A Concise History of the World

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  Neolithic villages increasingly included spaces for domesticated animals as well as storage places for crops. In warmer climates people contructed pens and in colder climates they built special buildings or took animals into their houses. They learned that animal manure increases crop yields, so they gathered the manure from enclosures and used it as fertilizer. Increased contact with animals and their feces also increased human contact with various sorts of disease-causing pathogens, including minor illnesses such as the common cold and deadly killers such as influenza, bubonic plague, and smallpox. This was particularly the case where humans and animals lived in tight quarters, for diseases spread fastest in crowded environments. Thus farmers developed illnesses that had not plagued foragers, and the diseases became endemic, that is, widely found within a region without being deadly. Ultimately people who lived with animals developed resistance to some of these illnesses, and foragers’ lack of resistance to many illnesses meant that they died more readily after coming into contact with new endemic diseases, as was the case when Europeans brought smallpox and other diseases to the Americas in the sixteenth century. (Discussed in detail in Chapter 4.)

  Domesticated animals eventually far outnumbered their wild counterparts. For example, in the United States today (excluding Alaska), there are about 77 million dogs, compared to about 6,000 wolves. The United Nations estimates that worldwide there are more than 2 billion cattle, and more than 20 billion chickens, with enormous consequences for the environment. Animal domestication also shaped human evolution; groups that relied on animal milk and milk products for a significant part of their diet tended to develop the ability to digest milk as adults, while those that did not remained lactose intolerant as adults, the normal condition for mammals.

  Demographic, social, and cultural factors appear to have operated together in the turn from gathering wild plants to growing domesticated ones, and from hunting and snaring wild animals to raising domesticated ones. In terms of demography, although the warming climate allowed levels of foraging that were sufficient for sedentary villages to develop, population may have slowly grown beyond the readily available food supply. This increase in population resulted from lower child mortality and longer life spans, and perhaps also from higher fertility rates. Naturally occurring foods often included cereals or other crops that could be ground and cooked into a mush soft enough for babies to eat. This mush—for which there is widespread archaeological evidence—allowed women to decide to stop nursing their children at a younger age and instead put their energies elsewhere. Skeletal evidence from California, for example, shows that as groups living there around 2500 bce increasingly relied on acorns for food—which must be boiled or roasted and ground before they are edible—women's work load increased, and they weaned their children earlier. By doing this, women lost the contraceptive effects of breast-feeding, and children were born at more frequent intervals. But instead of moving to a new area—the solution that foragers relied on when faced with the problem of food scarcity—people chose to stay with or near the physical and social structures of the sedentary villages they had built. So they developed a different way to increase the food supply to keep up with population growth—plant and animal domestication—thus beginning cycles of expanding population and intensification of land use that have continued to today.

  Cultural factors interwove with these demographic and social ones. One example of this can be seen at Göbekli Tepe, a site not far from Hallan Çemi in present-day Turkey, where around 9000 bce hundreds of people came together to build rings of massive, multi-ton elaborately carved limestone pillars, and then covered them with dirt and built more. The people who created this site lived some distance away, where archaeological remains indicate that, at the time they first carved the pillars, they ate wild game and plants, not crops. Once these pillars were carved and raised in place, however, their symbolic, cultural, or perhaps religious importance may have made people decide to adopt a subsistence strategy that would allow them to stay nearby. Studies of other sites in the area show that in some population was not outstripping the food supply obtained by foraging, so that the new economy was primarily the result of deliberate cultural choice, not food scarcity.

  1.5 A predator eyes a boar on one of the huge limestone pillars at Göbekli Tepe, which were carved, arranged in rings, and then buried about 9000 BCE. Most carvings are of dangerous animals such as lions, snakes, and scorpions rather than prey, and the structure required great skill and effort to build.

  Nowhere do archaeological remains alone answer the question of who within any group first began to cultivate crops, but the fact that, among many foragers, women have been primarily responsible for gathering and processing plant products suggests that they may also have been the first to plant seeds in the ground. In many parts of the world, crops continued to be planted with hoes and digging sticks for millennia, and crop-raising remained primarily women's work, while men hunted or later raised animals. In these places, which include large parts of North America and Africa, women appear to have retained control of the crops they planted, sharing them with group members or giving them as gifts.

  A field of planted and weeded crops yields ten to one hundred times as much food — measured in calories — as the same area of naturally occurring plants, a benefit that would have been evident to early crop-planters. It also requires more labor, however, which was provided both by the greater number of people in the community and by those people working longer hours. In contrast to the twenty hours a week foragers spent on obtaining food, farming peoples were often in the fields from dawn to dusk, particularly during planting and harvest time, but also during the rest of the growing year because weeding was a constant task. Neolithic farmers were also less healthy than foragers were; although crop-raising gave them a more reliable food supply, their narrower range of foodstuffs made them more susceptible to disease and nutritional deficiencies such as anemia.

  Foragers who lived at the edge of farming communities may have recognized the negative aspects of crop-raising, for they often adopted this new way of life quite slowly. In some places farming spread through migration. Studies of bone chemistry have revealed that sometimes farming villagers moved to a different area, built a new village, cleared land, and planted seeds, or sometimes only men moved, intermarrying with women from foraging groups. These migrations could be accompanied by violence; judging by cemetery remains, the number of people who died violent deaths increased in the period of intensifying foraging and early agriculture in some parts of the world, and both weapons and armor became more prevalent. Because the population of farming communities grew so much faster than that of foragers, however, the balance shifted. By about 6500 bce farming had spread northward from the Fertile Crescent into Greece and by 4000 farther northward into Europe all the way to Britain. Crop-raising spread out from other areas in which it was first developed, and slowly larger and larger parts of Asia, Africa, and the Americas became home to farming villages.

  The most common global pattern for crop-raising involved sedentary villages, but this was not the case everywhere. In some parts of the world, including Amazonia, Papua New Guinea, and many parts of North America, crop-raising was combined with gathering and hunting. Especially in deeply wooded areas, people cleared small plots by chopping and burning the natural vegetation—a method termed “slash and burn” —and planted crops in successive years until the soil eroded or lost its fertility. They then moved to another area and began the process again, perhaps returning to the first plot many years later, after the soil had rejuvenated itself. Groups using shifting slash-and-burn cultivation remained relatively small and continued to rely on the surrounding forest or jungle for much of their food, practices that continued into the twentieth century.

  Animal-raising was also not sedentary everywhere. In drier areas, flocks of sheep and goats need to travel long distances from season to season to obtain enough food, and a new form of living was created based on herding and rais
ing livestock: pastoralism. Some pastoralists became nomadic, relying primarily on their flocks of animals for food, but also gathering wild plant foods. Pastoralism was well-suited to areas where the terrain or climate made crop-planting difficult, such as mountains, deserts, dry grasslands, and tundras. Eventually other grazing animals, including cattle, yaks, and reindeer, also became the basis of pastoral economies in central and western Asia, many parts of Africa, and far northern Europe.

  Plow agriculture and food processing

  Crop-raising and pastoralism brought significant changes to human ways of life, but the domestication of certain large animals had an even bigger impact. Cattle and water buffalo were domesticated in some parts of Asia and North Africa in which they occurred naturally by at least 7000 bce, and horses, donkeys, and camels by about 4000 bce. Cattle and water buffalo were used for their meat, and also perhaps for their blood, which was tapped and either drunk or mixed into cooked foods. More importantly, all of these animals can be trained to carry people or burdens on their backs and pull against loads dragged behind them, two qualities that are rare among the world's animal species. In many parts of the world, including North America and much of South America and sub-Saharan Africa, no naturally occurring large species could be domesticated. In the mountainous regions of South America, llamas and alpacas were domesticated to carry packs, but the steep terrain made it difficult to use them to pull loads, and they were not large enough to ride. The domestication of large animals dramatically increased the power available to humans to carry out their tasks, which had both an immediate effect in the societies in which this happened and a long-term effect when these societies later encountered societies in which human labor remained the only source of power. The biologist and environmental scientist Jared Diamond has proposed, in fact, that large domesticated animals provided Eurasian societies with advantages that resulted in the differences of wealth and power in the modern world, a very long legacy of these early endowments.

  In terms of food production, the pulling power of animals came to matter most. Sometime in the seventh millennium bce, people attached wooden sticks to frames that animals dragged through the soil, thus breaking it up and allowing seeds to sprout more easily. These simple scratch plows were pulled first by cattle and water buffalo, and later by horses and mules. (Donkeys and camels were used primarily as pack animals, but occasionally for plowing as well.) Over millennia, moldboards — angled pieces that turned the soil over, bringing fresh soil to the top — were added, which reduced the time needed to plow and allowed each person to work more land.

  Using plows, people produced a significant amount of surplus food. Certain planted crops eventually came to be grown over huge areas of land, so that some scientists describe the development of agriculture—like the domestication of dogs—as a process of codependent domestication: humans domesticated crops, but crops also “domesticated” humans so that they worked long hours spreading particular crops around the world. Of these, wheat, rice, and corn have been the most successful. The United States Department of Agriculture estimates that today wheat is planted in over 800,000 square miles around the world, and represents a fifth of all calories in the human diet, while rice is planted in over 600,000 square miles. A further 600,000 square miles are now planted in corn, with one-quarter of the nearly 50,000 items in the average American supermarket containing corn, not even counting the corn eaten by the chickens, pigs, and cattle whose meat is also found in that supermarket.

  Technologies of storing and cooking developed alongside those of food production, varying according to the raw materials that were available. People in many parts of the world developed techniques of weaving baskets from the rushes and reeds found along seacoasts, lakes, and rivers. Baskets were used for storage (and also for catching fish and other aquatic animals), and those that were woven tightly enough could also be used to make soups and stews by placing hot cooking stones in them. The invention of kilns—which happened independently in many places—allowed clay pots and the glazes painted on them to be fired at higher temperatures so that the pots became completely impermeable to liquids, thus making them useful as vessels for long-term storage as well as cooking. Sometime in the fifth millennium bce pot-makers in Mesopotamia invented the potter's wheel, a technology for making higher-quality pots that both spread and developed independently elsewhere. Cooking in pots allowed people to blend foods in new ways, which led to greater distinctions in eating habits both among different groups and within one group based on the differing abilities of families to obtain more unusual or expensive ingredients. Food preparations for celebrations and feasts became more elaborate, and the consumption of food acquired added ceremonies and rules.

  Clay pots were also used for preparing, storing, and transporting fermented food and beverages. Fermentation is a natural process that, like cooking, makes food more nutritious and easier to digest; it makes things rot, but also preserves many foods from spoiling and kills off pathogens in water. Pastoralists discovered one particular type of fermentation when they learned that the lining of a baby animal's stomach curdles milk into a more digestible, easy-to-transport, and longer-lasting product—cheese—and began to control this process in leather bags and containers. When humans first began to control fermentation is not clear. Evolutionary biologists using DNA evidence have determined that the primary yeast used in the fermentation that produces alcohol, Saccharamyces cerevisiae—one of many yeasts present naturally in the air—shows signs of human selection beginning more than 10,000 years ago, thus perhaps even before wheat. Significant wine and beer making began about the same time as farming itself, although people were most likely making mead from honey and small amounts of wine and beer before this.

  Alcohol should perhaps be added to the list of reasons for the development and spread of crop-raising, as humans sought to obtain a reliable supply of raw material they could transform into this high-energy substance that also became their principal painkiller. Evidence from skeletal remains in South America supports this idea, as people living there about 6000 BCE consumed the corn they had begun to grow as alcohol (most likely as a type of quicha, a beer made by chewing grain and then spitting it into a pot, which allows the fermentation process to begin) before they turned to eating it. Like the domestication of milk-producing animals, the production of fermented beverages also shaped human evolution, as a larger share of the population developed the ability to metabolize alcohol, which is actually a poison. Alcohol became part of social events and its consumption was often ritualized, with beer and wine among the offerings given to spirits and deities, or consumed by shamans, priests, and worshippers as a means of gaining access to the world beyond the visible or honoring the gods.

  Just as foragers continually improved their tools and methods, pastoralists and farmers did as well. They adapted the wheel invented to make clay pots for use on carts and plows pulled by animals. Wheeled vehicles led to road-building, and wheels and roads together made it possible for people and goods to travel long distances more easily, whether for settlement, trade, or conquest.

  Social and gender hierarchies

  In many parts of the world, foragers showed signs of increasing social differentiation in their material goods and mortuary practices, and in some the concentration of power by a “Big Man” coalesced into a chiefdom, in which power was more formalized. These processes occurred more often in agricultural communities.

  Certain people were buried with significant amounts of jewelry, shells, household goods, fancy fabrics, weapons, and other objects, while others were buried with very little. Graves and other evidence also show greater differentiation based on gender, with men becoming more associated with the world beyond the household and women with the domestic realm. These social and gender hierarchies varied in their intensity, changed over time, and blended with more egalitarian practices, but no agricultural society was without them. Lines of causation in these changes are difficult to trace; written sources do not p
rovide a clear answer because social and gender hierarchies were already firmly in place by the time writing was invented.

  Most likely the causes were complex and intertwining, with multiple pathways leading to prominence and power. Within foraging groups, some individuals already had more authority because of their links with the world of gods and spirits, positions as heads of kin groups or tribes, or personal characteristics. This power became more significant over time as there were more resources to control. Priests and shamans developed more elaborate rituals and became full-time religious specialists, exchanging their services in interceding with the gods for everything else that they needed to live. In many communities, religious specialists were the first to work out formal rules of conduct that later became oral and written codes of law, generally explaining that these represented the will of the gods. The codes threatened divine punishment for those who broke them, and they often required people to accord deference to priests as the representatives of the gods, so that they became an elite group with special privileges.