Cannibals and Kings (5 page)

It seems clear that the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna triggered the shift to an agricultural mode of
production in both the Old and New Worlds. But the two sequences involve crucial differences vital to the understanding of all subsequent human history. Tehuacán Valley villages were not built until several thousand years after the first plants were domesticated. And this was generally the sequence throughout the Americas. (Villages in Peru may have been built by sea-mammal hunters in more remote times, but these did not play a role in the main sequence of cultural evolution.) In the Old World the sequence was reversed. People built villages first and then, 2,000 years later, domesticated the wild plants whose seeds they had been collecting. To understand this difference, let us take a closer look at the two best-known regions: first the Middle East and then Mesoamerica (Central America and Mexico).

The earliest Middle Eastern villages are now known to have been built in conjunction with a mode of subsistence that involved gathering the seeds of wild barley, wheat, and other grasses. These seeds ripen during a three-week period in the late spring. Stands of wild wheat still grow thick enough in Anatolia for an individual using a flint-bladed sickle to harvest over two pounds of grain per hour—or for a family of experienced plant collectors to gather as much grain during a three-week period as they would need for a whole year. The “broad spectrum” hunter-collectors built the first permanent villages to provide a place for storing the grain, grinding it into flour, and converting it into cakes or porridge. Their houses, walls, storage pits, roasting ovens (for cracking the husks), and heavy grinders (for making the flour) were investments that, unlike temporary campsites, could not easily be given up.

At Mount Carmel in Israel, for example, eleventh-millennium
B.C
. prehistoric hunter-collectors known as
Natufians carved out basin-shaped depressions at the front of their rock shelters, laid courses of stone pavement, and built rings of stone around permanent hearths. In the Jordan River Valley, at the 12,000-year-old site of Mallaha, seed eaters made stone foundations for round houses and plastered storage pits. Flint “sickles,” which acquired a telltale sheen from cutting the stalks of wild grains, have also been found at these sites. There is similar evidence, dating back to 10,000–8000
B.C.
, of preagricultural grain-cutting and grain-roasting or grain-storing village life at Zawi Chemi Shanidar in Iraq along the upper drainage of the Tigris River and at Karim Shahir on the flanks of the Zagros Mountains. At Tell Mureybat, at the headwaters of the Euphrates River in Syria, archaeologists have found 10,000-year-old clay-walled houses, grinding stones, roasting pits, and eighteen separate types of wild seeds including the ancestors of wheat and barley.

The New World sequence was very different. The earliest New World domesticated plants, those found by MacNeish in the Tehuacán Valley, are about 9,000 years old. Primitive forms of maize with a small cob containing only two or three rows of kernels were being grown about 7,000 years ago. Yet it was not until 5,400 years ago that the inhabitants of the Tehuacán Valley built permanent houses. And even then the houses were inhabited only part of the year, since semimigratory collecting continued to furnish 50 percent of the plants used for food.

Incidentally, the long but peculiarly different sequence of steps and the entirely different set of plants involved in the incipient phases of agriculture in the Old and New worlds should lay to rest once and for all the hoary notion that one development was derived from the other. If people from the Middle East somehow
managed to get to Tehuacán 9,000 years ago, they came empty-handed and were obviously not very helpful. The American Indians still had to spend several thousand additional years improving and expanding their own inventory of crops. Some die-hard diffusionists—scholars who believe that it was unlikely for something as complex as agriculture to have been developed independently more than once—attempt to get around the absence of wheat, barley, rye, or any other Old World food plants or domesticated animals in Mesoamerica by proposing that the
idea
of crops was transmitted and not the crops themselves. Yet I have already shown that what keeps hunter-collectors from switching over to agriculture is not ideas but cost/benefits. The idea of agriculture is useless when you can get all the meat and vegetables you want from a few hours of hunting and collecting per week.

I think the reason why the two sequences were different is that different kinds of plant and animal communities existed in the Old and New worlds after the big game were destroyed. In the Middle East the combination of animals and plants was such that, by settling down in villages, the “broad spectrum” hunter-collectors could increase their consumption of both meat and food plants. But in Mesoamerica to settle down in permanent seed-collecting villages was to do without meat.

The zones in which Middle Eastern agriculture arose happened to contain not only wheat, barley, peas, and lentils in a wild state but also the precursors of domesticated sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle. When permanent preagricultural settlements were built in the middle of dense fields of grain, herds of wild sheep and goats—whose major source of food was wild grasses, including the ancestors of wheat and barley—were forced into closer contact with the villagers. Aided by dogs, villagers
could bring the movement of these herds under control. The sheep and goats were kept on the margins of the grain fields and were allowed to eat the stubble but not the ripening grain. In other words, the hunters no longer had to go to the animals; the animals, attracted by the fields of concentrated foodstuff, came to the hunters.

The ripening grain could have been so irresistible, in fact, that the animals threatened to destroy the crops. This gave the hunters a double incentive as well as a double opportunity to intensify their production of meat, thereby threatening sheep and goats with overkill and extinction. And that is probably what would have happened to these species, like so many before them, were it not for the advent of domestication—the greatest conservation movement of all times.

The actual steps by which the animals were saved from extinction could have been simple. Many modern-day hunter-collectors and village horticulturalists keep animals as pets. Just as it was not lack of knowledge about plants that delayed the development of farming, so was it not lack of knowledge about animals that prevented earlier cultures from raising large numbers of sheep and goats as pets and making use of them for food and other economic benefits. The principal limitation was rather that human populations would soon run out of wild plant foods for themselves if they had to feed captive animal populations. But the cultivation of grains opened new possibilities. Sheep and goats thrive on stubble and other inedible portions of domesticated plants. They could be penned, fed on stubble, and milked and slaughtered selectively. Animals that were too aggressive or too delicate, or that grew too slowly, would have been eaten before they reached reproductive age.

This theory explains why the domestication of plants and animals occurred at the same times and places in the Old World. Both domestications were part of a general region-wide intensification which laid the basis for the emergence of a new production system. At Zawi Chemi Shanidar, one of the earliest villages in Iraq, domesticated sheep were present almost 11,000 years ago. Evidence of domesticated goats dating back 9,500 to 9,000 years, has been found at Ali Kosh in Iran, along with domesticated varieties of wheat, barley, and oats. Archaeologists have identified the same complex—domesticated plants and animals—at Jarmo in Iraq with a date of 8,800 years ago.

Now, back to Mesoamerica. Like their near-contemporaries in the Middle East, the “broad spectrum” hunter-collectors of the Ajuereado period in Tehuacán made good use of grains, two of which—amaranth and maize—were later domesticated. MacNeish notes that seed collection had labor efficiencies comparable to agriculture and that, like agriculture, it provided harvests that could be stored. Why, then, didn’t the people of Tehuacán settle down near the wild stands of amaranth or corn? Was it because they lacked geniuses to tell them how to do it? Or was it, as one archaeologist has suggested, because of mysterious “changes in sociopolitical organization which had nothing to do with either climate or population density”? These are poor alternatives given the glaring differences between the remnant animal species in Mexico and those in the Middle East. The domestication of animals in Tehuacán did not keep pace step by step with the domestication of amaranth and corn for the simple reason that all domesticable herd animals had become locally extinct as a result of climatological changes and overkill. If they wanted to eat meat, the people of Tehuacán
needed to move about freely in response to the seasonal habits of their prey—mostly woodland deer, rabbits, turtles, and other small animals and birds. Hence their reluctance to invest the kind of effort the Near Eastern seed gatherers put into their houses, roasting pits, and storage facilities. And hence their postponement of full village life until they had depleted even the smaller animals long after they had domesticated many species of plants.

I am not saying that Mesoamerica was entirely devoid of domesticable species. Toward the end of the Tehuacán sequence, dogs and turkeys were being raised for food. But the dietary potential of these animals was insignificant compared to the Old World grass-eating ruminants. Dogs can be significant sources of protein only if they are raised as scavengers, and turkeys compete with human beings for grains. The only New World animals comparable to sheep and goats were llamas and alpacas, which survived exclusively in South America and could play no role in the formative phases of Mesoamerican village life.

South American Indians did, of course, eventually domesticate llamas, alpacas, and guinea pigs (also absent from Mesoamerica). These animals served as an important source of meat for Andean peoples from about 2500
B.C.
onwards. Not enough is known about the incipient phases of agriculture in the Andes to explain why preagricultural villages based on seed gathering and semidomesticated llama-alpaca hunting did not occur. One possibility is that the llama and alpaca were very difficult to breed in captivity. Their closest wild relative, the vicuña, whose wool is much sought-after, cannot be domesticated because the animal refuses to go through its elaborate courtship ritual when it is confined. Another posibility is that wild stands of quinoa
were not productive enough to serve as an inducement to build a village next to them. But this question cannot be answered without additional research.

The depletion of animal resources in the zones where New World agriculture developed had far-reaching consequences. It set the two hemispheres on divergent trajectories and imparted to each a different pace of development. This explains why it was that Columbus “discovered” America and Powhatan did not “discover” Europe, that Cortés conquered Moctezuma rather than the other way around. In the Old World the domestication of sheep and goats was followed rapidly by that of pigs, cattle, camels, donkeys, and horses. These animals were incorporated into the agricultural system and provided the basis for additional technological advances. In fully sedentary villages, grains could be diverted to feed donkeys and oxen, which could be harnessed to help pull plows and other heavy objects. Loads were hauled first on sleds, then on rollers, and finally on wheels. This led to increasingly efficient transport and, more important, laid the foundation for mechanical engineering and hence for all complex machines. In the New World the wheel was invented by the American Indians, perhaps for making pottery and certainly as a toy, but its further development was halted by the lack of animals suitable for hauling heavy loads. Llamas and alpacas were worthless as a source of traction, and the bison, hard to tame in any case, lived outside the nuclear areas of incipient farming and state formation. Failure to develop the technology of the wheel meant that the New World was left far behind in all lifting, hauling, milling, and manufacturing processes in which pulleys, gears, cogs, and screws play an essential role.

The different faunal endowments of the two hemispheres
at the end of the Pleistocene overkill had other consequences as well. Patterns of political economy, religion, and food preferences in both hemispheres cannot be understood without taking into account the role of domestic animals as a source of animal protein. These subjects will be taken up in later chapters.

What I have shown so far is that the emergence of village life was a response to the depletions brought about when the hunting-collecting mode of subsistence was intensified. But in the Middle East, once the investment was made in grain-processing and grain-storage facilities, the improved standards of living and the abundance of both calories and proteins made it extremely difficult not to tolerate or encourage population expansion. Medium-protein, high-calorie diets reduced the effectiveness of prolonged lactation as a means of contraception; women were more sedentary and could take care of a new baby as well as a three- or four-year-old; agricultural tasks sponged up child labor; and villages could expand into virgin lands. Beginning with 100,000 people in 8000
B.C.
, the population of the Middle East probably reached 3.2 million shortly before 4000
B.C.
—a fortyfold increase in 4,000 years. This increase entailed renewed pressures on living standards, starting a new round of intensification and a new cycle of depletions. Forest resources proved particularly vulnerable to the increase in domestic animals. Large areas reverted to scrub, and soils began to erode. Meat once again became scarce, nutritional standards fell, diseases transmitted by domestic animals increased, reproductive pressure soared, and the whole region stood on the threshold of enormous new transformations which would affect every aspect of life. And all this did not take place without another cost which I have yet to discuss: the cost of increased warfare.