Climate change threatened their world. We can sympathize. We, too, inhabit a worryingly warming world. Fluctuations in the interim have brought protracted or profound cold spells; and human activities intensify current trends. On a long-term view, however, the warming that brought the Ice Age to an end is still going on. When the upward trend in global temperatures began, during an era of climatic instability ten to twenty thousand years ago, people responded – broadly speaking – in either of two ways. Some communities migrated in search of familiar environments. Others stayed put and tried to adapt.
After the Ice: The Mesolithic Mind
We can begin by following the migrants, tracing their halts and sites in search of the thinking along the way. Their routes accompanied or followed the retreat of fat, nourishing quadrupeds that lived on the ice edge. Hunting remained the basis of the migrants’ ways of life, but we can retrieve evidence of at least one new idea that occurred to them as their circumstances changed.
In 1932 in northern Germany, Alfred Rust was digging campsites occupied by reindeer-hunters about ten thousand years ago. He found none of the great art he hoped for. In three lakes, however, he excavated remnants of thirty big, unbutchered beasts. Each had been ritually slashed to death and sunk with a big stone stuck between the ribs. There were no precedents for this kind of slaughter. Earlier ritual killings preceded feasts, or targeted lions and tigers or other rival predators. The lakeside deaths were different: the killers waived the food. They were practising pure sacrifice, entirely self-abnegatory, putting food at the feet of the gods but beyond the reach of the community. The remains Rust dug up were the first indications of new thinking about transcendence: the rise of gods jealous in their hunger and the emergence of religion apparently intended to appease them.
Usually, in later sacrifices, as far as we know, the sacrificers and the gods have shared the benefits more evenly. The community can consume the sacrificed matter, eating food the gods disdain, or inhabiting edifices erected to their glory, or exploiting labour offered in their honour. Anthropology has a convincing explanation: gifts commonly establish reciprocity and cement relationships between humans. A gift might also, therefore, improve relationships beyond humankind, binding gods or spirits to human suppliants, connecting deities to the profane world and alerting them to earthly needs and concerns. If sacrifice first occurred as a form of gift exchange with gods and spirits, it must have made sense to practitioners in the context of exchanges among themselves.
The idea of sacrifice probably first occurred much earlier than the earliest surviving evidence. It may not be too fanciful to connect it with reactions to the crisis of climate change and the rise of new kinds of religion, involving the development of permanent cult centres and of new, elaborate, propitiatory rituals. The first temple we know of – the first space demonstrably dedicated to worship – dates from even earlier than the sacrifice Rust identified: it measures about ten feet by twenty and lies deep under Jericho, in what is now the Palestinian portion of Israel. Two stone blocks, pierced to hold some vanished cult object, stand on ground that worshippers swept assiduously.
The idea of sacrifice appealed, perhaps, to potential practitioners because scapegoats divert potentially destructive violence into controllable channels.3 Critics, especially in Judaism, Islam, and Protestantism, have reviled sacrifice as a quasi-magical attempt to manipulate God. But they have not deterred most religions during the last ten millennia from adopting it. In the process, sacrifice has come to be understood in contrasting or complementary ways: as penance for sin, or thanksgiving, or homage to gods, or as a contribution to fuelling or harmonizing the universe; or as sacralized generosity – honouring or imitating God by giving to or for others.4
Thinking with Mud: The Minds of the First Agriculturists
The followers of the ice clung to their traditional means of livelihood in new latitudes. Other people, meanwhile, to whom we now turn, preferred to stay at home and adapt. They confronted climate change by changing with it. By stopping in one place, they heaped up layers of archaeologically detectable evidence. We can therefore say a lot about what was in their minds, starting with economic ideas; then, after an excursion among the professionals who did most of the thinking, we can turn to political and social thought before, finally, looking at deeper matters of morals and metaphysics.
Global warming opened new eco-niches for humans to exploit. After ice, there was mud. From easily worked soils the biggest, most enduring new economic idea of the era sprang: breeding to eat – domesticating, that is, plants and animals that are sources of food. Where water and sunshine were abundant and soils friable, people equipped with the rudimentary technology of dibblers and digging sticks could edge away from foraging and start farming. They did so independently, with various specializations, in widely separated parts of the world. Taro planting in New Guinea started at least seven, perhaps nine, thousand years ago.5 Farming of wheat and barley in the Middle East, tubers in Peru, and rice in South-East Asia is of at least comparable antiquity. Cultivation of millet followed in China, as did that of barley in the Indus valley, and of a short-eared grain known as tef in Ethiopia. Over the next two or three millennia farming spread or began independently in almost every location where available technologies made it practicable. The invention of agriculture plunged the world into an alchemist’s crucible, reversing millions of years of evolution. Previously natural selection had been the only means of diversifying creation. Now ‘unnatural selection’, by human agents for human purposes, produced new species.
I suspect that the first foodstuffs people selected and bred to improve their food stocks were snails and similar molluscs. To some extent, this is a logical guess: it makes better sense to start with a species that is easy to manage rather than with big, boisterous quadrupeds or laboriously tilled plants. Snails can be selected by hand, and contained with no technology more sophisticated than a ditch. You do not have to herd them or train dogs or lead animals to keep them in check. They come ready-packed in their own shells. A good deal of evidence supports the logic. In ancient middens all over the world, wherever ecological conditions favoured the multiplication of snail populations at the time, at deep stratigraphic levels, laid down some ten thousand years ago, you find shells, often at levels deeper than those of some hunted foods that demand sophisticated technology to catch.6 The molluscs they housed belonged, in some cases, to varieties now extinct and bigger than any that survive – which suggests that people were selecting for size.
Farming was a revolution. But was it an idea? Should a practice so muddy and manual, so fleshy and physical, feature in an intellectual history of the world? Among theories that deny or belittle it, one says that farming happened ‘naturally’ in a gradual process of co-evolution, in which humans shared particular environments with other animals and plants, gradually developing a relationship of mutual dependence.7 In some ways, the transition to agriculture does seem to have been a process too slow for a sudden mental spark to have ignited it. Foragers typically replant some crops, selecting as they go. Foraging aboriginals in Australia replant nardoo stalks in the soil. Papago in the California desert sow beans along their routes of transhumance. Anyone who observes them realizes that long continuities can link foraging and farming: one might transmute into the other without much mental input from practitioners. Hunting can edge into herding, as the hunters corral and cull their catches. New crops may develop spontaneously near human camps, in waste enriched by rubbish. Some animals became dependent on human care or vulnerable to human herding by virtue of sharing people’s favoured habitats. In an exemplary co-evolutionary process, dogs and cats, perhaps, adopted humans for their own purposes – scavenging for tidbits, accompanying the hunt, or exploiting concentrations of small rodents which hung around human camps for waste and leftovers – rather than the other way round.8
A rival theory makes farming the outcome of environmental determinism: rising populations or diminishing resources requir
e new food-generating strategies. Recent, historically documented times provided examples of foraging peoples who have adopted farming to survive.9 But stress can hardly issue simultaneously from both population increase and the loss of resources: the latter would frustrate the former. And there is no evidence of either at relevant times in the history of the emergence of agriculture. On the contrary, in South-East Asia farming started at a time of abundance of traditional resources, which gave elites leisure to think of yet further ways of multiplying the sources of food.10 Agriculture was an idea people thought of, not an involuntary twitch or an inescapable response.
According to a further, once-popular theory, farming began as an accident, when foragers carelessly dropped seeds in suitable soil. A woman – adepts of the theory tend to foreground a female, perhaps because of women’s ascribed or adopted role as nurturers – or some ‘wise old savage’, as Charles Darwin thought, must have launched our ancestors’ first experiments in agriculture, when, in Darwin’s words, ‘noticing a wild and unusually good variety of native plant … he would transplant it and sow its seeds’. This narrative does make farming the product of an idea, but, as Darwin continued, ‘hardly implies more forethought than might be expected at an early and rude period of civilization’.11 One might put it on the level of new food strategies invented and diffused among communities of monkeys, like Imo’s innovations with sweet potatoes among Japanese macaques (see here).
Three intellectual contexts make the beginnings of tillage intelligible. Food and drink, after all, are for more than nourishing bodies and quenching thirst. They also alter mental states and confer power and prestige. They can symbolize identity and generate rituals. In hierarchically organized societies, elites nearly always demand more food than they can eat, not only to ensure their security but also to show off their wealth by squandering their waste.12 Political, social, and religious influences on food strategies are therefore worth considering.
Feasts, for example, are political. They establish a relationship of power between those who supply the food and those who eat it. They celebrate collective identity or cement relations with other communities. In competitive feasting, of the kind that, as we have seen, people were already practising before farming began, leaders trade food for allegiance. The strategy is practicable only when large concentrations of food are available. Societies bound by feasting will therefore always favour intensive agriculture and the massive stockpiling of food. Even where forms of leadership are looser or decision making is collective, feasting can be a powerful incentive to use force, if necessary, to boost food production, and accumulate substantial stocks. In any event, the idea of agriculture is inseparable from the self-interest of directing minds.13
Equally, or alternatively, religion may have supplied part of the inspiration. In most cultures’ myths the power to make food grow is a divine gift or curse, or a secret that a hero stole from the gods. Labour is a kind of sacrifice, which gods reward with nourishment. Planting as a fertility rite, or irrigation as libation, or enclosure as an act of reverence for a sacred plant are all imaginable notions. People have domesticated animals for use in sacrifice and prophecy as well as for food. Many societies cultivate plants for the altar rather than the table. Incense and ecstatic or hallucinatory drugs are among the examples, as are the sacrificial corn of some high Andean communities and the wheat that in orthodox Christian traditions is the only grain permitted for the Eucharist. If religion inspired agriculture, alcohol’s ability to induce ecstasy might have added to its appeal of selecting plants suitable for fermentation. Ploughing or dibbling soil, sowing seeds, and irrigating plants might start as rites of birth and nurture of the god on whom you are going to feed. In short, where crops are gods, farming is worship. Agriculture may have been born in the minds of priestly guides, who may of course have doubled as secular leaders.
Finally, conservatism may have played a role, according to the archaeologist Martin Jones, who has suggested that in warming environments, settled foragers would be bound to take increasing care of climate-threatened crops. To preserve an existing way of life, people would weed them, tend them, water them, and winnow them, encouraging high-yielding specimens, channelling water to them, and even transplanting them to the most favourable spots. Similar practices, such as managing grazing ever more zealously, would conserve hunted species. Eventually humans and the species they ate became locked in mutual dependence – each unable to survive without the other. People who strove to keep their food sources intact in a changing climate were not seeking a new way of life. They wanted to perpetuate their old one. Agriculture was an unintended consequence. The process that brought it about was thoughtful, but directed to other ends.14
Farming did not suit everybody. Backbreaking work and unhealthy concentrations of people were among the malign consequences. Others included ecologically perilous increases of population, risks of famine from overreliance on limited crops, vitamin deficiencies where one or two staples monopolized ordinary diets, and new diseases in new eco-niches, where domestic animals formed – as they still form – reservoirs of infection. Yet where new ways of life took hold, new ideas accompanied them, and new forms of social and political organization followed, to which we can now turn.
Farmers’ Politics: War and Work
Farming required more than just the right material conditions: it was also the product of an act of imagination – the realization that human hands could reshape land in the image of geometry, with cultivated fields, marked by straight edges and segmented by furrows and irrigation ditches. Minds fed by agriculture imagined monumental cities. Strong new states emerged to manage, regulate, and redistribute seasonal food surpluses. Chiefs gave way to kings. Specialized elites swarmed. Opportunities of patronage multiplied for artists and scholars, stimulating the cycle of ideas. Labour, organized on a massive scale, had to be submissive and warehouses had to be policed: the link between agriculture and tyranny is inescapable. Wars almost certainly got worse as sedentarists challenged each other for land. Armies grew and investment flowed to improve technologies of combat.
Rituals of exchange helped keep peace. But when they failed, war obliged participants to think up new kinds of behaviour. It has often been argued that humans are ‘naturally’ peaceful creatures, who had to be wrenched out of a golden age of universal peace by socially corrupting processes: war, according to the influential anthropologist Margaret Mead, ‘is an invention, not a biological necessity’.15 Until recently, there was a dearth of evidence with which to combat this theory, because of the relatively scanty archaeological record of intercommunal conflict in Palaeolithic times. Now, however, it seems an indefensible point of view: evidence of the ubiquity of violence has heaped up, in studies of ape warfare, war in surviving forager societies, psychological aggression, and bloodshed and bone breaking in Stone Age archaeology.16 This bears out Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, who used to refer enquirers who asked about the causes of conflict to Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Ant.17
So aggression is natural; violence comes easily.18 As a way of gaining an advantage in competition for resources, war is older than humankind. But the idea of waging it to exterminate the enemy appeared surprisingly late. It takes little mental effort to wage war to gain or defend resources or assert authority or assuage fear or pre-empt attack by others: these are observable causes of violence among pack animals. But it takes an intellectual to think up a strategy of massacre. Massacre implies a visionary objective: a perfect world, an enemy-free utopia. Perfection is a hard idea to access, because it is so remote from real experience. Most people’s accounts of perfection are humdrum: just more of the same, mere satiety or excess. Most visions of paradise seem cloying. But the first perpetrators of ethnocide and genocide, the first theorists of massacre, were truly radical utopians. In some versions of the fate of the Neanderthals, our species wiped them out. William Golding reimagined the encounter – romantically, but with an uncanny sense of what the beech
forests of forty thousand years ago were like – in the novel he thought was his best, The Inheritors: his Neanderthals are simple, trusting folk, while the ‘new people’ resemble creepy, sinister alien invaders – incomprehensible, pitiless, strangely violent even in love-making. The Neanderthals seem incapable of suspecting the newcomers’ strategy of extermination until it is too late.
The evidence is insufficient to support Golding’s picture, or other claims that our ancestors plotted Neanderthal extinction. And smaller wars, of the kind chimpanzees wage against neighbouring tribes or secessionist groups who threaten to deplete their enemies’ resources of food or females, are hard to identify in the archaeological record.19 Warfare, no doubt, happened before evidence of it appeared: the first full-scale battle we know of was fought at Jebel Sahaba, some time between about eleven and thirteen thousand years ago, in a context where agriculture was in its infancy. The victims included women and children. Many were savaged by multiple wounds. One female was stabbed twenty-two times. The killers’ motives are undetectable, but the agrarian setting raises the presumption that territory – the basic prerequisite of farmers’ survival and prosperity – was valuable enough to fight over.20 The twenty-seven men, women, and children, on the other hand, slaughtered at Nataruk in what is now Kenya, perhaps about eleven thousand years ago, were foragers: that did not save them from the arrows and clubs that pierced their flesh and crushed their bones.21 The way farmers fortified their settlements points to intensification of conflict. So do the ‘death pits’ in which massacre victims were piled about in their hundreds, seven thousand years ago, at sites in what are now Germany and Austria.22 Peoples who practise rudimentary agriculture today are often exponents of the strategy of massacre. When the Maring of New Guinea raid an enemy village, they normally try to wipe out the entire population. ‘Advanced’ societies often seem hardly different in this respect, except that their technologies of massacre tend to be more efficient.
Out of Our Minds Page 11