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The rise of agriculture

The simple story is that agriculture arose suddenly after the end of the ice age. It turns out (surprise, surprise) that the truth is a good deal more complex than that. I’m indebted to the New Scientist (18.9.04) for some of this.

There was certainly a major crisis, as vast amounts of the best land disappeared underwater (more). And hunter-gatherer communities found themselves squeezed up together.

However we discuss elsewhere (more) that our ancestors were almost certainly much smarter than they have previously been given credit for. They will have known what seeds did for a very long time. And it will have occurred to them that it’s pointless to walk many miles to gather their favourite herbs and other medical plants, when they could arrange for them to grow nearby.

But cultivated crops were only a minor part of the diet for a long time. The scientists talk hundreds or thousands of years. But I see no reason why the Homo heidelbergensis folk (more), of nearly half a million years ago, shouldn’t have been into cultivation. They were certainly living a pretty good life, which is important as we’ll see shortly.

It will have been the women who first noticed useful plants growing around their rubbish tips – and who first made the connection with the seeds that they threw away by mistake. It will have been the women who first indulged in a bit of genetic modification by planting the best seeds to improve the crop, who learned how to cultivate it better and so on.

The N.S. article also puts forward another theory. Apparently these new-fangled plants were gathered, and then cultivated, to provide delicacies for feasting – by people who already had enough to eat, and who had the time and energy to spare for such frivolities. The wild versions of the early crops were far too inefficient to grow and harvest to be cost-effective as a staple food. Wild lentils for example usually grow just two per plant. As these spare-time farmers bred improved versions of these crops, and got better at cultivating them, it became possible for more people to partake of these treats.

Some scientists believe that grains such as wheat and barley were originally grown to make beer with. Certainly, until windmills and watermills were invented, grinding grains to make bread was terribly hard work . (I’ve been trying to find out when this was. But like the wheel, nobody seems to know.)

The eminent experimental archaeologist Dr. Peter Reynolds once copied a structure that had been found on many iron-age sites in southern England. Archaeologists thought that they must have been used for drying grain. Reynolds found that his was useless for drying grain – but that it made an excellent malting floor! The Customs and Excise people were quite upset at the quality of the ‘mash’ that he sent them for analysis. They slapped his wrist firmly and told him not to do it again without a licence.

Unfortunately I’ve recently seen an article, in Science no less, claiming that advanced wheats such as ‘emmer’ and ‘einkorn’ (if you’ve not met these don’t worry) were somehow wild because their heads break off easily. To us non-experts this picture looks exactly like barley. But Wikipedia assures us that it is actually emmer wheat. Emmer, and other wheats with spikes, on are still grown in many places today.

According to the Science article, and to many archaeologists, it’s only if the head stays on that a wheat can be classed as cultivated. You can see why they might think this. It enables you to carry the entire stalk home – if that is your wish – and thresh it there.

However even a prestigious journal like Science can’t get it right all the time, or it would never say anything useful. And this claim has got to be nonsense. I helped for a time at the Butser Ancient Farm. To be sure Butser reflects iron-age technology rather than the Neolithic technology that I think the article was concerned with. (Unfortunately I threw it away in disgust.) Butser grows these loose-head wheats, and finds them very good indeed. They are harvested by walking through the field picking off the heads. This is quick, easy, efficient and fun for all the family. It is far less back-breaking than using a sickle down at ground level, and it simplifies the threshing process that follows. Experimental archaeology really is a wonderful tool for putting the rest of the archaeological fraternity straight.

No doubt a sickle was used later, if available, to cut as much straw as was needed for bedding, feed and thatching. If not I think we have to imagine them pulling the straw up by the roots; and then maybe cutting the roots off with a stone tool, on a flat surface.

At some point, these people started taming and/or herding animals. They also started breeding (genetically modifying) them. Few domesticated animals would survive long in the wild. Some animals are particularly suited to being tamed. These are the ones with a leader and a well established pecking order. Dogs are the best example. Once you have persuaded them that you are their leader then they are yours for life.

Horses are good too. The first archaeological evidence for the domestication of horses dates back only some 6 thousand years. But genetic evidence suggests that we started the ‘improving’ horses nearly 30 thousand years ago. The genetic evidence also suggests ‘multiple ancestry’. So domesticating horses wasn’t a single breakthrough, mastered by one group and spread round the continent. It was an advance that happened independently in many different places, and no doubt at many different times.

Whatever the detailed truth of all this, when crunch time finally came, much of the groundwork had already been done. Many of the food plants had been made much more productive, and many animals had been at least partly domesticated.

The stone-age peoples will have been in no hurry to take agriculture too seriously. Farming was hard, backbreaking work. The skeletal remains of stone-age farmers show this clearly. It remained pretty hard right up until steam was harnessed (more) less than 200 years ago. It’s a salutary thought that up until then, over 95% of ordinary folk like you and I were earning our crusts this way.

But that’s not all. Traditionally, farming folk have lived in close contact with their animals. This was particularly true in the colder regions where the heat given off by the animals helped to keep the humans warm! I’ve read that many of our modern human diseases originated in animals; and that they transferred to us humans as a result of this close contact. Until we started to develop immunity to these new diseases, they must have caused untold misery. The skeletons of stone-age farmers support this too. They show more signs of infectious disease than those of their hunter-gatherer forebears.

Hunter-gathering was much more fun. Modern hunter-gatherers only have to work about 15 hours a week (the men anyway). The rest of the time they are free to sit around telling stories.

About 15 thousand years ago, the weather warmed up dramatically and quite suddenly. But then it clamped down again (in the Younger Dryas event). About 11½ thousand years ago it warmed up again, this time for good.

The ice had not yet started to melt, so the sea level was still a hundred metres or so lower than it is today. Folk will have been quick to take advantage of the warmer weather. They will have expanded into many places which had previously been uninhabitable. Many of them are now underwater. Note the word ‘expanded’. Plenty of folk stayed behind, and no doubt bred enough kids to take up the space vacated by those who left.

The sea level took its time to rise. As far as I’ve been able to establish, it was thousands of years before the situation got serious (more). But then the flooding speeded up. The waters rose sufficiently to inundate huge areas of both newly-occupied land and long-occupied land. It was probably the most fertile land at that.

It was crunch time. The hobby, practised mainly by the women to produce delicacies for feasting, now became a life saver – long hours of back-breaking work, new diseases and all. Farming enables you to support far more people on a given area of land. So once farming became the main source of food, there was no going back.

Now that we’ve reached ‘modern’ (post ice-age) times, you might think that we would get a little less speculation and a little more fact. There is indeed a dramatic increase in evidence, but unfortunately it conflicts.

We used to be told that farming was invented in the ‘Fertile Crescent’ (the Tigris and Euphrates valleys in Iraq, the Jordan valley in ancient Phoenicia and the Nile valley in Egypt) – and that it spread from there. This of course flies in the face of all that we have just discussed. And there’s now plenty of evidence that it’s not true. As we would expect, farming was invented in many different places and at many different times.

Why did scientists get so hooked on the Fertile Crescent? I can think of two reasons. First, they used to think of all our forebears as stupid. We shouldn’t blame them for this. It’s part of the human condition. I bet that if you are part of the modern computer-literate generation, you think of us old folk who aren’t as being a bit lacking-between-the-ears too. I know that we thought that of our earlier generations. The scientists used to regard agriculture as a sudden and massive stroke of genius – like the invention of the wheel perhaps. As we’ve seen, it wasn’t like that at all. It was a gradual development, and obvious to anybody with a head on their shoulders.

The second possible reason is that they made a classic mistake, that scientists are continually warning each other about. They confused ‘absence of evidence’ with ‘evidence of absence’. Nearly half a million years ago our ancestors, Homo heidelbergensis, were living the Life of Riley in southern England (more). The ice returned later, and scraped clean all but a small patch. That patch is all the evidence we have that the region was inhabited at all, let alone that the inhabitants were doing so well.

We discuss elsewhere the capriciousness of the fossil record. The archaeological record is equally capricious, and for very similar reasons as we’ve seen. The Fertile Crescent seems to have been dry for most of the time since the ice age. I’m sure it’s no co-incidence that it takes in the valleys of four major rivers. The conditions must have been good for preserving archaeological evidence. Then again, the civilisations kept moving, leaving untouched evidence behind. In wetter areas, folk tended to stay put more, and later generations obliterated much of the evidence of how their ancestors lived.

I’ve read a report (New Scientist, 29.6.00) saying that folk in sub-Saharan Africa were already herding cattle by 12 thousand years ago. We don’t know what the folk of the Middle East were doing at that time, because the land that most of them were living on is now underwater. The Jordan valley is an exception of course, because the flooding didn’t reach it. A village has been found there, dated to 12 thousand years ago too. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of how the people were living.

The Great Agricultural Revolution probably did start in the Fertile Crescent, about 10 thousand years ago as far as I can make out. It will have been one of the places where the most people were displaced most suddenly. (Another will have been the bed of the North Sea (more).) Maybe they were the first to get serious with irrigation too. But all the coastal peoples will have had to follow on with their own version before long.

Meanwhile the inland peoples were able to carry on hunting and gathering as before, unaffected by the flooding at the coast. But eventually they became obliged to take up farming too. Why? The only evidence seems to be genetic. Geneticists take blood samples from living people, and work out from their genes where they originated. Sadly each new article you read propounds a different theory. Sometimes a great wave of farmers swept through the land sweeping the hunter-gatherers out of the way. Sometimes the existing people stayed put, and took to farming as they learned these new skills.

As so often, the truth is probably a bit of each. Perhaps a wave of farmers did indeed sweep up from the coast. This brought new blood, and thus supported the ‘wave’ theory. But the existing inhabitants didn’t move out. They stayed put, and took to farming in order to make a living from the land that was left to them. In this they supported the ‘stay put’ theory. But the coastal folk were the adventurous ones. And it was some of them that moved on, and imposed farming on the inhabitants of the next slice of territory

Either way farming seems gradually to have spread up through Europe, at about 1 km per year, until it reached Scandinavia and Britain.

Or did it? There’s evidence that we British were drinking milk as early as 6½ thousand years ago. This means that we must have domesticated the wild aurochs, and started herding them, even earlier than that. This is not as early as they were tamed in Turkey, which was between 8 and 10 thousand years ago. But genetic studies suggest that it was a home-grown domestication. Cattle were domesticated twice, in two different places. And one of them was northern Europe. However the eminent archaeologist Francis Pryor reckons that he has found evidence that we in Britain were herding animals a thousand(?) years before the near continent. Being an island people, we clearly did a lot of things our own way.