were not having 9 kids back-to-back to do the field work. they usually spaced the kids out so one was toddling before the next was born.

I don't know how to compare the risks of either way of life. I mean, farming depends on there being no major weather mishaps, no raids, stable water supply, etc. I am unsure how to quantify risks vs. benefits of agriculture vs. hunting-gathering.

So I look at it from a resource allocation standpoint. Agriculturalists ate less and reproduced more, and that gave them an advantage. They had to compete against hunter-gatherers and pastoralists for land, though. By attrition, agriculturalists would eventually win that conflict.

Some cultures seem to have a built-in defense against agriculture leading to division of labor -- the potlatch. It's as if the people of these cultures had abortive attempts at civilization, were horrified, and decided it was better to destroy all surpluses or give them away.

I think too that there must have been some kind of evolutionary watershed that allowed it to happen. For example, farming requires the observation that there is a yearly seasonal pattern.

in a bad year hunting/gathering, you can lose up to half your clan to starvation. you can't effectively store food if you are constantly romaing. agriculturalists have that benefit.

my theory (personally) is that farming did not start for foodstuffs. also, many of the places where farming is thought to have originated did not have huge seasonal patterns - they enjoy very long growing seasons.

farming, in my opinion, probably started with medicines and luxury goods. herbailsts who would know that certain types of roots and leaves had certain properties would have carried them as they moved about, since you never know when the next time you will come across a similar plant would be. at some point, someone must have realized that seeds and shoots can create new plants, and that got passed along with the rest of the herbalist lore.

at some point, that same click would have been made for hallucanogens, grapes, and, ultimately, grains suitable for making beer. these things were all found in the wild, but a reason to cultivate an unattended, fixed patch of them would be so that you could always have then available for celebration or sacred festivals etc. once that mental/societal leap was made, the next step of performign similar feats with foodstuffs would not have been a long one to make.

These are excellent points. Do you have any resources to recommend?

Just yesterday I was musing about the role cheese may have played in ranching, at least in those parts of the world where it is consumed. Cheese is possibly the most addictive substance known to humankind. It is a good source of nutrition, too. I wonder how much of an incentive was provided by cheese.

someone already reccomended diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. It is a fantastic starting point. Sforza and Jean Auel (beleiv eit or not) are also major idealists in how I've put my theories together.

Your cheese ideas are intruiging. Farming probably led to the domestication of animals, which in turn, would have led to a new round of foodstuffs. it may be what made people move towards a purely meat-producing "farming", rather than a mixed mode, which most early farms were.

Carbohydrates are also highly addictive. Bread and beer. Since I find cheese to be utterly revolting, I can't compare cheese and carbs for addictiveness with any degree of fairness.

Back when sugar was a very rare commodity, there was a case of an English diplomat who betrayed his country so he could remain in Egypt where he was awarded access to sugar as payment. Had he not betrayed England he would have gone back to England and be cut off from his sugar supply when diplomatic relationships were cut-off. He chose sugar over patriotism.

Excesssugar in kids can lead to alcoholism, while recovering alcoholics often binge heavily on carbs.

(This will be one of my unpopular and weird, wacky, out-there kind of theories)

Isn't it interesting that many of these early cultures (I can't say all because I don't know all nine that you speak of) have a legend built around this agriculturalism? Stating that there is some heavenly interference/encouragement of becoming farmers?
Sumeria - Inanna steals knowledge from her father and brings it to earth in defiance of his wishes - agriculture (among many other skills) is taught to the people
Judaism - besides the Torah, where God punishes Adam by throwing him and Eve out of the garden and saying he must till the land, there is the Book of Enoch, which says the Nephilim came down to teach skills to men, and seems to hint at teaching agriculture, although it could be herbalism ("made them acquainted with plants")
Egypt - Osiris and his wife Isis taught the people agriculture, specifically of grains

When faced with a common myth, one can take it in one of several ways. One can decide it is literal - I do not. One can decide it is metaphorical, which seems to leave some questions unanswered - fwhy then would this have appeared simultaneously around the world in an age where communication between contintents was practiacally non-existent? Or one can decide it is a mix - that something happened which a very primitive people were not able to explain in terms other than that which they could use. The typical fall back is God did it, or Demons did it.
Did something happen which somehow came in such a way as to be interpreted to come from the sky? And did this something teach agriculture and other skills to people? Or is there a sort of human telepathy that exists by virtue of synchronistic evolution, so that all groups of humans arrive at a similar stage at a similar time?

The rationalist explanation would be that gods are overblown ancestors. If one says, "The ancestors taught us how to plant grain and raise sheep and cattle," that sounds far less, uh, numnious.

However, I'm pretty sure I told you about a vision I had in 1989 (I won't describe the circumstances publically), in which it was basically revealed to me that there was an "alien invasion" about 10,000 years ago, wherein humankind was infected with a kind of virus that led to civilization. I'm not sure I "believe" that, but it may not be functionally that far from the truth. I've seen other versions of this concept, for example in the very whacked-out Transmitter to God by Rhawn Joseph.

Could not the "invasion" be a sort of interstellarly transported virus which affected the human brain? They now posit this is how life may travel between planets... and perhaps the notion of "Gods" or "aliens" is some sort of intuitive understanding of this process...

though i am loathe to admit any connection to creationists, i must say, the idea of alien intelligent design has always intruiged me. it does not seem unlikely at all that the "gods" of our ancestors, as well as the many gaps in our palentological and cultural records are connected to a manipulation in our predecessors by an outside force, looking to conduct genetic experiements (or trying to find sophisticated slave labor, perhaps even a future food source, if the culture liked brains, and the relative intelligence of a creature was directly proportionate to the brain).

the entire spiritual concept of prayer would have branched back to the roots of the first test subjects, who would have had to communicate with these entities to "learn" how to do things outside thier possible realm of experience. calling out and recieving an answer, to beings of immense power and experience, that hail from the heavens, and live outside of our understading...

it is not hard to see how all the icons spawned, if you take that template as a potential truth.

Not every society has been (or even is - the Austrailian aboriginies for example) as "left-brained" and linear as ours is. And to an extend the development of modes of cognition can be socialized and taught. More "right-brained" societies have tended to develop more animistic spiritual views. This is more of a mystical state where one is connected with the universe and the spiritual essence flows through and connects all. In general this type of spirituality seems to be/have been more prevalent in less agricultually intensive and less literate, and definitely less alphabetically literate societies or some combination thereof. The developement of both agriculture and literacy would neccessitate a more sequential form of thought - the province of the left-brain where the self and the world would become more separated into discreete packets. So what could have once been a spirit one was connected with seems to be more of an outside influence and could have evolved into a 'god' - something to be prayed to rather than talked to. Make any sense?

What would be the effects of increased atmospheric CO2 on the potency of hallucinogenic plants?

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Well, I understand that children can be made to do work, but I suppose one would have to be very heavy-handed with them. Hmm, I wonder what role that may have played in the development of patriarchal religion?

Indeed one does... look at how difficult it is for me to get A just to carry his dishes to the sink!

I highly encourage you to read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, which discusses the rise of agriculture in great detail, among other things. His theories have been criticized for being simplistic at times, but I found the book riveting, and I haven't seen another argument as convincing as his for explaining the same phenomena.

Thanks for the recommendation!

Beer, plain and simple. We settled to consume alcoholic beverages. And I'm not being cheeky here. I heard that every early civilization had some form of beer like product. I am thinking that early nomadic and tribes cached food in places, much the aboriginal tribes of Australia. I speculate that enough of these caches, which likely contained grain products, may have gotten wet and fermented. People being the way they are still consumed the mix and found it to be good.. This happened frequently enough the people began to figure out how to do it themselves, and we ended up settling so we could produce it on a larger scale. I don't think agricultural civilization would have survived with out the ability to get drunk.

That's my thoughts anyway. I got no sources.

Damn, you beat me to it. I have expounded in several public houses on the subject of beer as the foundation of civilization.

Who could have stood an agricultural society without the ability to get drunk or otherwise fucked up? ::shudder::

(weird ass confession time - I have always been terrified of sterotypical rowed vegetable gardens. From the time I was born. As in when I was less than one year old I cried - and the parental unit assures me it was a terrified scream rather than a whiney scream and mothers can tell- when any family member- even the most unliked sibling- ventured into the evil veggie garden they grew.)

A historian friend of mine,

erudito has looked at this question many times and actually occassionally teaches about it at high school. Don't let his conservatism fool you - he actually does have a clue...

As you've mentioned farming doesn't improve lifespan, resistance to disease or general health. The capacity of it, particularly in the early stages of development, to provide a store of food is questionable.

And herein lies the problem. We liberal minded souls, with an intrinsic distate for it, forget about war.

Farming provides a numerically superior and more concentration population. Gatherer-Hunter societies didn't stand a chance.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

the domestication of the primate

this is an issue i have spent a lot of time on

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the food storage is the comparison

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cheese

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invasion vs. genetic engineering

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