III. Let us now turn to the questions of when agriculture was introduced, the complexities of its introduction, and its implications for the future.
A. The introduction of agriculture, sometimes called the Neolithic revolution, was a crucial change in the human experience. Some would argue that, other than the emergence of the species itself, the development of agriculture and the later replacement of agricultural economies with industrial economies are the two key developments of the human experience.
B.Agriculture was invented in at least three separate places.
1. The first invention occurred in the northern Middle East/Black Sea region with domestication of wheat and barley.
2. The second invention occurred in South China and continental Southeast Asia around 7000 BCE with the introduction of rice.
3. The third invention was the domestication of corn, or maize, in Central America about 5000 BCE.
4. Agriculture may also have been invented in other places, including sub-Saharan Africa and northern China.
C. By 5000 BCE, agriculture had gradually spread and was becoming the most common economic system for the largest number of people in the world. Despite the advantages of agriculture over hunting and gathering, its widespread adoption was slow.
1.One reason for this slow spread was that contacts among relatively far-flung populations were minimal.
2. Not all regions were suitable for agriculture; some were heavily forested or arid.
3. An alternative economic system based on nomadic herding of animals prevailed for a long time over agriculture in the Middle East, Africa, the Americas, and Central Asia.
4.Agriculture involves settling down,which might not have been attractive to some hunting-and-gathering societies that treasured their capacity to move around.
IV. When agriculture was introduced, it brought massive changes in the human experience.
A. Agriculture involves more work, particularly for men, than hunting and gathering; thus, it redefined and increased the work expectations of human society.
B.Agriculture also redefined gender relations. In most hunting-and-gathering societies, men did the hunting and women did the gathering, but because both groups contributed to the food supply, women usually had some influence in society. In agricultural societies, however, patriarchal systems predominated.
1. The most obvious reason for the increase in male dominance was that agriculture both permitted and required an expansion of the birthrate.
2. Men increasingly assumed the role of principal cultivator of the crucial food crops, resulting in the development of patriarchal societies.
3. In hunting-and-gathering societies, children had few functions until they reached their early teens. In agricultural societies, childhood and work became more closely associated, and the idea of obedience tended to follow this shift.
V. The advent of agriculture raises interesting questions about human progress.
A.Despite what many of us learned in grade school, the adoption of agriculture had a number of drawbacks. In some cases, these drawbacks affected some groups willingness to adopt agriculture.
1.The first drawback is the introduction of new kinds of inequality, particularly between men and women.
2.The second is that agriculture allowed people to settle down into clustered communities, which exposedthe inhabitants to increased incidences of epidemic disease.
3.The third is that agricultural societies altered the local environment in a way that hunting-and-gathering societies did not do, to the extent of damaging and even destroying a regional environment and the communities that existed there.
B.The advantages of agriculture, however, allowed it to spread.
1.One not entirely frivolous theory toexplain this spread is that agriculture allowed the growth of products that could be fermented to create alcohol.
2.More systematically, agriculture significantly improved food supplies, which in turn allowed families to have more children and resulted in population expansion.
3.These conditions prevailed for a long time, between about 9000 BCE until 300 to 400 years ago.
C.Agricultural economies were constrained by limitations in the amount of food that a given worker could generate. Even the most advanced agricultural economies required about 80 percent of the population to be engaged primarily in agriculture, which limited the amount of taxation that could be levied and limited the size of cities to no more than 20 percent of the populationa crucial feature to remember about agricultural societies in general.
D.Agricultural societies also generated cultural emphases, especially by encouraging new attention to the spring season and to divine forces responsible for creation.
E.The crucial features of agriculture were its role in population increase and its capacity to generate discernible surpluses, which freed at least some people to do other things, such as manufacturing pottery. As we will see in the next lecture, manufacturing could lead to yet additional developments in the human experience, including the emergence of cities and advancements in other areas of technology.
-Peter Stearns, "A Brief History of the World" Guidebook 1, p. 9, 10, 11
F. It is a mistake to think our ancestors were unsophisticated.
1. To survive using Stone Age technologies, they needed detailed scientific knowledge of their environments, accumulated through millennia of collective learning and stored in stories and myths.
2. Southwestern Tasmania was one of the most remote environments on Earth in the Paleolithic era. Yet modern archaeological studies of Kutikina Cave, which was occupied from 35,000 years ago to perhaps 13,000 years ago, have revealed hundreds of stone tools, ancient hearths, delicate spear points of wallaby bone, and knives made from natural glass (Mithen, After the Ice, pp. 30607). The first Tasmanians exploited their environment with great efficiency.
-David Christian, "Big History" Guidebook 1, p. 63
B. To many, it may seem obvious that Paleolithic lifeways were harsh, brutal, and unpleasant. Yet in 1972, American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins wrote a famous article, The Original Affluent Society, in which he questioned these assumptions. Sahlins argued that in some ways Paleolithic life was not too bad.
1. Being nomadic, people had little desire to accumulate goods. This, he describes as the Zen path to abundance: a feeling that everything you need is all around you.
2. Diets were often healthy and varied.
3. Modern studies of foraging societies suggest that people often survived on just 3 - 6 hours of work a day.
4. Because there was little accumulated wealth, Paleolithic societies were more egalitarian than those of today (though this does not mean there were no conflicts between individuals, or divisions by age, lineage, and gender).
C. On the other hand, studies of Paleolithic skeletons suggest that most people died young, usually from physical trauma of some kind.
D. Sahlins may have overstated the case, and we can be sure that someone reared in a modern society would struggle to survive in a Paleolithic society. Nevertheless, Sahlinss article reminds us that we should not
assume without question that history is a story of progress.
-Ibid.
2. Agriculture did not necessarily improve living standards, which is why many foragers who knew about farming rejected it. Archaeological evidence suggests they may have been right, for many early farmers suffered from poor health and nutrition. This idea encourages us to look for push rather than pull explanations, for factors that forced people to take up agriculture whether they wanted to or not.
-Ibid. p. 72
V. How well did the first farmers live? Did agriculture necessarily mean progress?
A. We saw in Lecture Twenty-Two that, by some criteria, Paleolithic foragers lived quite well.
B. The evidence on early farmers is mixed.
1. The first generation or two probably lived well, enjoying improved food supplies.
2. However, within a few generations, population growth created problems that nomadic foragers had never faced. Sedentary villages attracted vermin and rubbish, and diseases spread more easily with a larger pool of potential victims to infect, particularly after the introduction of domesticated animals, which passed many of their parasites on to humans. Studies of human bones from early Agrarian communities hint at new forms of stress, caused by the intense labor of harvest times, or by periodic crop failures, which became more common because farmers generally relied on a more limited range of foodstuffs than foragers. Periodic shortages may explain why skeletons seem to get shorter in early Agrarian villages.
3. On the other hand, early Agrarian communities were probably fairly egalitarian. Relative equality is apparent even in large sites such as Catal Huyuk, where buildings are similar in size, though differences in burials show there were some, possibly hereditary, differences in wealth.
VI. The early Agrarian era transformed a world of foragers into a world of peasant farmers. Within these denser communities new forms of complexity would begin to emerge. Yet by some criteria, living standards may have declined. Complexity does notnecessarily mean progress!
-Ibid. p. 75
By modern standards, Paleolithic and early Agrarian communities were simple and egalitarian. However, during the early Agrarian era, institutionalized hierarchies began to appear, dividing communities by gender, wealth, ethnicity, lineage, and power. About 5,000 years ago there appeared the first tribute-taking states. These were controlled by elites who extracted labor and resources, partly through the threat of organized force, just as farmers extracted ecological rents from their domesticated plants and animals. The appearance of states was a momentous transition in human history.
-Ibid. p. 77
V. Now we return to the early Agrarian era to trace how power structures became more significant and more institutionalized. It will help to imagine two distinct ways of mobilizing power. Though intertwined in reality, we can distinguish them analytically.
A. Power from below is power conceded more or less willingly by individuals or groups who expect to benefit from subordination to skillful leaders. People expect something in return for subordination, so power from below is a mutualistic form of symbiosis. As societies became largerand denser, leadership became more important in order to achieve group goals, such as the building of irrigation systems or defense in war.
1. Familiar modern examples of power from below include the election of club or team officials or captains.
2. When we think of power as legitimate (e.g., the right to tax in a democratic society), we are generally thinking of it as power from below, even if it is backed by the threat of force.
B. Power from above depends on the capacity to make credible threats of coercion. That depends on the existence of disciplined groups of coercers, loyal to the leader and able to enforce the leaders will by force when necessary. In such an environment, people obey because they will be punished if they do not. This aspect of power highlights the coercive (or parasitic) element in power relationships.
1. The existence of jails, police, and armiesis evidence that such power exists.
2. Yet no state can depend entirely on coercion becausemaintaining an apparatus of coercion is costly and depends on maintaining the willing support of the coercers. No individual can single-handedly coerce millions of others.
C. In practice, the two forms of power are intertwined in complex ways. Protection rackets, for example, offer a service. Yet it is often the racket itself that is the likely source of danger, so does the payment of protection money count as a form of power from below or above?
D. Building coercive groups is complex and costly, and the earliest forms of power emerged before such groups existed. That is why the first power elites depended mainly on power from below.
-Ibid. P. 78