Near a Thousand Tables (14 page)

The importance of mollusks as probably the first creatures herded and bred by men has never been broached, much less investigated or acknowledged. So what little can be said about it has to be tentative, commended as much by reason as evidence. Snails are only part of the story, for the residue of shellfish of many kinds lies alongside them in ancient refuse heaps scattered across the world. In the history of the exploitation of marine creatures for food, it is obviously reasonable to propose that herding may have preceded hunting, for fishing is a kind of hunting which demands highly inventive technology, adjusted to an unfamiliar medium. Mollusk farming, by contrast, seems a natural extension of gathering and can be done by hand. In the great shell middens of ancient Denmark, oyster, cockle, mussel and periwinkle are the main species but there are many others, among which snails abound. A great increase in the occurrence of mollusk shells occurs in
Mesolithic middens
. They are scattered densely on the western shores of Europe, especially in Scandinavia, where they have survived undisturbed, and along almost the entire length of the Pacific shores of the Americas. There are particularly spectacular concentrations in Scotland (at Oban and Larne), in Brittany, at sites associated with the North African culture known as Capsian, in California and near the Iberian coast in Asturias and the Tagus valley. The shells are piled beside freshwater breeding grounds all over the world. Oysters have a conspicuous place in this context. Oyster beds are not necessarily associated with anything one could reasonably call “oyster domestication” and even artificial beds do not necessarily imply selective breeding: but there seem to have been big increases in oyster consumption and therefore, presumably, impressive improvements in oyster-gathering techniques in the Mesolithic era. Off the coast of Senegal, at Lake Diana in Corsica and at Saint-Michel-en-l'Herme in the Vendée, there are islands formed entirely of discarded oyster shells, which are still growing in a sea rich in
natural oyster beds
. A mound of shells in Maine is estimated at seven million bushels.

The increase in the rate of accumulation at many of these sites, usually between about six and eight thousand years ago, represents an undetected revolution in the history of food. The assumption usually made by historians is that an
increase in the consumption of mollusks can only be explained by a shortage of
bigger game
. But small, easily managed creatures had considerable advantages over big game, provided they could be supplied in large quantities. Archaeologists label mollusks as a “gathered” food, but where they were eaten in huge quantities it will make better sense, in some cases, to think of them as being systematically farmed.

It offends heroic and romantic sensibilities to imagine a great revolution led by snails. Yet, after cooking, the beginnings of systematic food production surely constitute the biggest food-connected innovation in the history of our species. The story of how it happened has traditionally been divided into two strands, both characterized by a progressive model: agriculture and the scientific improvement of plant food species are conventionally classed as growths from gathering; while herding and stock breeding are treated as developments from hunting. These are marginally misleading traditions: some kinds of farming and stock breeding are probably older than some kinds of hunting; mollusk farming is a kind of herding which is closer to gathering practices than anything which can fairly be called hunting. And sedentary farming communities can acquire domestic animals by means unconnected with the hunt: by weaning strays or by attracting scavengers to their settlements. Farmers may then develop the breeds which suit sedentarists' purposes: some species might be refined for pest control. Others are useful as natural “food processors”: ruminants and foragers can turn energy sources which humans cannot consume directly—such as tough or unpalatable leaves and kitchen waste—into the human food we call meat. They could be used as a “walking larder” for times of
crop failure
. Still the traditional classifications make sense, because they split foods into two recognizably distinct categories, which, on the understanding that their stories are interdependent, can be tackled in turn: first, creatures; then, in the next chapter, plants.

The origins of herding and of its almost invariable consequence—selective stock breeding—have been shrouded in myth and false assumptions. Herding has been classified as an extraordinary development in historical ecology, which could not have happened independently in more than a very few places. If it is now found almost everywhere in the world, that must—according to traditional reasoning—be a result of diffusion: a practice initiated in one place, or a very limited number of places, by a stroke of accident or genius, then radiated across the world, transmitted by migration or war or trade. This kind of reasoning is still popular in scholarship but it really belongs to the mental tool kit of a bygone age. Diffusionism as a philosophy arose among intellectual elites committed to hierarchical models of the
world. Only people peculiarly favored by God or nature could initiate great ideas. Other people—less intelligent or less evolved—could only progress by learning from their betters. The idea appealed in a world dominated, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by white men's empires, whose justification was that they were spreading the benefits of their own innovations to lesser breeds. It seemed convincing in a world of scholarship dominated by traditions of classical humanism and schooled in the tracing of the transmission of texts. Since cultural developments really do spread by diffusion from a single original source and the same models, the same techniques of research got transferred to other disciplines.

Yet there is an alternative way of approaching problems like the one before us. The fact that herding is commonplace might equally well be seen as evidence that it is not extraordinary at all, but something which comes easily, almost, one might say, naturally, as humans and other animals coevolve. The species we domesticate are those with which we have a relationship of interdependence. We use them for food, for suppression of vermin or for entertainment or help in the hunt, work or war. In exchange, we feed them and protect them from predators. These are relationships as intimate and, in a sense, natural, as those which link lice or macrobial parasites with their hosts, or seagulls with fishermen or, as we shall see in the next chapter, cultivars with cultivators. Gathering, hunting and herding, which are usually arranged progressively—placed one after the other in our conventional chronologies of prehistoric change—were really complementary techniques of obtaining food, which
developed together
.

Many hunting cultures do not just accept the bounty of nature. They drive herds where they want them, sometimes constructing drive lanes for the purpose and penning or corraling the catch: this is already a form of herding. Or they produce food by wielding fire to manage the environment. This was the method by which most Native American peoples of the Northeastern woodlands supplied their larders before European settlers arrived. In woodland thinned by periodic blazes, hunters could move freely and the species they favored for the pot, such as elk, deer, beaver, hare, porcupine, turkey, quail and grouse
were encouraged
. For the same reason, early European beholders of Australia were astonished by the vast fires they saw rising from the shore: over most of the continent, the aborigines managed the habitat of the kangaroo by this means. Although some hunting communities prefer not to pursue such techniques to the point where they become the permanent custodians of the herds, these hunting methods clearly belong to a continuum which includes pastoralism. Whether to take the process further and become full-time managers of flocks is a decision which depends on a balance of considerations: if the supply of animals for the hunt is plentiful, the extra trouble
of undertaking pastoralism may not be worthwhile. The great benefit of undertaking that extra trouble is that it facilitates selective breeding and gives the community disposal of animals of the exact description to meet their requirements or their tastes, though a similar, if slower, effect, can be achieved by culling unfavored specimens during the hunt. Once herding happens, selective breeding follows.

Charles Darwin pondered these problems while he was working toward the theory of evolution. His studies of stockbreeders' methods gave him the key to how nature might work, analogously to a breeder, selecting specimens with appropriate qualities for the competition to survive. At an early stage of his work, he assumed that systematic breeding was a late development of a progressive past: the ascent of man to an ever-higher state of civilization. Partly, this assumption arose from his conviction—the orthodoxy, indeed, of his times—that all history is progressive and that human “primitives” were of modest capacities. Partly, too, it was because he revered that stockbreeders' craft and thought of it as arcane and hard of access—conceptually elusive, practically demanding. Darwin did not expect what he called “semi-civilized and savage peoples” to be well versed in breeding technique. Yet many examples arose to surprise him in the course of his researches. The Tuaregs' camels, he acknowledged, “can boast a genealogy far longer than the descendants of the Darley Arabian.” Mongols bred white-tailed yaks for sale to China as providers of fly whisks. The Ostyaks and some Eskimos favored dogs with uniform coats and the Damara in Southern Africa bred their cattle for the same effect. Generally in Southern Africa, Darwin found, “the power of discrimination which these savages possess is wonderful, and they can recognize to which tribe any cattle belong.” The Turuma Indians of Guiana jealously selected the best bitches to mate with the best of their dogs and kept two varieties of purely ornamental fowl. “Hardly any nation,” according to Darwin, “is more barbarous than the Fuegians, but I hear from Mr. Bridges, the catechist to the Mission, that when these savages have a large, strong and active bitch, they take care to put her to a fine dog, and even take care to feed her well, that her young may be strong and well favored.” “The most curious case” which came to Darwin's attention was recorded by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, who claimed that the Inca regularly selected the best specimens from their deer hunts to release back into the wild with the aim of improving the breed, “so that the Incas followed exactly the reverse system of that which our Scottish sportsmen are accused of following, namely, of steadily killing the finest stags, thus causing the
whole race to degenerate
.”

This evidence compelled Darwin to revise his estimate of the place of systematic stock breeding in history. It was an early and very widespread innovation.
The commonest purpose for stock breeding is as food production. It can start in a number of ways; but hunting is certainly one of them. It is tempting to imagine a phase of human history prior to hunting, when hominids and early humans fed like vultures, gathered around the detritus of better predators' meals, or around the bones of animals dead from disease or senectitude. But the debate in food historiography over the difference between hunting and scavenging has been ill conceived. Most predatory animals do both. The significant distinction is between seeking live prey and dead. Only from live specimens can food be bred. Some easily garnered species are seized alive as they crawl the earth or get trapped in rock pools. Others can be drawn into a close relationship with people by mutual attraction. Some can be trapped in the course of the hunt, but this is certainly an unusual way for domestication to begin. Stock breeding rarely, if ever, develops in cultures which depend on hunting unless an intermediate herding phase occurs—which happens frequently, though not universally. In some respects, it is surprising that it ever happens at all.

Hunting is an attractive way of life, which still exercises a romantic appeal for some people in sedentary and even urban societies: thousands of years of civilization seem insufficient to scratch out the savage under the skin of executives, for instance, whose leisure is best spent on a big-game hunt or remote trout stream, or of their employees who go bass fishing or deer hunting. The exhilaration of the chase was expressed by a J. M. Barrie character—a pampered aristocrat liberated by a shipwreck which forced her back to “nature”:

L
ADY
M
ARY:
… I sighted a herd near Penguin's Creek, but had to creep round Silver Lake to get windward of them. However, they spotted me and then the fun began. There was nothing for it but to try and run them down, so I singled out a fat buck and away we went down the shore of the lake, up the valley of rolling stones; he … took to the water, but I swam after him; the river is only a mile broad there, but it runs strong. He went spinning down the rapids, down I went in pursuit; he clambered ashore, I clambered ashore; away we tore helter-skelter up the hill and down again. I lost him in the marshes, got on his track again … and brought him down with an arrow in Firefly Grove.

T
WEENY
(staring at her): Aren't you tired?

L
ADY
M
ARY:
Tired!
It was gorgeous
.

The fact that people in hunting cultures depend on it for their livelihood never seems to reduce the hunt to the level of routine work. Its challenges are relished,
its magic magnetic, even where it is utterly familiar. The inspiration it has provided for rock art shows how it dominates imaginations in societies which live by it. In some ways, it is a highly efficient way of getting food. Effective hunting delivers abundance. “How I should love to be the jaguar's daughter!” exclaims a heroine in a myth of the Opaye of the Matto Grosso. “I should get all the
meat I wanted
.”

Hunting economizes on the costs of rearing animals and laboring in fields. It directs effort efficiently by exploiting the relatively few and modest skills men are naturally good at compared with other species: using brainpower to anticipate and even influence the behavior of victim-species, taking aim, hurling a missile. Throwing power can be hugely enhanced by relatively simple technologies, like those of the boomerang, blowgun, spear-thrower and—at a relatively sophisticated stage of technical change, probably not more than twenty thousand years ago—the bow. Controlled fire can be used to stampede and channel prey. Funnel-shaped lanes—of the kind depicted in Paleolithic art and replicated in modern times in Australia, Siberia and America—can be formed from cairns or posts to maneuver
animals into traps
. Cliffsides or artificial pits can be used as lethal chutes down which creatures are harried to death or bogs exploited to bring them to a sticky end. Or strong or swift creatures can be trained to compensate for the physical inadequacies of the huntsman: dogs, leopards, hawks. In the right conditions of balance between the availability of game and the numbers of mouths to be fed, hunting cultures of the past found entirely satisfactory ways of keeping people well nourished, without adopting pastoral or agricultural methods of food production. Analysis of Paleolithic remains shows impressive nutritional profiles: intakes typically of three thousand calories a day, of which meat supplied about a third. Hunter-gatherers of the ice age ate about five pounds of food a day, of which nearly two pounds were meat. Though most of them enjoyed little salt, their diets were generally high in calcium; because of the nature of the plant foods they ate—few starchy grains, relatively large amounts of fruits and wild tubers—and because of the concentration of ascorbic acid in organ meats, they had five times a modern American's average intake of
vitamin C
.