Over time, groups of various sizes came to understand themselves as linked by shared kinship and culture, and as different from other groups. Words were devised to describe such groups, which in English include people, ethnic group, tribe, race, and nation. Shared culture included language, religion, foodways, rituals, clothing styles, and many other factors, whose importance in defining membership in the group changed over time (though language was almost always important). Because of extensive intermarriage within the group over many generations, the differences between groups were (and are) sometimes evident in the body, and were (and are) often conceptualized as blood, a substance with deep meaning. Kinship ties included perceived and invented ones, however, as adoption and other methods were devised to bring someone into the group, or traditions developed of descent from a common ancestor. At the heart of all such groups was a conscious common identity, which itself enhanced endogamy as people chose (or were required) to marry within the group. These groups came into being, died out, morphed into other groups, split, combined, lost and gained in significance, and in other ways changed, but their fluidity and the fact that they were constructed through culture as well as genetics does not make them any less real. They came to have enormous significance later in world history, but developed before the invention of writing and appear to have been everywhere. No doubt the people who traced their hands on the Cueva de los Manos had a word to describe their own group, and to distinguish themselves from those not in the group.
Rituals
Like painting the Cueva de los Manos, the burial of the young woman in southern France was a social occasion, but it was also a way to express ideas and beliefs about the material world and perhaps an unseen world beyond. Paleolithic mortuary rituals created social and political messages, and conveyed (and possibly distorted) cultural meaning. (As have funerals ever since.) They marked membership in a group, which might have been understood to continue after death took one from the realm of the living. Bodies were handled in a wide variety of ways: buried upright, prone or flexed, alone or with others, and with widely varying grave goods; placed in jars, under the floors of houses, or in locations far away; defleshed, beheaded, or the bones disarticulated, with some parts (especially the skull) placed somewhere else in a second ritual; painted, plastered, covered in ash or ochre. What these all meant is hard to determine, but they must have meant something, as it took time and effort to treat the deceased in whatever way was considered appropriate. Archaeologists often mark the spatial or chronological boundary between one group and another by differences in the style of burial. Together with paintings and decorated objects, burials suggest that people thought of their world as extending beyond the visible. People, animals, plants, natural occurrences, and other things around them had spirits, an animistic understanding of the spiritual nature and interdependence of all things. The unseen world regularly intervened in the visible world, for good and ill, and the actions of dead ancestors and the spirits could be shaped by living people.
Rock art from around the world and a wide array of ethnographic evidence suggests that ordinary people were thought to learn about the unseen world through dreams and portents, while messages and revelations were also sent more regularly to shamans, spiritually adept men and women who communicated with or traveled to the unseen world. Shamans created complex rituals through which they sought to ensure the health and prosperity of an individual, family, or group. These included rituals with gender and sexual imagery, and shamans in some places may have constructed a transgender role through which they harnessed power that crossed gender boundaries, just as they crossed the boundary between the seen and unseen world. Many cave paintings show groups of prey or predator animals, and several include a masked human figure usually judged to be a shaman in a gesture or pose assumed to be some sort of ritual. Sometimes the shaman is shown with what looks like a penis, and such figures used to be invariably described as men. More recently the suggestion has been made that these figures may have been gendered male, but could have been a woman wearing a costume, as gender inversions are often part of many types of rituals and performances. Or the figure—and the actual shaman who it may have represented—was understood as a third gender, neither male nor female, or both at the same time. Shamans in many cultures wore masks that gave them added power, and were understood to take on the qualities of the animal, creature, or spirit represented by the mask; transcending boundaries was thus their role. They also operated as healers; burials of individuals assumed to be shamans often include bundles of plant, animal, and mineral products, which were eaten, sniffed, or rubbed on the skin, most likely in conjunction with chants, songs, and prescribed movements. Judging by practices from later periods, the rituals and medicines through which shamans and healers operated were often closely guarded secrets, but they were passed orally from one spiritually adept individual to another. Gradually they built a body of knowledge about the natural world, as well as how best to communicate with supernatural forces.
Interpreting what certain objects that appear to have ritual purposes might have meant to those who made or possessed them is just as contentious as other aspects of early human history. For example, small stone, ivory, bone, or clay figures of women, often with enlarged breasts, buttocks, and/or stomach, dating from the later Paleolithic period (roughly 33,000–9,000 bce) have been found in many parts of Europe. These were dubbed “Venus figures” by nineteenth-century archaeologists, who thought they represented Paleolithic standards of female beauty just as the goddess Venus represented classical standards. Some scholars have interpreted them, as well as later Neolithic figurines of women, as fertility goddesses, evidence of people's beliefs in a powerful female deity. Others view them as aids to fertility, carried around by women hoping to have children—or perhaps hoping not to have more. Perhaps they were made by women looking at their own bodies in mid-life, with the rounded form of most women who have given birth, and represent hopes for good health during aging. Or they were sexualized images of women carried around by men, a sort of Paleolithic version of the centerfold in a men's magazine. Or perhaps, taking into account the emphasis in cultural history on multiple and shifting meanings, they might have represented different things to different people. Small clay figurines of women from Mesoamerica and coastal Ecuador in the second millenium BCE have been similarly interpreted in a range of ways: as fertility emblems, ritual objects, models of sexuality, and aids to pregnancy.
1.4 Paleolithic rock art from Tanzania shows shamans somersaulting over animals. The dotted and hatched lines may represent visual hallucinations, and the animals might also be visions seen in a trance rather than real prey.
In both the Old World and the New, figurines of women—and of men or people whose gender is not clearly indicated, along with animals and animal/human hybrids—have most commonly been found in household debris, which suggests that domestic and ritual spaces were not separate from one another. Instead, ordinary actions were ritualized, that is, carried out as performances with certain conventions and formality that gave them added meaning. Paleolithic rituals might have involved special locations and objects, but they also involved the materials of everyday life, such as food, tools, or the materials out of which houses were made, and took place in the house or in unaltered places in the landscape.
Ascribing ritual purposes to ordinary objects does not mean that these do not reflect other aspects of life as well. The painted, carved, and otherwise decorated objects and locations from the later Paleolithic are also products of imagination, reason, pride, mischievousness, and a range of emotions (including boredom). The body itself could be a canvas for social and cultural values, as skeletons and corpses whose skin and hair have been preserved show bodily modifications of all types: piercings, tattooing, removal of various parts, binding, scarification, tooth filing, elongation, skull deformations, and others. The body of a man frozen in the Alps from about 5300 years ago, for example, has both pierced ears and tattoos. (The l
atter may have been done in part for therapeutic reasons, as the tattoos are in locations on the spine, knees and ankles often used for acupuncture.) Objects modified in a particular way or by talented individuals—what we might now call “luxuries” or “art”—conveyed status and prestige, which is why they show up in burials or the mounds of refuse left from feasts.
Funerals, feasts, and other public occasions were events where certain individuals could show off their wealth (and generosity) to a large audience, but they were also times during which community leaders could stress social cohesion and egalitarianism. Using ethnographic parallels, scholars stress that egalitarian social systems are not “simpler” than hierarchical ones, nor are they “natural,” but require complex social rules and their continual reinforcement to maintain.
Sedentism and domestication
Foraging remained the basic way of life for most of human history, and for groups living in extreme environments, such as tundras or deserts, it was the only possible way to survive. In some places, however, the natural environment provided enough food that people could become more settled. Moderate temperatures and abundant rainfall allowed for verdant plant growth; or seas, rivers, and lakes provided substantial amounts of fish and shellfish. About 15,000 years ago, as the earth's climate entered a warming phase, more parts of the world were able to support sedentary or semi-sedentary groups of foragers. Archaeological sites in many places begin to include storage pits, bins, and other sorts of containers, as well as grindstones and the skeletons of rats and mice who also ate stored food. They show evidence that people were intensifying their work to get more food from the surrounding area, preparing a wide range of foods out of hundreds of different ingredients, acquiring more objects, and building more permanent housing.
Sedentism used to be seen as a result of the plant and animal domestication that scholars use to separate the Neolithic from the Paleolithic, but in many places it preceded intentional crop-raising by thousands of years, so the primary line of causation runs the other way: people began to raise crops because they were living in permanent communities. Thus people were “domesticated” before plants and animals were. They developed socio-economic and sociopolitical structures for village life, such as ways to handle disputes or to make decisions about community resources, which they then adapted when they changed their subsistence strategies to agriculture.
The archaeological site of Hallan Çemi in what is now eastern Turkey provides a good example of these developments. About 11,000 years ago, people here were foragers: they ate wild sheep and goats, along with wild plants including almonds, pistachios, and legumes. These were abundant enough to support a small permanent village, and the people built houses, but in contrast to the normal living arrangements of groups of foragers, the entrances to these faced away from the central communal space. Thus they would have given the families who lived in them some degree of privacy. The inhabitants of Hallan Çemi also built several larger structures, with hearths and benches and floors that they replastered many times. These buildings contained fragments of imported copper and obsidian, and in one of them an aurochs skull was hung on the wall facing the entrance. These buildings could have held many members of the community for public events over a number of years, and the aurochs skull suggests that these events included rituals. Those events certainly included feasting, as decorated stone bowls, sculpted pestles, and burnt animal bones appear in great numbers, suggesting ritualized preparation and consumption of food and drink. The feasts appear to have been so large, in fact, that they must have included people living in other communities, perhaps those who facilitated the trade in copper and obsidian, though whether these feasts were designed to promote cooperation with other communities or competition with them is impossible to tell from the evidence. (And they might have done both.) Along with bowls and pestles, residents also made small stone batons that were notched in what look like tallies. Michael Rosenberg, who has closely studied this site, suggests that these could be counts of things done, things given, or perhaps things owned. Whatever they represent, the fact that something is being formally counted is a departure from the more egalitarian and reciprocal norms common among foragers. Thus, in this foraging village, there are clear indications of some type of social differentiation and sociopolitical structures beyond the kin group, along with cultural norms to support these.
Eastern Turkey is within the part of the world in which sedentary villagers first began intentional crop-planting—the area archaeologists call the Fertile Crescent, which runs from present-day Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan north to Turkey and then south to the Iran–Iraq border. At just about the time the villagers of Hallan Çemi were building their houses and public buildings, residents of other villages began to use the digging sticks, hoes, and other tools with which they gathered wild wheat and barley to plant the seeds of these crops, along with seeds of legumes such as peas and lentils, and of the flax with which they made linen cloth. They selected the seeds they planted in order to get crops that had favorable characteristics, such as larger edible parts or kernels clustered together that ripened all at one time and did not just fall on the ground, qualities that made harvesting more efficient. Through this human intervention, certain crops became domesticated, modified by selective breeding so as to serve human needs. Archaeologists trace the development and spread of plant-raising by noting when the seeds and other plant parts they discover show evidence of domestication.
By about 9000 BCE, many villages in the Fertile Crescent were growing domesticated crops, and a similar process—first sedentism, then domestication—happened elsewhere as well. By about 8000 BCE, people were growing sorghum and millet in parts of the Nile River Valley, and perhaps yams in western Africa. By about 7000 BCE, they were growing domesticated rice, millet, and legumes in China, yams and taro in Papua New Guinea, and perhaps squash in Mesoamerica. In each of these places, crop-raising occurred independently, and it may have happened in other parts of the world as well. Archaeological evidence does not survive well in tropical areas like Southeast Asia and the Amazon Basin, which may have been additional sites of plant domestication. Within several centuries of initial crop-planting, people in the Fertile Crescent, parts of China, and the Nile Valley were relying on domesticated food products alone. Farming increased the division of labor within communities, as families and households became increasingly interdependent, trading food products for other commodities or services.
Farming villages were closer together than were communities of foragers, and in many places the division of labor between communities grew as well, as local, regional, and sometimes long-distance trade networks handled a growing variety of commodities. These included raw materials such as obsidian and jade that could be made into utilitarian, ceremonial, and decorative items, and metals, including gold, silver, copper, and lead, which were hammered into beads and other jewelry. By about 5500 BCE people in the Balkans had learned that copper could be extracted from ore by heating it in a smelting process. Smelted copper was poured into molds and made into spear points, axes, chisels, and other tools along with jewelry.
Map 1.3 Plant and animal domestication
People adapted crops to their local environments, choosing seeds that had qualities that were beneficial, such as drought resistance. They also domesticated new kinds of crops. In the Indus Valley of South Asia people were growing dates, mangoes, sesame seeds, and cotton along with grains and legumes by 4000 bce. In the Americas by about 3000 bce corn was domesticated in southern Mexico and potatoes and quinoa in the Andes region of South America, and by about 2500 bce squash and beans in eastern North America. These crops then spread, so that by about 1000 bce people in much of what is now the western United States were raising corn, beans, and squash.
At roughly the same time that they domesticated certain plants, people also domesticated animals. The earliest animal to be domesticated was the dog, which separated genetically as a subspecies from wolves at least 15,000 years ago
and perhaps much earlier. The mechanism of dog domestication is hotly debated: did it result only from human action, as foragers chose and bred animals that would help them with the hunt rather than attack them, or was it also caused by selective pressure resulting from wolf action, as animals less afraid of human contact came around campsites and then bred with one another? However it happened, the relationship provided both with benefits: humans gained dogs’ better senses of smell and hearing and their body warmth, and dogs gained new food sources and safer surroundings. Not surprisingly, humans and domestic dogs migrated together, including across the land bridges to the Americas and on boats to Pacific islands.
Dogs fit easily into a foraging lifestyle, but humans also domesticated animals that fit with a sedentary way of life. In about 9000 bce, at the same time they began to raise crops, people in the Fertile Crescent domesticated wild goats and sheep, probably using them first for meat and skins, then for milk, and eventually shearing the sheep for wool. They learned from observation and experimentation that traits are passed down from generation to generation, and they began to breed the goats and sheep selectively for qualities that they wanted, including larger size, greater strength, better coats, increased milk production, and more even temperaments. Sometimes they trained dogs to assist them in herding, and then selectively bred the dogs for qualities that were advantageous for this task. The book of Genesis in the Bible, written in the Fertile Crescent sometime in the first millennium bce, provides an early example of selective breeding. Jacob makes a deal with his father-in-law to take only those goats and sheep that are spotted, but he secretly increases the number of spotted animals in the flock by placing a spotted stick “before the eyes … of the strongest of the flocks … whenever they were breeding” so that more and stronger spotted animals were born (Genesis 30:41). This method was based on the idea—accepted for a very long time—that what a pregnant animal or woman saw during pregnancy would influence the outcome; although this has been firmly rejected in modern science, the Bible notes that it was successful, and that Jacob “grew exceedingly rich, and had large flocks.” People also domesticated other animals, including pigs, guinea pigs, and various sorts of poultry, using the latter for eggs as well as meat.
A Concise History of the World Page 6