The Rational Optimist (15 page)

Some time later, at 7,600 years ago, farmers who were happily cultivating the fertile plains around the ‘Euxine lake’ suffered a rude shock, when rising sea levels burst over the Hellespont and flooded into the lake’s basin, filling it at a rate of six inches a day till it became the modern Black Sea. Baffled refugees presumably fled up the Danube into the heart of Europe. Within just a few hundred years, they had reached the Atlantic coast, peopling all of the southern half of Europe with farmers, sometimes by infecting their neighbours with enthusiasm for the new trick of farming, but more often (so the genetic evidence suggests) displacing and violently overwhelming hunter-gatherers as they went. It took another thousand years to reach the Baltic, chiefly because fishermen inhabited that coast at high densities and had no need to start farming. The crops the farmers took with them changed little, despite the new conditions they encountered. Some crops, like lentils and figs, had to be left behind on the Mediterranean. Others, like emmer and einkorn wheat, adapted readily to the wetter and cooler lands of Northern Europe. By 5,000 years ago farmers had reached Ireland, Spain, Ethiopia and India.

Other descendants of the Black Sea refugees took to the plains of what is now Ukraine where they domesticated the horse and developed a new language, Indo-European, that would come to dominate the western half of the Eurasian continent, and of which Sanskrit and Gaelic are both descendants. It was also somewhere near the Baltic or the Black Sea between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago that a genetic mutation, substituting G for A in a control sequence upstream of a pigment gene called OCA2, gave adults blue eyes for the first time. It was a mutation that would eventually be inherited by nearly 40 per cent of Europeans. Because it went with unusually pale skin, it probably helped those people who were trying to live on vitamin-D-deficient grain in sunless northern climates: sunlight enables the body to synthesise vitamin D. The gene’s frequency speaks of the fecundity of farmers.

One of the reasons that farming spreads so rapidly once it starts is that the first few crops are both more productive and more easily grown than later crops, so farmers are always happy to move on to virgin land. If you burn down a forest, you are left with a soft, friable soil seasoned with fertilising ash. All you need do is poke a digging stick into the ground and plant a seed and sit back and wait for it to grow. After a few years, however, the soil is compacted and needs breaking up with a hoe, and weeds have proliferated. If you now leave the ground fallow to allow the fertility to build up again, the tough roots of grasses need to be broken up and buried to make a good seedbed – and for that you need a plough and an ox to pull it. But the ox needs feeding, so you need pasture as well as arable land. No wonder that shifting agriculture – slash and burn – remains so much more popular with many tribal people in forests to this day. In Neolithic Europe, the smoke of fires must have hung heavy in the air as the expanding front of farming spread west. The carbon dioxide released by the fires may even have helped to warm the climate to its 6,000-years-ago balmy maximum, when the Arctic ice retreated from Greenland’s northern coast in summer. This is because early farming used probably nine times as much land per head of population as farming does today, so the small populations of the day generated lots of carbon dioxide per head.

Capital and metal

Wherever they went, the farmers also brought their habits: not just sowing, reaping and threshing, but baking, fermenting, hoarding and owning. Hunter-gatherers have to travel light; even if they are not seasonally nomadic, they must be ready to move at any time. Farmers, by contrast, have to store grain or protect herds or guard fields before they are harvested. The first person to plant a wheat field must have faced the dilemma of how to say ‘This is mine; only I may harvest it.’ The first signs of private property are the stamp seals of the Halaf people, 8,000 years ago on the borders of Syria and Turkey: similar seals were later used for denoting ownership. This land rush presumably left the remaining hunters baffled spectators as their game lands were carved up, possibly by ‘poorer’, more desperate people. Perhaps Cain was a farmer; Abel a hunter.

Meanwhile, as farming replaced gathering, so herding replaced hunting. The Neolithic settlements of the Middle East probably grew up as markets where shepherds from the hills could meet cereal farmers from the plains and exchange their surpluses. The hunter-gatherer market now became the herderfarmer market. Haim Ofek writes: ‘On the human level, nothing could be more handy at the onset of agriculture than a well-established propensity to exchange, for nothing could better reconcile the need for specialisation in food production with the need for diversification in food consumption.’

Copper smelting was a practice that makes no sense for an individual trying to meet his own needs, or even for a self-sufficient tribe. It requires a stupendous effort to mine the ore and then by virtue of elaborate bellows to smelt it in a charcoal fire at more than 1,083°C, just to produce a few ingots of a metal that is strong and malleable, but not very hard. Imagine: you have to cut wood and make charcoal from it, make ceramic crucibles for the smelting, dig and crush the ore, then mould and hammer the copper. Only by consuming the stored labour of others – by living off capital – could you even finish the job. Then, even if you can sell copper axes to other hunter-gatherers, the market is likely to be too small to make it worth your while setting up a smelting operation. But once agriculture has provided the capital, increased the density of people, and given them a good reason for chop ping down trees, then there might be a market large enough to support a community of full-time copper smelters, so long as they can sell the copper to neighbouring tribes. Or, in the words of two theorists: ‘The denser societies made possible by agriculture can realize considerable returns to better exploitation of the potential of co-operation, co-ordination and the division of labour.’

Hence, the invention of metal smelting was an almost inevitable consequence of the invention of agriculture (though some very early mining of pure copper-metal deposits around Lake Superior was apparently done by hunter-gatherers, perhaps supplying the almost agricultural salmon ranchers of the Pacific coast). Copper was produced throughout the Alps, where some of the best ores are to be found, but it was exported to the rest of Europe for several thousand years after Oetzi’s death, only later being displaced by copper mined in Cyprus. A little more than a thousand years after Oetzi died, and a short distance to the west in the Mitterberg region of what is now Austria, there were settlements inhabited by people who apparently did little else but mine and smelt copper from lodes in the nearby mountains. Living in a cold mountain valley, they found it more profitable to make copper and exchange it for, say, meat and grain from the Danube plains, rather than to raise their own cattle. It seems not to have made them very rich – nor would Cornish tin, Peruvian silver, or for that matter Welsh coal enrich their miners in the millennia to come. Compared with the farmers on the Danube Plain, the Mitterberg copper miners left behind few ornaments or luxuries. But they were better off than they could be trying to live self-sufficiently in the mountains raising their own food. They were not supplying a need; they were making a living, responding to economic incentives as clearly as any modern person.
Homo economicus
was not an eighteenth-century Scottish invention. Their copper, turned into ingots and sickles, standardised for weight, then broken up and circulated far and wide, would soon become a primitive form of money widely used throughout Europe to lubricate exchange.

Conventional wisdom has probably underestimated the extent of specialisation and trade in the Neolithic age. There is a tendency to think that everybody was a farmer. But in Oetzi’s world, there were farmers who grew einkorn and maybe farmers who grew grass for weaving into cloaks; coppersmiths who made axes and maybe bear hunters who made hats and shoes. And yet there were things that Oetzi no doubt made for himself: his bow was unfinished and so were some of his arrows. At a rough estimation, typical modern non-industrial people, living in traditional societies, directly consume between one-third and two-thirds of what they produce, and exchange the rest for other goods. Up to about 300 kilograms of food per head per year, people eat what they grow; after that they start to exchange surplus food for clothing, shelter, medicine or education. Almost by definition, the more wealthy somebody is, the more things he acquires from specialists. The characteristic signature of prosperity is increasing specialisation. The characteristic signature of poverty is a return to self-sufficiency. Go to a poor village in Malawi or Mozambique today and you will find few specialists and people consuming a high proportion of what they produce. They are ‘not in the market’, as an economist might say. And quite possibly they are less ‘in the market’ than ancient agrarian folk like Oetzi were.

Indulge me in a little sermon. The tradition among many anthropologists and archaeologists has been to treat the past as a very different place from the present, a place with its own mysterious rituals. To cram the Stone Age or the tribal South Seas into modern economic terminology is therefore an anachronistic error showing capitalist indoctrination. This view was promulgated especially by the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, who distinguished pre-industrial economies based on ‘reciprocity’ from modern economies based on markets. Stephen Shennan satirises the attitude thus: ‘We engage in exchanges to make some sort of profit; they do so in order to cement social relationships; we trade commodities; they give gifts.’ Like Shennan, I think this is patronising bunk. I think people respond to incentives and always have done. People weigh costs and benefits and do what profits them. Sure, they take into account non-economic factors, such as the need to remain on good terms with trading partners and to placate malevolent deities. Sure, they give better deals to families, friends and patrons than they do to strangers. But they do that today as well. Even the most market-embedded modern financial trader is enmeshed in a web of ritual, etiquette, convention and obligation, not excluding social debt for a good lunch or an invitation to a football match. Just as modern economists often exaggerate the cold-hearted rationality of consumers, so anthropologists exaggerate the cuddly irrationality of pre-industrial people.

The ‘kula’ system of the south Pacific is a favourite case history of those who like to argue that markets were unknown to pre-industrial people. According to Bronislaw Malinowski, the people of fourteen different island groups exchanged armshells for necklaces in such a way that the armshells travelled in an anti-clockwise circle around the entire island group, while the necklaces went clockwise. After two years or more, an item might have returned to its original owner. To describe such a system as a market is plainly absurd: the exchange itself, not profit, must be the point. But look closer and kula becomes less peculiar. It was only one of many kinds of exchange practised in these islands; the fact that Westerners give each other cards and socks at Christmas speaks to the importance in their lives of the social meaning of exchange, but does not mean they do not also seek profits in markets. An anthropologist from the South Pacific might study Western Christmas and conclude that an utterly pointless and profitless but frantic midwinter commercial activity, inspired by religion, dominates the lives of Westerners. Pacific islanders were and are acutely aware of the importance of getting a good bargain when trading with a stranger. In any case, further research since the days of Malinowski has demonstrated that he had rather exaggerated the circular nature of the system, which is a mere side effect of the fact that traders who are exchanging useful items also like to give each other useless but pretty gifts that then sometimes end back where they started.

Ignoble savage?

In the first half of the twentieth century, the Neolithic Revolution was interpreted by Gordon Childe and his followers as a bettering of the human condition, which brought obvious benefits: stored food with which to survive famines; new forms of nutrition close at hand, such as milk and eggs; less need for exhausting, dangerous and often fruitless treks through the wilderness; work that the unfit and injured could still do; perhaps more spare time in which to invent civilisation.

In the last third of the twentieth century, a prosperous yet nostalgic time, farming came to be reinterpreted as an invention born of desperation rather than inspiration, and perhaps even ‘the worst mistake in the history of the human race’. The pessimists, led by Mark Cohen and Marshall Sahlins, argued that farming was a back-breaking treadmill that brought a monotonous diet deficient in nutrients to a people plagued by pollution, squalor, infectious diseases and early death. More people could now live upon the land, but with unchecked fertility, they would have to work harder. More babies were born, but more people died young. Whereas extant hunter-gatherers such as the Dobe !Kung seemed to have ample leisure and to live in ‘the original affluent society’ (Sahlins’s phrase), limiting their reproduction and so preventing overpopulation, skeletons of the first farmers seemed to show wear and tear, chronic deformity, toothache and short stature. Meanwhile, they would catch measles from cattle, smallpox from camels, tuberculosis from milk, influenza from pigs, plague from rats, not to mention worms from using their own excrement as fertiliser and malaria from mosquitoes in their ditches and water butts.

They also got a bad attack of inequality for the first time. Extant hunter-gatherers are remarkably egalitarian, a state of affairs dictated by their dependence on sharing each other’s hunting and gathering luck. (They sometimes need to enforce this equality with savage reprisals against people who get ideas above their stations.) A successful farmer, however, can soon afford to store some provisions with which to buy the labour of other less successful neighbours, and that makes him more successful still, until eventually – especially in an irrigated river valley, where he controls the water – he can become an emperor using servants and soldiers to impose his despotic whim upon subjects.