by Kevin Reilly
Perhaps the wild gazelles were hunted almost to extinction because they could not be domesticated. But the people of the Fertile Crescent domesticated sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle. They brought these animals under human control not only for food but also for their wool and hides for clothing and eventually for milk and cheese. They also recognized the utility of certain plants for their fiber content and planted flax for the fiber we know as linen.
China, too, had a rich assortment of wild plants and animals that could be domesticated. The Chinese had access to millet in the northern Yellow River valley and wild rice in the lakes and marshes of the southerly Yangtze River. In addition, soybeans provided protein. For meat, the Chinese domesticated the pig. For fiber, they grew hemp for rope and the silkworm for silk cloth.
Other areas of independent domestication offered different combinations of cereals, pulses, animals, and fibers. The African Sahel (the grasslands just south of the Sahara) had the cereal grains sorghum, millet, and African rice and such pulses as cowpeas and African peanuts. In addition, guinea fowls provided meat. Separately, farther south in West Africa, the available domesticates were African yams, oil palms, watermelon, gourds, and cotton. Farther east, in Ethiopia, coffee was first domesticated along with certain local plants.
Native Americans domesticated plants and animals in three areas. The inhabitants of Central America and Mexico domesticated tomatoes, corn, beans, squash, and turkeys. South Americans (in the Andes and Amazon) domesticated potatoes, the grain quinoa, various beans, and the llama, alpaca, and guinea pig. In addition, the inhabitants of the Eastern Woodlands (today’s eastern United States) domesticated a number of local plants that yield starchy or oily seeds, like the sunflower. Independently of all these areas, the farmers in New Guinea domesticated sugarcane, bananas, yams, and taro, but they lacked cereals and animals.
Of these nine separate cases of domestication in the world, only a few produced a wide range of edible plants, a balance of carbohydrates and proteins, and animals for meat, hides, and transportation. The Middle East was the richest area, followed by China and South and Central America. Some areas initiated farming or herding with so few plants and animals that people continued to forage or hunt for much of their food. Ethiopia, West Africa, New Guinea, and North America were such areas. In these cases, domestication was a part-time affair, supplemented by hunting, fishing, and gathering. In addition, Eurasia enjoyed a far greater variety of animals that could be domesticated than did Africa and the Americas.
Thus, the agricultural/pastoral revolution began to create a world in which the accidents of geography enabled some people to benefit from a varied diet and wide range of animals under human control, while others did not. Almost all farming societies grew and prospered at the expense of foragers. But some of the original agricultural societies—again, New Guinea, the West Africans, and the native North Americans—did not develop the complex urban and literate cultures that became the next step for agriculturalists 5,000 years later. The most successful agricultural societies, in addition to the Middle East and China, were probably Egypt, India, and the Mediterranean, all of which piggybacked on the original discoveries in the Middle East or Southwest Asia.
East–West Transmission Advantages . What accounts for this difference in fortunes? Again, geography may be the answer. In general, plants, animals, people, and ideas moved more easily along an east–west than a north–south axis. If other climate factors like rainfall and temperature were similar, newly domesticated crops could be easily transplanted on the same latitude because the climate and growing season were similar. The plants and animals that were domesticated in the Fertile Crescent traveled easily from the Tigris and Euphrates westward to Egypt, the Mediterranean and Europe, and eastward to Iran, Afghanistan, and India. In each of those areas, the new farmers and herders added new crops and tamed new animals—Egyptian figs and donkeys; Indian cucumbers, cotton, and humped cattle; and Mediterranean olives and grapes. The result was a remarkably varied basket of cereals, pulses, fruits, and vegetables and numerous animals for food, transport, clothing, and pets, most of which could travel back and forth between Europe and India.
Conversely, plants and animals resisted north–south movement. Horses would not breed easily close to the equator because the even hours of night and day hampered ovulation. Mexican corn took 1,000 years to reach what is today the United States.
Chinese domesticated crops and animals also moved more quickly along the eastbound paths of the great river valleys: millet along the Yellow River and rice along the Yangtze. But north–south movement was slow. Northern domesticated pigs, dogs, and mulberry trees did not transfer easily to the more tropical zones of southern China. Southern Chinese wet rice and tropical fruits did not easily move north, but along with pigs and chickens, they traveled in two directions: south into Southeast Asia and east to the island of Taiwan about 6,000 years ago. There, the southern Chinese cultural complex joined the maritime and fishing traditions of the island, forming a new complex called Austronesian and a culture of maritime expansion. In the Philippines about 5,000 years ago, this culture added such tropical products as bananas, taro, sugarcane, and breadfruit to their diet of rice, chicken, and pigs. Within another 1,000 years, it spread to the coasts of Southeast Asia and the islands of Indonesia, from which Polynesian descendants colonized the Pacific Ocean as far east as Easter Island and as far west as the Indian Ocean and Madagascar, paving the way for the introduction of the yams, bananas, and other tropical fruits into Africa.
To summarize, the domestication of plants and animals gave certain peoples, though not always the original inventors, a leg up on the next global revolution—cities and state societies. The future would belong to those who, by accident of geography, could borrow, imitate, innovate, and interact with neighbors in a similar environment—and that often meant latitude.
Agriculture and Language . The first farmers may have spread their languages with their seeds. Whether farmers actually moved and displaced earlier hunting-gathering populations or passed on their words with their seeds and techniques, a map of the spread of languages follows the spread of agriculture. Each of the original nine places of domestication seems to have passed its language along to those who adopted its foods. Thus, the Indo-European language family, which extends from Ireland to India, covers a northern band of the territory that received the crops of the Fertile Crescent. The Afro-Asiatic family of languages, which includes ancient Egyptian and Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic, extends across a southern band of shared crops from Egypt or the Fertile Crescent. Chinese cultivators may have spread three language families: Sino-Tibetan, Tai, and Austroasiatic. From the latter in Taiwan came the Austronesian language group, which spread throughout the Pacific. Most of these language groups spread in an east–west direction. Where such movement was blocked, as in the Americas, languages and crops moved slower and not as far. In Africa, the Niger-Congo language family spread from West Africa eastward and then southward, never fully displacing the earlier click languages of the preagricultural Khoisan people. In general, forager languages remained more localized.
Languages and crops could travel with people on the move or be exchanged in trade with foreigners. In the Americas, corn spread mainly through trade. Mexican corn moved gradually to the southwestern and southeastern United States in separate series of trading exchanges. In the Middle East, early farmers spread their crops and languages by moving to new areas and cultivating new lands. The process varied in speed and intensity. Early agriculture spread rapidly. One recent theory argues for a spur in a possible natural catastrophe: the displacement of early farmers by the overflow of the Mediterranean onto the shores of the Black Sea about 8,000 years ago.27 Whether the early farmers of the Mediterranean were refugees from a rapidly flooding homeland or merely the descendants of earlier Middle Eastern farmers starting new families, the process was swift across the Mediterranean but very slow into northern Europe.
Agricult
ure, however, drove one of many waves of language change. In later centuries, pastoral peoples, most notably Arabs, Turks, and Mongols, spread their languages over vast areas of Eurasia. In the modern era, European colonizers substituted their languages for innumerable Native American, African, and Asian languages, a process that continues today with the use of English for certain computer and international purposes.
The Long Agricultural Age:
Places and Processes
From our vantage point as members of a city-based civilization, it may seem as though the domestication of plants and animals was merely a step on the way to cities, states, governments, complex societies, and often bronze metallurgy and writing. But agricultural village life, without cities or states, was the norm for most of humanity for most of the past 10,000 years. In this section, we survey the scope and length of the agricultural age by looking at a few specific sites at particular times. In addition to suggesting the enormous variety of agricultural societies before the formation of cities and states, these examples suggest how the transition to cities occurred.
Jericho . The remains of one of the earliest agricultural villages in human history lie beneath the modern town of Jericho in Palestine, on an oasis in the desert northwest of the Dead Sea. Archaeologists have unearthed signs of the conversion from gathering to farming dating more than 10,000 years ago. There are round huts indicating permanent settlement and a large wall circling the village. There is also evidence of pottery, baked brick, textiles, grinding stones, and the polished stone blades that became a hallmark of the Neolithic period, or New Stone Age. More than 2,000 people may have lived in the village at an early stage. Its permanence for them is attested by the recent discovery of decorated human skulls with seashells in the eye sockets, placed in a collective burial.
Catal Huyuk . One of the most intensely excavated sites of the early agricultural or Neolithic age is Catal Huyuk, in Turkey, dating from 9,000 years ago.28 Spanning 32 acres, at its height it may have numbered 10,000 people. While earlier Jericho consisted of rounded dwellings and only later switched to rectangular houses, Catal Huyuk was composed from its beginning of rectangular dwellings, situated side by side and on top of each other like a layered field of bricks three or four stories high. Without streets to separate one row of buildings from another, the people of Catal Huyuk entered their dwellings by ladder from the roof.
Why did farming people deliberately live in such crowded quarters in what resembles a modern apartment complex? For over 1,000 years (10,500 to 9,000 years ago), the dwellings of people in places like Jericho were moving farther apart as foragers became fulltime farmers. It seems that the introduction of agriculture pushed people apart by giving families independence from each other. But from the beginnings of Catal Huyuk, about 9,000 years ago, its inhabitants clustered together like bees in a beehive. James Mellaart, the archaeologist who began excavations of the site in the 1950s, called it a “Neolithic city.” But later excavations have revealed none of the elements of city life except for the clustered living. Archaeologists have found no public spaces, for instance. Even Jericho had public walls and a tower. Catal Huyuk also shows no sign of a division of labor, not even the distinction between farmers and other occupations, which is a basic characteristic of city life. Each family constructed its own home with a slightly different mix of materials for mud and plaster. Families also used the nearby deposits of obsidian for blades and mirrors, which they fashioned in their own homes.
In fact, the inhabitants of Catal Huyuk were not even full-time farmers. People lived on wild seeds, acorns, pistachio nuts, fruits, and grains as well as domesticated cereals (wheat and barley), lentils, and peas. Similarly, while they domesticated sheep, goats, and cattle, they also consumed wild horses, deer, boar, bears, foxes, wolves, dogs, birds, and fish. Catal Huyuk had other Neolithic characteristics, however. The people created ceramic pottery, wove cloth that they wore in addition to skins, and amassed a wide range of tools, containers (straw baskets as well as pots), weapons (bow and arrow), and objects for art or ritual.
Archaeologists also found early examples of an art form that is characteristic of Neolithic societies. There are numerous figurines of women, many of which show heavy breasts or protruding stomachs that might suggest pregnancy or fertility. One enthroned woman figurine, dubbed the “mother goddess” by Mellaart, evokes later myths of goddesses who suckled animals and of Earth Mothers who gave birth to vegetation each spring. But there are other images as well. There are sculptured heads of bulls and animal horns on walls. There are headless figures with arms and legs splayed outward, possibly giving birth. There are also images of vultures, apparently pecking at headless bodies.
What does all this mean? Archaeologists are excavating this huge site with painstaking care, and their work is expected to take another 20 years. But at this point, they can venture a couple of theories. One is that religion, whether or not it was related to goddess worship, was a central focus of daily life in Catal Huyuk. There are no freestanding temples. The sculptured clay and plaster images have been found in people’s homes, usually in one room of a three-room house. This separateness within the house, in a place that was frequently swept clean, suggests a sacred space for each family: a family religion rather than a larger public worship.
Finally, the excavations reveal considerable attention to death, dying, and the dead. Like earlier farmers (e.g., Jericho), the people of Catal Huyuk buried their dead under the floor. Sometimes they decapitated the bodies and just buried the skulls. The images of vultures pecking at headless bodies may reveal what happened to the rest of the remains outside. In Jericho, whole rooms of skulls were found in addition to sculptured or cast figures of the heads of the deceased. In Catal Huyuk and some nearby sites, people did something else. At the end of a particular time frame, after a number of family skulls or bodies had been buried under the house, the whole house would be filled up and everything covered in dirt, including the images on the wall, the oven, and the possessions of the last person who died. Then it appears that the next generation of the same family would construct its house over the one that had just been buried, beginning the cycle again. This is why Catal Huyuk appeared to be a Neolithic apartment complex: people did not live on top of each other; rather, they lived on top of their ancestors. This may have been a form of ancestor worship or a way of making sense of the passing of previous generations. The fertility imagery might have added the important dimension of the future. In any case, art, religion, and daily life seem to have been closely related in Catal Huyuk in houses that were also temples to the ancestors.
Banpo . One of the oldest well-excavated Neolithic sites in China is Banpo, a village near the Yellow River and modern Xian, settled about 6,000 years ago. The inhabitants domesticated millet, pigs, and dogs and supplemented their diets with numerous fish and fowl. The dwellings at Banpo resembled Jericho more than Catal Huyuk; many were rounded dwellings of mud and thatch on a scaffold of wooden poles; they were scattered rather than clustered together. A trench encircled the village, like the wall of Jericho. Like Jericho, Banpo had public spaces that may have been meeting or ritual areas. But adults and children were buried whole, adults outside the trench, children inside the village and enclosed in pottery jars with open bottoms. Like both Catal Huyuk and Jericho, Banpo was a village of equals. There was little, if any, sign of political or religious leadership: no palaces, temples, or signs of differentiated status. Each house was the same size, constructed by its occupants.
As at Catal Huyuk, there is some evidence at other early Neolithic sites that women played an important role. At Banpo, a young female was buried with more possessions than others. This may be a sign that the society was matrilineal, that is, that inheritance was figured from mother to daughter. Matrilineal inheritance was common in Native American Neolithic societies and among some of the first Neolithic settlers in Europe, the Bandkeramik people, where female graves are also more ornate than those of males. In fact, the matri-li
neal clan may have been common in early Neolithic society. Excavations in Thailand at Khok Phanon Di (near modern Bangkok) have revealed evidence of early rice cultivation about 4,000 years ago along what was a shellfish-rich mangrove coast. Among many unexceptional burials, archaeologists have excavated the body of a woman elaborately clothed in a dress sewn with 120,000 beads whose arms were covered with decorative shell bracelets. Because she is buried with a treasure of pottery, archaeologists surmise that this “Princess” of Khok Phanon Di was an expert potter who may have traded her pottery for shell ornaments. More generally, the role of women in producing high-quality pottery at Khok Phanon Di may have raised their status.
If early Neolithic society was frequently matrilineal, it may have been related to women’s role in the domestication of agriculture. As the gatherers of an earlier age, women were the first to cultivate plants. One can easily imagine an early association between women’s capacity to produce life from their own bodies and their skill or rapport with Mother Earth. The worship of women’s fertility might have been a key ingredient of Neolithic religion. Long after Catal Huyuk had been abandoned, farming communities worshipped goddesses of the earth, harvest, field, or hunt. One archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas, has reported excavating thousands of figurines that suggest the continuation of a worship of the mother goddess in southern Europe until about 4,000 years ago. Many later cultures captured in written myths and stories what must have been living legend in the early age of agriculture. The Sumerian goddess Inanna descends to the underworld, and the crops and animals die; she returns, and all life is reborn. The Greek goddess of the harvest, Demeter, allows the earth to turn green during the six months that her daughter Persephone is allowed to visit from the underworld. Later folk myths continued the identification of women and the fertility of the earth: women should plant corn because they know how to produce children, the sterile wife is injurious to a garden, seed grows best when planted by a pregnant woman, and only bare-breasted women should harvest the crops.29 Until quite recently, it was common practice to throw rice at a bride to ensure her fertility.