Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  Whether that is true or not, hierarchy developed fastest within households. I have already observed that men and women had had different roles in foraging societies, the former more active in hunting and the latter in gathering, but studies of contemporary groups suggest that domestication sharpens the sexual division of labor, tying women to the home. The high mortality/high fertility regime required most women to spend most of their lives pregnant and/or minding small children, and changes in agriculture—changes that women themselves probably pioneered—reinforced this. Domesticated cereals need more processing than most wild foods, and since threshing, grinding, and baking can be done in the home while supervising infants, these logically became women’s work.

  When land is abundant but labor is scarce (as in the earliest days of cultivation), people normally cultivate large areas lightly, with men and women hoeing and weeding together. If population increases but the supply of farmland does not, as happened in the Hilly Flanks after 8000 BCE, it makes sense to work the land more intensively, squeezing more from each acre by manuring, plowing, and even irrigating. All these tasks require upper-body strength. Plenty of women are as strong as men, but men do increasingly dominate outdoor work and women indoor work as agriculture intensifies. Grown men work the fields; boys tend the flocks; and women and girls manage the ever more sharply defined domestic sphere. A study of 162 skeletons dating around 7000 BCE from Abu Hureyra revealed striking gender distinctions. Both men and women had enlarged vertebrae in their upper backs, probably from carrying heavy loads on their heads, but only women had a distinctive arthritic toe condition caused by spending long periods kneeling, using their toes as a base to apply force while grinding grain.

  Weeding, clearing stones, manuring, watering, and plowing all increased yields, and inheriting a well-tended field, rather than just any bit of land, made all the difference to a household’s fortunes. The way religion developed after 9600 BCE suggests that people worried about ancestors and inheritance, and we should probably assume that it was at this point that they began reinforcing their rituals with other institutions. With so much at stake, men in modern peasant cultures want to be sure they really are the fathers of the children who will inherit their property. Foragers’ rather casual attitudes about sex yield to obsessive concern with daughters’ premarital virginity and wives’ extramarital activities. Men in traditional agricultural societies typically marry around the age of thirty, after they have come into their inheritance, while women generally marry around fifteen, before they have had much time to stray. While we cannot be sure that these patterns originated at the dawn of farming, it does seem rather likely. By, say, 7500 BCE a girl would typically grow up under the authority of her father, then, as a teenager, exchange it for the authority of a husband old enough to be her father. Marriage would become a source of wealth as those who already had good lands and flocks would marry others in the same happy situation, consolidating holdings. The rich got richer.

  Having things worth inheriting meant having things worth stealing, and it is surely no coincidence that evidence for fortifications and organized warfare mushrooms in the Hilly Flanks after 9600 BCE. Modern hunter-gatherer life is famously violent; with no real hierarchy to keep their passions in check, young hunters often treat homicide as a reasonable way to settle disagreements. In many bands, it is the leading cause of death. But to live together in villages, people had to learn to manage interpersonal violence. Those that did so would have flourished—and have been able to harness violence to take things from other communities.

  The most remarkable evidence comes from Jericho, famous for the biblical story of the walls that tumbled down when Joshua blew his trumpet. When Kathleen Kenyon dug there fifty years ago, she did find walls—but not Joshua’s. Joshua lived around 1200 BCE, but Kenyon uncovered what looked like fortifications eight thousand years older. She interpreted these as a defensive bastion, twelve feet high and five feet thick, dating to around 9300 BCE. New studies in the 1980s showed that she was probably mistaken, and that her “fortification” actually consisted of several small walls built at different times, perhaps to hold back a stream; but her second great find, a stone tower twenty-five feet tall, probably really was defensive. In a world where the most advanced weapon was a stick with a pointed stone tied to the end, this was a mighty bulwark indeed.

  Nowhere outside the Hilly Flanks did people have so much to defend. Even in 7000 BCE, almost everyone outside this region was a forager, shifting seasonally, and even where they had begun to settle down in villages, such as Mehrgarh in modern Pakistan or Shangshan in the Yangzi Delta, these were simple places by the standards of Jericho. If hunter-gatherers from any other place on earth had been airlifted to Çayönü or Çatalhöyük they would not, I suspect, have known what hit them. Gone would be their caves or little clusters of huts, replaced by bustling towns with sturdy houses, great stores of food, powerful art, and religious monuments. They would find themselves working hard, dying young, and hosting an unpleasant array of microbes. They would rub shoulders with rich and poor, and chafe under or rejoice in men’s authority over women and parents’ over children. They might even discover that some people had the right to murder them in rituals. And they might well wonder why people had inflicted all this on themselves.

  GOING FORTH AND MULTIPLYING

  Fast-forward ten thousand years from the origins of hierarchy and drudgery in the prehistoric Hilly Flanks to Paris in 1967.

  To the middle-aged men who administered the University of Paris campus in the dreary suburb of Nanterre—the heirs of traditions of patriarchy stretching back to Çatalhöyük—it seemed obvious that the young ladies in their charge should not be allowed to entertain young gentlemen in their dorm rooms (or vice versa). Such rules have probably never seemed obvious to the young, but for three hundred generations teenagers had had to live with them. But not anymore. As winter closed in, students challenged their elders’ right to dictate their love lives. In January 1968 Daniel Cohn-Bendit, nowadays a respected Green Party member of the European Parliament but then a student activist known as “Danny the Red,” compared the minister for youth’s attitudes to the Hitler Youth’s. In May students took on armed police in running street-fights, paralyzing downtown Paris with barricades and burning cars. President De Gaulle met secretly with his generals to find out whether—if it came to a new Bastille Day—the army would stand by him.

  Enter Marshall Sahlins, a youngish anthropology professor from the University of Michigan. Sahlins had made his name with a series of brilliant essays on social evolution and by criticizing the Vietnam War; now he forsook Ann Arbor (“a small university city made up exclusively of side streets,” he unkindly but not unfairly called it) to spend two years at the Collège de France, the Mecca of both anthropological theory and student radicalism. As the crisis deepened, Sahlins sent a manuscript to the journal Les temps modernes, required reading for everyone who was anyone on the French intellectual scene. It was to become one of the most influential anthropological essays ever written.

  “Open the gates of nurseries, universities, and other prisons,” student radicals had scrawled on a wall at Nanterre. “Thanks to teachers and exams competitiveness starts at six.” Sahlins’s manuscript offered something to the students: not an answer, which the anarchists probably did not want (“Be a realist, demand the impossible” went one of their slogans), but at least some encouragement. The central issue, Sahlins argued, was that bourgeois society had “erected a shrine to the Unattainable: Infinite Needs.” We submit to capitalist discipline and compete to earn money so we can chase Infinite Needs by buying things we don’t really want. We could learn something, Sahlins suggested, from hunter-gatherers. “The world’s most primitive people,” he explained, “have few possessions but they are not poor.” This only sounded like a paradox: Sahlins argued that foragers typically worked just twenty-one to thirty-five hours per week—less than Paris’s industrial laborers or even, I suspect, its students. Hunter-
gatherers did not have cars or TVs, but they did not know they were supposed to want them. Their means were few but their needs were fewer, making them, Sahlins concluded, “the original affluent society.”

  Sahlins had a point: Why, he asked, did farming ever replace foraging if the rewards were work, inequality, and war? Yet replace foraging it clearly did. By 7000 BCE farming completely dominated the Hilly Flanks. Already by 8500 BCE cultivated cereals had spread to Cyprus and by 8000 had reached central Turkey. By 7000 fully domesticated plants had reached all these areas and spread eastward to (or, perhaps, developed independently in) Pakistan. They had reached Greece, southern Iraq, and central Asia by 6000, Egypt and central Europe by 5000, and the shores of the Atlantic by 4000 (Figure 2.4).

  Archaeologists have argued for decades over why this happened, without much agreement. At the end of a magisterial recent review, for instance, the strongest generalization that Graeme Barker of Cambridge University felt he could make was that farmers replaced foragers “in different ways and at different rates and for different reasons, but in comparable circumstances of challenges to the world they knew.”

  Figure 2.4. Going forth and multiplying, version one: the westward spread of domesticated plants from the Hilly Flanks to the Atlantic, 9000–4000 BCE

  Yet although the process was messy—going on across millennia at the scale of entire continents, how could it not be?—we can make quite a lot of sense of it if we remember that it was, at the end of the day, all about Earth’s movement up the Great Chain of Energy. Orbital change meant that Earth captured more of the sun’s electromagnetic energy; photosynthesis converted some of that larger share into chemical energy (that is, more plants); metabolism converted some of that larger stock of chemical energy into kinetic energy (that is, more animals); and farming allowed humans to extract vastly more energy from plants and other animals for their own use. Pests, predators, and parasites in turn sucked as much of this newfound energy out of farmers as they could, but there was still plenty left over.

  Humans, like plants and other animals, found a major outlet for their extra energy in sexual reproduction. High birthrates meant that new villages could grow rapidly until every square inch of available land was being farmed, whereupon hunger and sickness rose until they canceled out fertility. Energy capture and energy consumption then reached a rough balance. Some villages stabilized like this, always hovering on the edge of misery; in others a few daring souls decided to start over. They might walk an hour to a vacant (perhaps less desirable) spot in the same valley or plain—or trudge hundreds of miles in search of green pastures they had heard about. They might even cross the seas. Many adventurers must have failed, the ragged, starving survivors crawling home with their tails between their legs. Others, though, triumphed. Population boomed until deaths caught up with births again or until colonies spun off colonies of their own.

  Most farmers expanding into new territory found foragers already living there. It is tempting to imagine scenes like something out of old Western movies, with cattle raids, scalping, and shoot-outs (with both sides using bows and arrows), but the reality may have been less dramatic. Archaeological surveys suggest that the first farmers in each region tended to settle in different areas from the local foragers, almost certainly because the best farmland and the best foraging grounds rarely overlapped. At least at first, farmers and foragers may have largely ignored each other.

  Eventually, of course, foraging did disappear. You will find few hunters or gatherers today prowling the manicured landscapes of Tuscany or Tokyo’s suburbs. Farming populations grew rapidly, needing only a few centuries to fill up the best land, until they had no option but to push into the (in their eyes) marginal territories of the foragers.

  There are two main theories about what happened next. The first suggests that farmers basically destroyed the original affluent society. Disease might have played a part; rats, flocks, and permanent villages certainly made farmers less healthy than hunter-gatherers. We should not, though, imagine epidemics like those that carried off Native Americans in their millions after 1492. The farmers’ and foragers’ disease pools had been separated by just a few miles of forest, not uncrossable oceans, so they had not diverged very far.

  Yet even without mass kill-offs, weight of numbers was decisive. If foragers decided to fight, as happened on so many colonial frontiers in modern times, they might destroy the odd farming village, but more colonists would just keep coming, swamping resistance. Alternatively, foragers might choose flight, but no matter how far they fell back, new farmers would eventually arrive, chopping down still more trees and breathing germs everywhere, until foragers ended up in the places farmers simply could not use, such as Siberia or the Sahara.

  The second theory says none of these things happened, because the first farmers across most of the regions shown in Figure 2.4 were not descendants of immigrants from the Hilly Flanks at all. They were local hunter-gatherers who settled down and became farmers themselves. Sahlins made farming sound deeply unattractive compared to the original affluent society, but in all likelihood foragers rarely faced a simple choice between two lifestyles. A farmer who left his plow and started walking would not cross a sharp line into foragers’ territory. Rather, he would come to villages where people farmed a little less intensively than he did (maybe hoeing their fields instead of plowing and manuring), then people who farmed less intensively still (maybe burning patches of forest, cultivating them until the weeds grew back, then moving on), and eventually people who relied entirely on hunting and gathering. Ideas, people, and microbes drifted back and forth across this broad contact zone.

  When people realized that neighbors with more intensive practices were killing the wild plants and chasing off the animals that their own foraging lifestyles depended on, rather than attacking these vandals or running away they also had the option of joining the crowd and intensifying their own cultivation. Instead of picking farming over foraging, people probably only decided to spend a little less time gathering and a little more time gardening. Later they might have to decide whether to start weeding, then plowing, then manuring, but this was—to repeat an image from the previous chapter—a series of baby steps rather than a once-and-for-all great leap from the original affluent society to backbreaking toil and chronic illness. On the whole, across hundreds of years and thousands of miles, those who intensified also multiplied; those who clung to their old ways dwindled. In the process, the agricultural “frontier” crept forward. No one chose hierarchy and working longer hours; women did not embrace arthritic toes; these things crept up on them.

  No matter how many stone tools, burned seeds, or house foundations archaeologists dig up, they will never be able to prove either theory, but once again genetics has come (partly) to the rescue. In the 1970s Luca Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford University began a massive survey of European blood groups and nuclear DNA. His team found a consistent gradient of gene frequencies from southeast to northwest (Figure 2.5), which, they pointed out, mapped quite well onto the archaeological evidence for the spread of farming shown in Figure 2.4. Their conclusion: after migrants from western Asia brought farming to Europe, their descendants largely replaced the aboriginal foragers, pushing their remnants into the far north and west.

  The archaeologist Colin Renfrew argued that linguistics also supported Cavalli-Sforza’s scenario: the first farmers, he suspected, not only replaced European genes with southwest Asian ones but also replaced Europe’s native languages with Indo-European ones from the Hilly Flanks, leaving just isolated pockets of older tongues such as Basque. The drama of dispossession that ended the original affluent society is inscribed in modern Europeans’ bodies and reenacted every time they open their mouths.

  At first the new evidence only increased the scholarly arguments. Linguists immediately challenged Renfrew, arguing that modern European languages would differ much more from one another if they had really begun diverging from an ancestral tongue six or seven millennia ago, an
d in 1996 an Oxford team led by Bryan Sykes challenged Cavalli-Sforza on the genetics. Sykes looked at mitochondrial DNA rather than the nuclear DNA Cavalli-Sforza had studied, and instead of a southeast–northwest progression, like Figure 2.5, identified a pattern too messy to be represented easily on a map, finding six groups of genetic lineages, only one of which could plausibly be linked to agricultural migrants from western Asia. Sykes suggested that the other five groups are much older, going back mostly to the original out-of-Africa peopling of Europe 25,000 to 50,000 years ago; all of which, he concluded, indicates that Europe’s first farmers were mainly aboriginal foragers who decided to settle down, rather than the descendants of immigrants from the Hilly Flanks.

  Figure 2.5. A story written in blood: Luca Cavalli-Sforza’s interpretation of Europe’s genetic makeup, based on a massive sample of nuclear DNA. He concluded that this map, showing degrees of genetic similarity of modern populations to the hypothesized colonists from the Hilly Flanks, with 8 representing complete similarity and 1 the lowest level of correspondence (measuring the first principal component in his statistical manipulation of the results, accounting for 95 percent of the variation in the sample), showed that colonists descended from the Hilly Flanks spread agriculture across Europe. But many archaeologists and some geneticists disagree.