The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation - Appendix 1: The Neolithic revolution and the first cities
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There is a great deal we don’t know about prehistoric humans. Before the invention of writing we have very little to go on, and the further back you try to look, the less information is available. There are some things we have learned from studies of people who were still living as tribal hunter-gatherers after the Western world had invented anthropology to study them, and that includes their cosmologies. They were animists – people who see the whole world as spiritually alive, with no division between the material world, the living world and the spirit world.
One thing that we can reasonably assume is that early humans organised themselves into what are technically called “bands”, but many people would call “tribes”. These was a form of social organisation where everybody knows everybody else – usually fewer than a hundred people. These bands presumably had one leader, who would usually have been male, but these were not leaders in the sense we like to think of today. They were not rulers, for there was none of the cultural infrastructure that is necessary to make that possible. They could have led only by consent, and would have needed to keep the majority of the rest of the band on board with important decisions. But the band itself was sovereign, in the sense that it did not recognise any authority higher than itself.
A recent attempt has been made to overturn this orthodoxy. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) tells a different story, in which humans spent tens of thousands of years experimenting with larger forms of social organisation. We now know that large numbers of pre-historic humans came together for festivals at certain times of year, that certain individuals were given burials of a sort we’d normally associate with monarchs rather than band leaders, and that monolithic structures were created on a scale that would have been impossible for just a few hundred people. Though these were impressive achievements for their time, it barely changes the conventional story of human social evolution. We evolved from our common ancestor with chimps, who also live in small bands. The next stage would have been a loose affiliation of bands – alliances, strengthened with the swapping of women for marriage. This results in a tribe or clan – groups of a few thousand or maybe a few tens of thousands, where at least some power or sovereignty has been passed up to a single tribal leader, and where cultural norms such as cosmologies can be shared.
The domestication of wolves
The first animal to be domesticated was the wolf, around 40K-27Kbp according to the genetics. Exactly where, when, why and how many times it happened are still open to debate, but there’s no question that dogs are extremely useful for hunting (both for tracking large prey and catching smaller prey). Wolves were the only animals to be domesticated while humans were still hunter-gatherers.
The Neolithic Revolution
Humans had evolved to forage and hunt for a living, just as our ancestral species had done for billions of years, but in one respect we were different to anything that had gone before: humans had a brand new survival strategy. Other creatures depend for their survival on things like being able to melt into the background or run very fast, or being very large, or having very sharp teeth, powerful venom or an impenetrable shell. Humans were the first creatures to depend entirely on their wits.For 2.6 million years of “Ice Age” (scientifically the “Pleistocene epoch”) evolution worked on an animal whose bipedal locomotion, dextrous hands and anatomical capability for complex speech, though all of them game-changers in their own right, were mere auxiliary features compared to the revolutionary evolutionary technology of overwhelming brain power. This, in control of those hands and communications, was applied to create weapons for hunting creatures so large and dangerous that an unarmed human would be fortunate to escape from unharmed. Lithic technology – the working of stone – advanced at a pace that wasn’t even glacial, but it eventually led to the invention of tools for harvesting and processing wild grains and pulses, and even made the felling of large trees possible.
There is a lively debate about the impact anatomically modern humans had on populations of large animals outside their African evolutionary home. Fossils show they first left Africa at least 180,000 years ago, but genetic studies indicate that these early migrants died out.Footnote: 'When did modern humans leave Africa?', Chris Stringer and Julia Galway-Witham, Science, 359: 6374, pp. 389-390.The successful colonisation of the rest of the world started about 60,000 years ago. Megafauna have been disappearing ever since, but we do not know to what extent this was the result of human activity. But even if these humans wereresponsible for an elevated extinction rate in the late Pleistocene, their impact on the ecosystems they colonised must have been limited by their relatively small numbers.
Around 11,700bp (9700 BC) the climate changed. The ice retreated, and large areas of the northern hemisphere became more attractive for human habitation. Within a few centuries, humans started farming in what is known as the “Fertile Crescent”. “Mesopotamia” was the name given to the bulk of it by the ancient Greeks – the land between two rivers (the Tigris and Euphrates). This area had high-quality soil, a reliable water supply, and was home to a disproportionate number of wild species that were particularly suitable (“pre-adapted”) for domestication.Footnote: Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years, Jared Diamond, 1998, Vintage.But that doesn’t explain why humans didn’t just remain hunter-gatherers.
This first agricultural (or “Neolithic” – new stone age) revolution has been described by American anthropologist Jared Diamond as “the worst mistake in the history of the human race” and by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari as “history’s biggest fraud.” Studies Footnote: Stone Age Economics, Marshall Sahlins, 1972, Tavistock Publications; Primitive Affluence, Bob Black, 1992, Green Anarchist Books.of 20th century foraging societies suggest they averaged no more than four hours a day hunting and gathering food, leaving plenty of time for leisure – and this was typically on relatively poor land, rejected by farmers. It is reasonable to assume that Mesolithic (middle stone age) foragers living in a more plentiful environment had at least as much free time. Neolithic farming was a much harder life, requiring back-breaking work from dawn till dusk, and there’s no evidence to suggestthose early farmers were any healthier or better fed than their Mesolithic predecessors. The best evidence we have suggests the opposite was true. [Footnote:'Early agriculture’s toll on human health', George R. Milner, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, 2019, 116:28, 13721-13723.]
And even if farming could provide more net calories, it couldn’t (and still can’t) touch foraging for variety: Mesolithic foragers must have enjoyed a more interesting and balanced diet than Neolithic farmers. This lack of variety persists: globally, today, about 25 cultivated crops comprise 90% of our diet. Footnote: 'How many plants feed the world?' Robert and Christine Prescott-Allen, Conservation Biology, 1990, 4:4. Farming also impacted the ecosystem in a fundamental way that foraging does not, causing far bigger changes to the balance of species in the local environment and the genetics of the domesticated species. Additionally, it opened the door to wealth and social inequalities on a scale that had previously been impossible, some of which still plague us today. There should be no myths about noble savages, [Footnote:The Truth About Primitive Life: A Critique of Anarcho-primitivism, Ted Kaczynski, 2008.] and analysis of bones suggests that few Mesolithic hunter-gatherers made it to the age of 50, but in many respects it was an easier, healthier and more pleasant way of life than the agricultural one that replaced it. This view of the Neolithic Revolution and its consequences forms the foundational beliefs of the anarchist critique of civilisation known as anarcho-primitivism.
Exactly how and why foragers became farmers are important questions that archaeologists have been trying to answer for over a century. All the simple answers are inadequate – this was a complex and lengthy process. Initially, the most obvious answer was that farming was a giant technological and cultural leap forwards: “progress”. Foragers, according to this hypothesis, would obviously have concluded that cultivating plants and keeping livestock is far more reliable and efficient than the lottery of foraging and hunting, right? This sort of thinking projects backwards from our modern perspective instead of understanding what really happened. It involves a concept of progress that is itself a product of modernity and would have been incomprehensible to the first farmers, and almost as meaningless to most medieval Europeans. On a geological-evolutionary timescale, the entire transition from foraging to farming happened in the blink of an eye, but on the timescale of human lives, it took hundreds of generations. It was not a conscious choice – no forager woke up one day and thought “why don’t we clear the forest, and deliberately grow the plants we need instead of foraging for them!” It happened as the result of countless individual human decisions, each taken because it made sense in the immediate situation, and in the foreseeable, rather than more distant future.
Foraging as a way of life naturally limits fertility and population density. In most territory available prior to the Neolithic Revolution, the only way to find enough food was to keep moving: Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were almost entirely nomadic (the only permanent settlements to significantly predate the Neolithic Revolution were a few fishing villages). The key to successful foraging, then as now, was to be in the right place at the right time. And if you are continually on the move then there’s a limit to how fast you can reproduce – carrying one infant is manageable, but carrying two is not. This practical limitation was reinforced by the fact that children in foraging societies are weaned much later, which has the biological effect of reducing female fertility. Even with a low population density and a slow birthrate, populations in those foraging societies would have steadily risen during years of abundance, but sooner or later there would be leaner years when food was scarce, even for foragers, with their flexible diet. The young, the old and the weak would struggle to survive these hard times, lowering the human population back into balance with the rest of the ecosystem.
Fear of hunger must have been a factor in the development of agriculture. If your foraging territory is limited by the presence of competitors, threatening your ability to feed yourself, you might be tempted to create a clearing, to provide habitat for the kind of plants that are good for foraging, and attract herbivores to hunt. Perhaps you’ll selectively hunt the males, leaving the females to reproduce. In these ways humans started to intentionally modify the ecosystem and the genetics of the plant and animal species that they depended on (they had already been doing so unintentionally for millennia).
Towards the end of the Mesolithic period there was an increase in sedentism: abandoning a nomadic way of life is a necessary pre-requisite for agriculture as we understand it. The first evidence of humans spending extended periods in fixed settlements dates from about 2,000 years before the start of the Neolithic Revolution, but these people were still foragers. What made them different to the nomadic majority was that they had claimed the most productive territories as exclusively theirs, usually at boundaries between multiple ecosystems, such as where a river meets the coast or passes through the foothills of a mountain range. Such locations would have been able to supply abundant resources at different times of the year, and permanent or semi-permanent settlement would also have allowed people to start preserving and storing some of the glut of food that is available to hunter-gatherers in spring and autumn. Sedentism also led to a step-change in the rate at which humans were modifying the genomes of the species destined to become the first domesticated crops and livestock. For example, the very act of harvesting seeds for storage puts selective pressure on the species involved. It favours the development of larger seeds in more easily harvested configurations on the plant, because those are the ones most likely to end up in a basket and accidentally dropped near a settlement, even if they aren’t deliberately planted.
Unfortunately, establishing long-term settlements in productive foraging locations and increasing the amount of edible plants in your immediate vicinity does not solve the problem of food insecurity for very long. It actually makes things worse, because the resulting population increase leaves a greater number of people vulnerable to future shortages. But there was no way back, either for the earliest farmers or for the majority who still foraged. For a while – in some cases for a long while – foragers and farmers co-existed in relative peace, and even traded with each other.[ Footnote:'Parallel palaeogenomic transects reveal complex genetic history of early European farmers', Mark Lipsom et al,Nature, 2017, 551, 368-372.] The foraging societies sometimes adopted some elements of the “Neolithic package” (sedentism, animal husbandry, agriculture and pottery), while foraging remained their primary means of subsistence. The products of farming would have been seen as exotic, high-status goods within foraging societies. This wasn’t enough to immediately convert them to a way of life that must have looked as hard as it was, but in almost all cases, eventually, the farmers either displaced the foragers, or the foragers became farmers. Farming then began spreading geographically in fits and starts from south-west Asia north-west into Europe and east into Asia, and other domesticated species spread from other points of origin slightly later. The vicious circle was complete. Gradual replacement of nomadic foraging with sedentary farming, and incremental improvements in farming technology, drove further increases in human population levels, threatening food security again. Overshoot was followed by famine, but the long-term trend was an inexorable growth of the human operation on Planet Earth, always at the expense of the wider ecosystem.
The Copper age
The last part of the Neolithic age was the “Copper age” or “Chalcolithic”. The first good evidence of copper smelting is from 5500BC in what is now Serbia. Footnote:'Ancient axe find suggests Copper Age began earlier than believed' (archive.org). Lead smelting began about the same time.
As with agriculture, civilisation began in Mesopotamia, although it independently arose a little later in the Americas and what is now China – the same places agriculture had started. This suggests a certain inevitability. It was unstable from the start. Civilisation was a new innovation and our ancestors were starting from scratch, without any instructions. The fundamental idea that unrelated strangers could live together without the bonds of family, tribe or clan, was new.
The first city we know of was Eridu, which was founded around 5400BC at what was then the mouth of the Euphrates, on sand dunes which showed no evidence of any previous occupation. This location was where three different ecosystems met – the river, the ocean and the desert. These supported three different populations (fisher-hunters living in reed houses, nomads living in tents in the semi-desert, and people of the “Samarra culture”, who lived in mud-brick houses and practised intensive irrigation-based agriculture). Access to fresh water was critical to all three, and all three were present at Eridu from the start. In the centre of the city was a large temple complex – a model that was to be repeated in all the early cities. Temples at this point were not just associated with religions, but were the administrative centre and focal point of the whole city.
The location of Eridu eventually proved its undoing, due to repeated encroachment of sand dunes and a rising saline water table limiting its agricultural capacity. It was repeatedly abandoned and re-occupied before being permanently abandoned around 600BC. The first really successful city – Uruk – was further up the river, away from the salt water. It gives its name to the main transition from small agricultural villages to what we would recognise as a city – the “Uruk period” (4000-3200BC).People had been farming here for at least a millennium before the cities started appearing, but their settlements never grew larger than a couple of thousand people. Uruk was home to 50,000. Humans had invented civilisation.