Near a Thousand Tables (18 page)

and a good quantity of spices from the land of the Blacks…. The prince, noticing our surprise, amiably explained by saying that he was born in the desert where no grain grows and that their people ate only what the land produced. He said that they acquired enough grain to honor passing strangers,

Leo suspected, however, that this reticence was partly for show and so have most scholars ever since. Nomads need to obtain grains, if they want them, by barter or raiding or tribute, or else they must
gather them wild
.

The gathering strategy is not always practicable: some environments yield too little harvestable wild food. But, wherever it is possible, foraging for edible plants
is popular, not only with farmers on the lookout for species to plant, but also among inveterate hunters and herders, peoples who have a strong cultural bias against agriculture, or whose habitat does not allow the wild plants to be adapted for cultivation. Many aboriginal Australian peoples exploit wild yams and assist their propagation by leaving the tuber tops in the ground or replanting them. This suggests that they could cultivate them if they so wished; but they prefer not to. When investigating the relationship between wild and cultivable grasses, Jack Harlan the agronomist, who was one of the great pioneers of historical ecology, harvested four pounds of wild wheat grain in an hour with a stone sickle: at that rate, people who had edible species available to them in antiquity had little incentive to domesticate them. The grass from Minnesota popularly known as “wild rice” which is now a prized delicacy throughout the United States was formerly the staple food of the natives, who could gather large amounts with relative economy of labor.

Somehow—we still do not know how or where—foraging began to yield to farming as a way of obtaining plant food: under this new dispensation, instead of relying on naturally occurring varieties, farmers transplanted such varieties into new locations, which they might adapt for the purpose by the sort of radical, ambitious interventions in the natural environment which we loosely call “civilization”: methods of soil preparation, including, for example, turning, irrigating and fertilizing the earth; clearing natural vegetation; weeding plots; exterminating predators; refashioning the lie of the land with ditches and mounds; diverting watercourses; building fences. Farmers could then develop strains of their own by selective planting and other techniques, including hybridization and grafting. Along with stock breeding, farming was the first great human intervention in the course of evolution, producing new species not by natural selection but through manipulation—sorting and selecting by human hand. From the perspective of historical ecology, this was the biggest revolution in the history of the world, a new departure on a scale unrepeated until, perhaps, the “Columbian Exchange” of the sixteenth century, to which we shall turn in due course (below, Chapter 7), or the beginnings of “genetic modification” at the end of the twentieth century (below, p. 209-10).

This impressive intensification of ways of exploiting plant food is puzzling, partly because it happened so rapidly, crammed into a spell of about five millennia, between about ten thousand and about five thousand years ago. This seems short by comparison with the long preceding period, during which, as far as we know, gathering was the only plant-exploiting strategy practiced anywhere in the world. More curious still is that farming proved extremely popular as a way of
life—so much so that the overwhelming majority of humankind eventually came to depend on it. Yet, wherever it happened, it involved sweeping social and political change, much of which can reasonably be supposed to have been unwelcome to the people who endured it. The problem of the origins of agriculture is, therefore, one of the most debated topics in recent scholarship; a survey of the relevant literature has enumerated thirty-eight distinct and competing explanations of how
farming came about
. No solution so far proposed seems entirely satisfactory and we are still really only refining the model proposed by Darwin:

accustomed as we are to our excellent vegetables and luscious fruits, we can hardly persuade ourselves that the stringy roots of the wild carrot and parsnip, or the little shoots of the wild asparagus, or crabs, sloes, etc. should ever have been valued; yet, from what we know of the habits of Australian and South African savages, we need feel no doubt on this head…. The savage inhabitants of each land, having found out by many and hard trials what plants were useful, or could be rendered useful by various cooking processes, would, after a time take the first step in cultivation by planting them near their usual abodes…. The next step in cultivation, and this would require but little forethought, would be to sow the seeds of useful plants; and as the soil near the hovels of the natives would often be in some degree manured, improved varieties would sooner or later arise. Or a wild and unusually good variety of a native plant might attract the attention of some wise old savage; and he would transplant it or sow its seed…. Transplanting any superior variety, or sowing its seeds, hardly implies more forethought than might be expected at an early and rude
period of civilisation
.

Obviously, there are nigglingly unsolved problems in this model. It is never satisfying to historians to be forced back on formulations of what “would” or “might” have happened (though this recourse is inevitable in any meditation on an episode as remote and ill documented as the origins of agriculture). We want to know what really did happen and to base our findings on evidence, not on reasoning alone. The assumption that “savage” attainments must be of a kind which requires “little forethought” makes us uneasy, because it is incompatible with one of our most cherished findings about human nature: as we have not progressed in cleverness, as far as we know, since the emergence of our species, we have to acknowledge that genius occurs, uncumulatively, at every stage of history and in every type of society—as well in the Paleolithic as in postmodernity, “in New Guinea as well as
in New York
.” Moreover, if Darwin were right, we might expect
to find the earliest cases of plant domestication in areas where the wild species were deficient in quantity or nutritional value. In practice, however, the opposite seems to be the case.

Early domestications tended to happen in places where, on the face of it, there seems to have been little incentive, owing to the abundance of easily garnered wild foods. Southeast Asian river deltas, which have been proposed as the scenes of the first farming in the world, were prehistoric “
seas of wild rice
.” All the areas commonly acknowledged to have been early nurseries of independent agriculture—in the Middle East, China, Southeast Asia, New Guinea, Mesoamerica, central Peru, Ethiopia—were characterized at the relevant time by diverse environments, rich in microclimates and specialized eco-niches, where food seems unlikely to have been in short supply. The Natufian culture in Palestine—predecessor of one of the earliest fully agrarian societies we know about—harvested wild cereals in large quantities as early as the
ninth millennium
B.C.
Its sites are littered with grinding stones, sickles and mortars dug into bedrock. Wild barley and two types of wheat that yield kernels digestible by human beings—einkorn and emmer—seem to have been natural to the region. Actual remains of these grains, processed by the grinders' tools, have been found in Jericho (below, p. 95), Mureybit and Ali Kosh. At Çayonü the foundation of the diet of the citizens of that early experiment in urbanization included emmer, einkorn, lentil, pea and vetch.

The fact that emmer and einkorn were present at many early sites may confer a clue. Kernels of these wheats are very hard to free from the tough, inedible glumes that surround them; so people who ate large amounts of them may have had an incentive to try to breed derivatives, which were easier to process. However, if labor saving was the purpose behind the strategy, crop domestication must be reckoned a failure. In practice, it seems always to have cost early farmers more trouble than it saved. The cultivated grains on which its practitioners relied were in every case less nutritious than the wild versions they replaced, though they also yielded more volume per unit of cultivation and generally demanded less labor to prepare for eating. Prior to preparation they had to be planted and nurtured. This was a backbreaking job which absorbed more time and effort than the gathering strategies employed by harvesters of wild grains.

Furthermore, the introduction of farming frequently triggered deleterious consequences. In societies of the commonest kind—civilizations that relied on a single staple, such as rice or wheat, barley or maize—exposure to famine and disease broadened as diet narrowed. Meanwhile, instead of being a universal diversion, hunting became an elite privilege and a varied diet became the reward of power. The ensuing refinements of civilization—towering monuments built at popular
expense for elite satisfaction—meant, for most people, more toil and
more tyranny
. Women got shackled to the food chain. Tillers of the soil became something like a caste, from which prowess could not raise them except in time of war.

I mention this with no intention of justifying romantic cant in favor of the moral superiority of spear-slingers' societies, in which hunting and gathering continued to predominate. They were and are bloodstained and riven with inequalities, just as much as those which rely on mass agriculture, only in different ways. What intensive farmers renounced was not the sylvan innocence of a golden age, but particular hardheaded advantages. In the late 1960s, the archaeologist Lewis Binford drew attention to this paradox of the evidence: farming was harmful to people in the ordinary ranks of the “original affluent societies.” Shortly afterward, the richly creative, enormously influential anthropologist Marshall Sahlins published
Stone Age Economics,
in which he argued convincingly that hunter societies were the most leisured and—in relation to energy expended—among the best nourished in history. Meanwhile, evidence began to accumulate that nonfarmers are usually restrained from farming, not by lack of means or knowledge—for gatherers commonly know as much as gardeners about plants and about the principles of propagation—but by a rational preference for an easier
way of life
. Jack R. Harlan put it in words that can hardly be bettered: “the ethnographic evidence indicates that people who do not farm do about everything that farmers do, but they do not
work as hard
.”

Gatherers use fire to clear ground, renew fertility and privilege or favor particular species. They often sow seeds and plant tubers. They use enclosures and scarecrows to protect plants. Sometimes they split tracts of land into proprietary plots. They have first-fruit ceremonies, rites of rain making, and prayers for the fertility of the earth. They harvest edible seeds and thresh, winnow and mill them. They are often experts on the toxic and prophylactic properties of the plants they use, processing the poison out of their own food and extracting it to stun fish or kill game. Indeed, some of the most reputedly “primitive” people in the world are expert in the control of this recondite scientific knowledge. The swamp dwellers of Frederik Hendrik Island, off New Guinea, know how to infect a fish-rich stretch of sea with poison, enabling them to gather and eat the fish without ill effect. Burke and Wills perished on their trans-Australian expedition in 1861 because, when their provisions ran out, they ate the nardoo seeds from which the aboriginals made a nourishing cake: without proper preparation, as the natives alone knew, it can
be highly toxic
.

“Gatherers,” Harlan went on, “understand the life cycles of plants, know the seasons of the year, and when and where the natural plant food resources can be
harvested in great abundance with the least effort.” In the era of universal foraging, the diet—to judge from the comparative study of human remains—was better than that of early cultivators. Starvation was rare. Health was generally better, with less chronic disease and “not nearly so many cavities in their teeth. The question must be raised: Why farm? Why give up the 20-hour work week and the fun of hunting in order to toil in the sun? Why work harder for food less nutritious and a supply more capricious? Why invite famine, plague, pestilence and crowded
living conditions
?”

These are demanding questions. It is important, however, not to make the problem seem insoluble by exaggeration. It is all too easy now to overstate the disadvantages of agriculture, just as in the past scholarship exaggerated its benefits. Clearly, farming brought important gains for people who started to practice it: crops could be matched to convenient sites and yields increased. Agriculture multiplied muscle power, feeding more human labor for despotic projects. It created surpluses with which to sustain large, powerful animals, capable of tasks beyond human strength. The oxen plowed more land, the horses and camels helped stockpile and transport more food in a series of spiraling effects. Whatever the disadvantages for the people who had to do the work and survive on the food, agriculture added enormously to the energy reserves of the societies that practiced it. Like hunting, it could lead to forms of “fun.” Early one morning in Afghanistan, Jack Harlan came across a group of men dressed in colorful embroidered jackets, balloon pants and pixie-toed shoes. They had two drums and were singing and dancing, waving sickles in the air. Women followed, shrouded in chadors, but participating in the pleasure of the occasion without undue restraint. “I stopped and asked in broken Farsee: ‘Is this a wedding celebration or something?' They looked surprised and said: ‘No, nothing. We are just going out to
cut wheat
.'”

We can acknowledge that agriculture was a mixed blessing, with some advantages. In the past we have erred too far in the opposite direction, ignoring the disadvantages, assuming that because farming happened relatively late in history it must be “progressive,” or that, because we do it ourselves, it must be a more rational way of life than any which preceded it or which other people prefer. By treating it as obviously superior, we have blinded ourselves to the need to explain it. The need for open-minded inquiry can be dodged by assuming that the agricultural intensification of the Neolithic era was inevitable: part of the “course of history” or of ineluctable progress. But history has no course; nothing is inevitable, and progress, in general, is still awaited.