An Edible History of Humanity (3 page)

The idea that farmers spread out from the agricultural homelands, taking domesticated crops and knowledge of farming techniques
with them as they went, is supported by evidence from many parts of the world. As farmers set out to establish new communities
on unfarmed land, the result was a “wave of advance” centered on the areas where domestication first occurred. Greece appears
to have been colonized by farmers who arrived by sea from the Near East between 7000 B.C. and 6500 B.C., for example. Archaeologists
have found very few hunter-gatherer sites, but hundreds of early farming sites, in the country. Similarly, farmers arriving
via the Korean peninsula from China seem to have introduced rice agriculture to Japan starting in around 300 B.C. Linguistic
evidence also supports the idea of a migration from agricultural homelands in which languages, as well as farming practices,
were dispersed. The distribution of language families in Europe, East Asia, and Austronesia is broadly consistent with the
archaeological evidence for the diffusion of agriculture. Today, nearly 90 percent of the world’s population speaks a language
belonging to one of seven language families that had their origins in two agricultural homelands: the Fertile Crescent and
parts of China. The languages we speak today, like the foods we eat, are descended from those used by the first farmers.

Yet there is also evidence to suggest that hunter-gatherers were not always pushed aside or exterminated by incoming farmers,
but lived alongside them and in some cases became farmers too. The clearest example is found in southern Africa, where Khoisan
hunter-gatherers adopted Eurasian cattle from the north and became herders. Several European sites provide archaeological
evidence of farmers and hunter-gatherers living side by side and trading goods. The two types of community had very different
ideas about what sort of sites were desirable for settlement, so there is no reason why they could not have coexisted, as
long as suitable ecological niches remained for hunter-gatherers. Things would have become progressively more difficult for
hunter-gatherers living near farmers, however. Farmers would not have worried so much about overexploiting wild food resources
near their settlements, given that they had farmed foods to fall back on. Eventually the hunter-gatherers either joined farming
communities, or adopted farming themselves, or were forced to move to new areas.

So which mechanism predominated? In Europe, where the advent of farming has been most intensely studied, researchers have
used gene tic analysis to determine whether modern Europeans’ ancestors were predominantly indigenous hunter-gatherers who
took up farming or immigrant farmers who arrived from the Near East. In such studies, people from the Anatolian peninsula
(western Turkey), which lies within the Fertile Crescent, are taken to be genetically representative of the earliest farmers.
Similarly, Basques are assumed to be the most direct descendants of hunter-gatherers, for two reasons. First, the Basque language
bears no resemblance to European languages descended from proto–Indo-European, the language family imported into Europe along
with farming, and instead appears to date back to the Stone Age. (Several Basque words for tools begin with “aitz,” the word
for stone, which suggests that the words date from a time when stone tools were in use.) Second, there are several Basque-specific
gene tic variations that are not found in other Europeans.

In one recent study, genetic samples were taken from both these groups and were then compared with samples from populations
in different parts of Europe. The researchers found that the genetic contributions from Basques and Anatolians varied significantly
across Europe: The Anatolian (that is, Near Eastern farmer) contribution was 79 percent in the Balkans, 45 percent in northern
Italy, 63 percent in southern Italy, 35 percent in southern Spain, and 21 percent in En gland. In short, the contribution
from farmers was highest in the east and lowest in the west. And this provides the answer to the puzzle. It suggests that
farming spread as a result of a hybrid process in which a migrant farming population spread into Europe from the east and
was gradually diluted by intermarriage, so that the resulting population ended up being descended from both groups. The same
thing probably happened in other parts of the world, too.

The spread of farming from its agricultural homelands, followed by the population growth of farming communities, meant that
farmers outnumbered hunter-gatherers within a few thousand years. By 2000 B.C., the majority of humanity had taken up farming.
This was such a fundamental change that even today, many thousands of years later, the distribution of human languages and
genes continues to reflect the advent of farming. During domestication, plants were genetically reconfigured by humans; and
as agriculture was adopted, humans were genetically reconfigured by plants.

Human farmers and their domesticated plants and animals struck a grand bargain, though the farmers did not realize it at the
time, and their fates became intertwined. Consider maize. Domestication made it dependent on man, but its alliance with humans
also carried maize far beyond its origins as an obscure Mexican grass, so that it is now one of the most widely planted crops
on earth. From mankind’s point of view, meanwhile, the domestication of maize made available an abundant new source of food;
but its cultivation (like that of other plants) prompted people to adopt a new, sedentary lifestyle based on farming. Is man
exploiting maize for his own purposes, or is maize exploiting man? Domestication, it seems, is a two-way street.

Even today, thousands of years after the first farmers began the process of domesticating plants and animals, mankind is still
a farming species, and food production remains humanity’s primary occupation. Agriculture employs 41 percent of the human
race, more than any other activity, and accounts for 40 percent of the world’s land area. (About a third of this land is used
for crop production, and about two thirds provide pasture for livestock.) And the same three foods that underpinned the world’s
earliest civilizations are still the foundations of human existence: Wheat, rice, and maize continue to provide the bulk of
the calories consumed by the human race. The vast majority of the remaining calories are derived from domesticated plants
and animals. Only a small proportion of the food consumed by humans today comes from wild food sources: fish, shellfish, and
a sprinkling of wild berries, nuts, mushrooms, and so on.

Accordingly, almost none of the food we eat today can truly be described as natural. Nearly all of it is the result of selective
breeding—unwitting at first, but then more deliberate and careful as farmers propagated the most valuable characteristics
found in the wild to create new, domesticated mutants better suited to human needs. Corn, cows, and chickens as we know them
do not occur in nature, and they would not exist today without human intervention. Even orange carrots are man-made. Carrots
were originally white and purple, and the sweeter orange variety was created by Dutch horticulturalists in the sixteenth century
as a tribute to William I, Prince of Orange. An attempt by a British supermarket to reintroduce the traditional purple variety
in 2002 failed, because shoppers preferred the selectively bred orange sort.

All domesticated plants and animals are man-made technologies. What is more, almost all of the domesticated plants and animals
on which we now rely date back to ancient times. Most of them had been domesticated by 2000 B.C., and very few have been added
since. Of the fourteen large animals to have been domesticated only one, the reindeer, was domesticated in the past thousand
years; and it is of marginal value (tasty though it is). The same goes for plants: Blueberries, strawberries, cranberries,
kiwis, macadamia nuts, pecans, and cashews have all been domesticated relatively recently, but none is a significant foodstuff.

Only aquatic species have been domesticated in significant quantities in the past century. In short, early farmers managed
to domesticate most of the plants and animals worth bothering with many thousands of years ago. That may explain why domesticated
plants and animals are so widely assumed to be natural, and why contemporary efforts to refine them further using modern genetic-engineering
techniques attract such criticism and provoke such fear. Yet such genetic engineering is arguably just the latest twist in
a field of technology that dates back more than ten thousand years. Herbicide-tolerant maize does not occur in nature, it
is true—but nor does any other kind of maize.

The simple truth is that farming is profoundly unnatural. It has done more to change the world, and has had a greater impact
on the environment, than any other human activity. It has led to widespread deforestation, environmental destruction, the
displacement of “natural” wildlife, and the transplanting of plants and animals thousands of miles from their original habitats.
It involves the genetic modification of plants and animals to create monstrous mutants that do not exist in nature and often
cannot survive without human intervention. It overturned the hunter-gatherer way of life that had defined human existence
for tens of thousands of years, prompting humans to exchange a varied, leisurely existence of hunting-and-gathering for lives
of drudgery and toil. Agriculture would surely not be allowed if it were invented today. And yet, for all its faults, it is
the basis of civilization as we know it. Domesticated plants and animals form the very foundations of the modern world.

The Standard Professions List is a document from the dawn of civilization, inscribed in the characteristic wedge-shaped indentations
of cuneiform script on small clay tablets. The earliest versions, dating from around 3200 B.C., were found in the city of
Uruk (modern-day Erech) in Mesopotamia, the region where writing and cities first emerged. Many copies exist, since it was
a standard text that was used to teach scribes. The list consists of 129 professions, always written in the same order, with
the most important at the top. Entries include “supreme judge,” “mayor,” “sage,” “courtier,” and “overseer of the messengers,”
though the meaning of many entries is unknown. The list illustrates that the population of Uruk, probably the biggest city
on earth at the time, was stratified into different specialist professions, some more important than others. This was a big
change from the villages of farmers that had emerged in the region around five thousand years earlier. Food lay at the root
of this transformation.

The switch from small, egalitarian villages to big, socially stratified cities was made possible by an intensification of
agriculture in which part of the population produced more food than was needed for its own subsistence. This surplus food
could then be used to sustain others—so not everyone had to be a farmer anymore. In Uruk, only around 80 percent of the population
were farmers. They tended fields that surrounded the city in a vast circle, ten miles in radius. Their surplus production
was appropriated by a ruling elite at the top of society, which redistributed some of it and consumed the rest. This stratification
of society, made possible by agricultural food surpluses, happened not just in Mesopotamia but in every part of the world
where farming was adopted. It was the second important way in which food helped to transform the nature of human existence.
With agriculture, people settled down; with intensification, they divided into rich and poor, rulers and farmers.

The idea that people have different jobs or professions, and that some are richer than others, is taken for granted today.
But for most of human existence this was not the case. Most hunter-gatherers, and then early farmers, were of comparable wealth
and spent their days doing the same things as the other people in the same community. We are used to thinking of food as something
that brings people together, either literally around the table at a social gathering, or metaphor ical ly through a shared
regional or cultural cuisine. But food can also divide and separate. In the ancient world, food was wealth, and control of
food was power.

As with the adoption of farming, the changes in food production and the associated transformation of social structures took
place simultaneously and were intertwined. A ruling elite did not suddenly appear and demand that everyone else work harder
in the fields; nor did greater productivity produce a sudden surplus to be fought over, with the winner crowned king. Instead,
the abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle meant that previous constraints on individuals’ ability to amass goods and
cultivate prestige, both of which are frowned upon by hunter-gatherers, no longer applied. Even so, the emergence of more
complex societies took some time: In Mesopotamia, the shift from simple villages to complex cities took five millennia, and
it also took thousands of years in China and the Americas.

Control of food was power because food literally kept everything going, by feeding humans and animals. Appropriating the food
surplus from farmers gave ruling elites the means to sustain full-time scribes, soldiers, and specialist craft workers. It
also meant that a certain proportion of the population could be pressed into service on construction projects, since the farmers
who remained on the land would provide enough food for everyone. So a store of surplus food conferred upon its owner the power
to do all kinds of new things: wage wars, build temples and pyramids, and support the production of elaborate craft items
by specialist sculptors, weavers, and metalworkers. But to understand the origins of food power it is necessary to start by
examining the structure of hunter-gatherer societies, and to ask why people had previously regarded the accumulation of food
and power to be so dangerous and destabilizing—and why this changed.

Hunter-gatherers may only have had to spend two days a week foraging for things to eat, but their lives were nonetheless ruled
by food. Bands of hunter-gatherers have to be nomadic, moving every few weeks once the food resources within range of each
temporary camp start to become depleted. Every time the group moves, it has to take all of its possessions with it. The need
to carry everything limits individuals’ ability to accumulate material goods. An inventory by modern anthropologists of a
family of African hunter-gatherers, for example, found that they collectively owned a knife, a spear, bow and arrows, a wrist
guard, a net, baskets, an adze, a whistle, a flute, castanets, a comb, a belt, a hammer, and a hat. Few families in the developed
world could list all their possessions in a single short sentence. These items were, furthermore, collectively owned and freely
shared. Rather than having everyone carry his or her own knife or spear, it makes more sense to share such items, since some
people can then carry other things, such as nets or bows. Bands in which items were shared would have been more flexible and
more likely to survive than bands in which items were jealously guarded by individuals. So bands in which there was social
pressure to share things would have proliferated.

The obligation to share also extended to food. Modern hunter-gatherers often have a rule that anyone who brings food back
to the camp has to share it with anyone else who asks. This rule provides insurance against food shortages, for not everyone
can be sure to find enough food on a given day, and even the best hunters can only expect to kill an animal every few days.
If everyone is selfish and insists on keeping their own food to themselves, most people will be hungry most of the time. Sharing
ensures that the food supply is evened out and most people have enough to eat most of the time. Ethnographic evidence from
modern hunter-gatherers shows that some groups have even more elaborate rules to enforce sharing. In some cases a hunter is
not even allowed to help himself to food from his own kill (though a family member will ensure that some food is passed to
him indirectly). Similarly, trying to claim a patch of land, and its associated food resources, is not allowed. Such rules
ensure that the risks and rewards of hunting and gathering are shared throughout the group. Historically, bands that practiced
food sharing were more likely to survive than those that did not: Competition for resources tends to encourage overexploitation,
and ownership disputes would have caused bands to fragment. Once again, food sharing predominated because it conferred clear
advantages upon bands that adopted it.

All of this meant that hunter-gatherers did not try to accumulate status goods to enhance their personal prestige. Why bother,
since such goods would have had to have been shared with others? It is not until the advent of agriculture that the first
indications of wealth or private ownership appear. As one anthropologist noted, having observed hunter-gatherers in Africa:

A Bushman will go to any lengths to avoid making other Bushmen jealous of him, and for this reason the few possessions the
Bushmen have are constantly circling among members of their groups. No one cares to keep a particularly good knife long, even
though he may want it desperately, because he will become the object of envy; as he sits by himself polishing a fine edge
on the blade he will hear the soft voices of the other men in his band saying: “Look at him there, admiring his knife while
we have nothing.” Soon somebody will ask him for his knife, for everybody would like to have it, and he will give it away.
Their culture insists that they share with each other, and it has never happened that a Bushman failed to share objects, food
or water with other members of his band, for without very rigid co-operation Bushmen could not survive the famines and droughts
that the Kalahari offers them.

Hunter-gatherers are also suspicious of self-promotion and attempts to create obligation. The !Kung Bushmen, for example,
believe that the ideal hunter should be modest and understated. After returning from the hunt he must downplay his achievements,
even if he has killed a large animal. When the men go to fetch the kill, they then express their disappointment at its size:
“What, you made us come all this way for this bag of bones?” The hunter is expected to play along, and not to be offended.
All of this is intended to prevent the hunter from regarding himself as superior. As one !Kung Bushman explained to a visiting
ethnographer: “When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the
rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we
cool his heart and make him gentle.”

To further complicate matters, the !Kung have a tradition that the meat from a kill belongs to the owner of the arrow that
killed it, rather than the hunter who fired it. (If two or more arrows bring down the kill, the meat belongs to the owner
of the first arrow.) Since the men routinely exchange arrows, this makes grandstanding by individual hunters even less likely.
Particularly skilled hunters are thus prevented from cultivating prestige for themselves by conferring large amounts of food
on others and so creating an obligation.

Quite the opposite, in fact: When a hunter has had a run of good luck and produced a lot of food, he might stop hunting for
a few weeks in order to give others the chance to do well, and so avoid any possibility of resentment. Taking a few weeks
off also means the hunter can allow others to provide him with food, so that there is no question of an outstanding obligation
to him.

Richard Borshay Lee, a Canadian anthropologist who lived with a group of !Kung on several research trips during the 1960s,
ran afoul of these rules when he tried to thank his hosts by holding a feast for them. He bought a large, plump ox for the
purpose and was surprised when the Bushmen began to ridicule him for having chosen an animal that was too old, too thin, or
would be too tough to eat. In the event, however, the meat from the ox turned out to be tasty and tender after all. So why
had the Bushmen been so critical? “The !Kung are a fiercely egalitarian people and have a low tolerance for arrogance, stinginess
and aloofness among their own people,” Lee concluded. “When they see signs of such behaviour among their fellows, they have
a range of humility-enforcing devices to bring people back into line.” The !Kung, like other hunter-gatherers, regard lavish
gifts as an attempt to exert control over others, curry political support, or raise one’s own status, all of which run counter
to their culture. Their strict egalitarianism can be regarded as a “social technology” developed to ensure social harmony
and a reliable supply of food for everyone.

Food determines the structure of hunter-gatherer society in other ways, too. The size of hunter-gatherer bands, for example,
depends on the availability of food resources within walking distance of the camp. Too large a band depletes the surrounding
area more quickly, which makes it necessary to move the camp more often and means the band needs a larger territory. As a
result, band sizes vary between six to twelve people in areas where food is scarce and twenty-five to fifty people in areas
with more abundant resources. The bands consist of one or more extended families, and because of intermarriage most members
of the band are related to each other. Bands generally do not have leaders, though some people may have particular roles in
addition to the traditional male and female tasks of hunting and gathering, respectively, such as healing, making weapons,
or negotiating with other bands. But there are no full-time specialists, and these particular skills do not confer a higher
social status.

Hunter-gatherer bands maintain alliances with other bands, to provide both marriage partners and further insurance against
food shortages. In the event of a shortage one band can then visit another to which it is related by marriage and share some
of its food. Inter-group sharing in the form of large feasts also takes place at times of seasonal food overabundance. Such
feasts appear to be universal among hunter-gatherers and provide an opportunity to arrange marriages, perform social rituals,
sing, and dance. Food thus binds hunter-gatherer societies together, forging links both within bands and between bands.

That said, it is important not to over-romanticize the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The “discovery” of surviving hunter-gatherer
bands by Europeans in the eighteenth century led to the creation of the idealized portrait of the “noble savage” living in
an unspoiled Eden. When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed the doctrine of communism in the nineteenth century, they
were inspired in part by the “primitive communism” of hunter-gatherer societies described by Lewis H. Morgan, an American
anthropologist who studied Native American societies. But even though the hunter-gatherer life was more leisurely and egalitarian
than most people’s lives are today, it was not always idyllic. Infanticide was used as a means of population control, and
there was routine and widespread conflict between hunter-gatherer bands, with evidence of violent death and even cannibalism
in some cases. The notion that hunter-gatherers lived in a perfect and peaceful world is beguiling but wrong. Even so it is
clear that the structure of hunter-gatherer society, which was chiefly determined by the nature of the food supply, was strikingly
different from that of modern societies. So when people took up farming, and the nature of the food supply was transformed,
everything changed.