Farming and the Emergence of Complex Societies
10,000 - 1000 BCE
This Big Era and the Three Essential Questions
About 12,000 years ago our species began to move in a new
direction. For the first time, humans began to produce food
systematically and hunt or collect it in the wild. The emergence
of farming and the far-reaching social and cultural changes
that came with it sets this Big Era apart from the first two.
From one perspective, the advent of farming was a slow, fragmented
process. It happened independently in several different parts
of the world at different times. It occurred as a result of
people making thousands of minute decisions about food production
without anyone being conscious that humans were 'inventing
agriculture.' And even though some people started farming,
others continued for thousands of years to live entirely on
wild resources or to combine crop growing with hunting and
gathering.
From another perspective we might argue that agriculture
took the world by storm. The paleolithic era of human and
hominid tool making went on for about 2,000,000 years. Farming
settlements, however, appeared on all the major landmasses
except Australia within a mere 8,000 years. Hunting-gathering
societies may have retreated gradually, but today they have
all but disappeared.
Precisely defined, farming
is a set of interrelated technical processes for producing
food. Agriculture
is a more comprehensive term indicating a whole way of living.
The emergence of societies based on agriculture, that is,
agrarian
societies, involved a complex interplay of plants, animals,
topography, climate, and weather with human tools, techniques,
social habits, and cultural understandings.
The fundamental technical element of this interplay was domestication,
the ability to alter the genetic makeup of plants and animals
to make them more useful to humans. Scholars have traditionally
labeled the early millennia of agriculture the Neolithic
Age, that is, New Stone Age, because a more varied and
sophisticated kit of stone tools appeared in tandem with the
emergence of farming.
Systematic food production contributed hugely to the amazing
biological success of homo sapiens. In the introduction to
Big Era Two, we introduced the concept of extensification.
This is the idea that in paleolithic times humans multiplied
and flourished by spreading thinly across all the major land
masses of the world, excepting Antarctica, and by adapting
to a wide range of environments, from equatorial forests to
Arctic tundra.
In Big Era Three, however, a process of intensification
got under way. This meant that by producing resources from
domesticated plants and animals human communities could settle
and thrive on a given land area in much greater numbers and
density than ever before.
The consequences of intensification were astonishing. In
the 9,000 years of Big Era Three, world population rose from
about 6 million to about 120 million, a change involving a
much faster rate of increase than in the previous eras. Such
growth, in turn, required unprecedented experiments in human
organization and ways of thinking.
Humans and the Environment
Scholars generally agree that hunter-gatherers of the paleolithic
enjoyed, at least much of the time, sufficient food supplies,
adequate shelter, and shorter daily working hours than most
adults have today. Humans did not, therefore, consciously
take up crop-growing and animal-raising because they thought
they would have a more secure and satisfying life.
When some communities in certain places made the transition
to farming, they did it incrementally over centuries or even
millennia, and they had no clear vision that they were dropping
one whole way of life for another. If we can speak of an 'agricultural
revolution,' we would also have to say that humans backed
slowly into it.
The 'Great Thaw'
The coming of agrarian societies was almost certainly connected
to the waning of the last Ice Age, that is, the period, beginning
about 15,000 years ago, when glaciers shrank and both sea
levels and global temperatures rose. In several parts of the
Northern Hemisphere rainfall increased significantly. This
period of 5,000 to 7,000 years was the prelude to the Holocene,
the climatic epoch that spans the past 10,000 years or so
and that continues today. Rising seas drowned low-lying coastal
shelves as well as land bridges that had previously connected,
notably, Siberia to Alaska and Australia and Papua New Guinea
to the islands of Indonesia
One consequence of this 'great thaw' -- and an important
characteristic of our planet in Big Eras Three, Four, and
Five--was the dividing of the world into three distinct zones,
whose human populations, as well as other land-bound animals
and plants, had very limited contact with one another. These
zones were 1) Afroeurasia and adjacent islands; 2) the Americas;
and 3) Australia and Papua New Guinea.
From about 4000 B.C.E., a fourth distinct zone, the Pacific
Ocean basin and its island populations, began to emerge. Though
humans rarely had contact between one zone and another (until
about 1500 C.E.), they interacted within each one more
or less intensively, depending on patterns of geography, climate,
and changing historical circumstances.
A second consequence of the great thaw was that across much
of the Northern Hemisphere warmer, rainier, ice-free conditions
permitted forests, meadowlands, and small animal populations
to flourish. The natural bounty was so great in some localities
that human bands stayed in one place all or part of the year
to forage and hunt. That is, they became sedentary,
settled in hamlets or villages rather than moving from camp
to camp. For example, in the relatively well-watered part
of Southwest Asia we call the Fertile
Crescent, groups began somewhere between 10,000 and 13,000
years ago to found tiny settlements in order to collect plentiful
stands of wild grain and other edible plants and animals.
Systematic Domestication
In time these groups took up the habit of protecting their
wild grain fields against weeds, drought, and birds. Eventually
they started broadcasting edible plant seeds onto new ground
to increase the yield. Finally, they began selecting and planting
seeds from individual plants that seemed most desirable for
their size, taste, and nutrition. In other words, humans learned
how to control and manipulate the reproduction of plants that
were bigger, tastier, more nutritious, and easier to grow,
harvest, store, and cook than wild food plants were. Systematic
domestication was under way!
In the Fertile Crescent key domesticates included
the ancestors of wheat, barley, rye, and several other edible
plants. Selecting and breeding particular animals species—
sheep, goats, cattle, pigs—that were good to eat and
easy to manage occurred in a similar way.
In effect, humans were grooming the natural
environment to reduce the organisms they did not want (weeds
or predatory wolves, for example) and to increase the number
of organisms they did want (grains, legumes, wool-bearing
sheep, good guard dogs).
Co-Dependency
Eventually, plant-growing and animal-raising communities
became 'co-dependent' with their domesticates. That is, they
came to rely on these genetically altered species to survive.
In turn, domesticated plants and animals were so changed that
they would thrive only if humans took care of them.
The great advantage of co-dependency was that a community
could rely fairly predictably on a given square kilometer
of land to produce good, increasing, even surplus yields of
hardy, tasty food. Populations of both humans and their domesticates
tended to grow accordingly. On the darker side, co-dependency
was a kind of trap: a farming community, which had to huddle
together in a crowded village and labor long hours in the
fields, could not go back to a hunting-gathering way of life
even if it wanted to.
Environmental Impact
The Fertile Crescent was an early incubator of agriculture,
but it was by no means the only one. Between 12,000 and 3,000
BCE, similar processes involving a great variety of domesticates
occurred in several different parts of the world.
The intensification in population densities
and economic productivity that farming permitted also spurred
humans to intervene in the natural and physical environment
as never before. As farmers cleared more land, planted more
crops, and pastured more animals, they enhanced their species'
biological success. That is, there occurred a positive feedback
cycle of ever-increasing population and productivity that
looked something like this:
Beginning about 6,000 B.C.E., intensification
in particular parts of the world moved to a level that required
radical innovations in the way humans lived and worked.
Early Societies
First in the Tigris-Euphrates and Nile River valleys, then
the Indus valley, and later in China's Huang River valley
and a few other regions, societies emerged that were far larger
and denser than the farming communities of the neolithic period.
We refer to these big concentrations of people as complex
societies, or, more traditionally, civilizations.
Their most conspicuous characteristic was cities.
Early cities were centers of agricultural production, manufacturing,
social experimentation, cultural creativity, and highly organized
political and military power. Building and preserving them,
however, required drastic alterations of the local environment
to produce sufficient food, building materials, and sources
of energy. The price of this intervention was high. Dense
urban societies were extremely vulnerable to changes in weather,
climate, disease conditions, wood supplies, and trade links
to distant regions.
Therefore both before and after the appearance of complex
societies, deliberate human efforts to manipulate and control
the natural environment beneficially also produced a negative
feedback cycle.
Deforestation and consequent erosion threatened periodic
food shortages and social conflict.
Habitation in densely packed villages and cities, which brought
humans in close contact with disease-carrying animals, resulted
in greater vulnerability to epidemics.
In the cases of some complex societies these problems led
to economic, demographic, or political collapse. In others,
however, they stimulated social and economic innovations to
improve conditions or stave off disaster.
Humans and Other Humans
The intensification of population and production that came
with Big Era Three obliged humans to experiment with new forms
of social organization. The customs and rules that governed
social relationships in a hunting band of twenty-five or thirty
people were no longer close to adequate.
The permanent farming settlements that multiplied in Afroeurasia
in the early millennia of the era numbered as few as several
dozen people to as many, in the case of Catal Huyuk in Turkey,
as 10,000. These communities had to work together in more
complicated ways and on a larger scale than was the case in
hunter-gatherer bands.
Even so, social relations may not have changed greatly from
hunter-gatherer days. Men and women probably continued to
treat each other fairly equally. No one had a full-time job
other than farming. Some individuals no doubt became leaders
because they were strong or intelligent. No individual or
group, however, had formal power to lord it over the rest.
Early Societies
Only after about 4,000 B.C.E. did truly staggering changes
occur in social customs and institutions. The complex societies
that arose in the Tigris-Euphrates, Nile, and Indus valleys,
and somewhat later in other regions, were cauldrons of intensification.
That is, people lived and worked together in much larger,
denser communities than had ever existed. These societies
shared a number of fundamental characteristics, which we generally
associate with civilizations:
Cities arose, the early ones varying somewhat in form
and function. By 2,250 B.C.E., there were about eight cities
in the world that had 30,000 or more inhabitants. By 1200
B.C.E. about sixteen cities were that big.
Some people took up full-time specialized occupations
and professions (artisans, merchants, soldiers, priests,
and so on) rather than spending most of their time collecting,
producing, or processing food.
A hierarchy of social classes appeared in which some men
and women—the elite class—had more wealth, power,
and privilege than did others. Also, men became dominant
over women in political and social life, leading to patriarchy.
The state, that is, a centralized system of government
and command, was invented. This meant that a minority group—kings,
queens, high officials, priests, generals—exercised
control over the labor and social behavior of everyone else.
Complex exchanges of food and other products took place
within the complex society, and lines of trade connected
the society to neighbors near and far.
Technological innovations multiplied, and each new useful
invention tended to suggest several others.
Monumental building took place—city walls, temples,
palaces, public plazas, and tombs of rulers.
A system of writing, or at least a complex method of record-keeping,
came into use.
Spiritual belief systems, public laws, and artistic expressions
all became richer and more complex.
Creative individuals collaborated with the ruling class
to lay the foundations of astronomy, mathematics, and chemistry,
as well as civil engineering and architecture.
A society did not have to exhibit every one of these characteristics
to qualify as a civilization. The checklist is less important
than the fact that all these social, cultural, economic, and
political elements interacted dynamically with one another.
The synergism among them made the society complex, that is,
made it recognizable as a civilization.
Specialized Societies
From about the fourth millennium B.C.E., Afroeurasia, one
of the three major interacting 'worlds,' saw a new type of
society and economy in parts of the Great
Arid Zone, the belt of dry and semi-arid land that extends
across Afroeurasia. Here, communities began to organize themselves
around a specialized way of life based on herding domesticated
animals, whether sheep, cattle, horses, or camels.
Known as pastoral
nomadism, this economic system permitted humans to adapt
in larger numbers than ever before to climates where intensive
farming was not possible. Because these societies were mobile,
not permanently settled, they expressed social relationships
not so much in terms of where people lived but rather in terms
of kinship, that is, who was related by 'blood' to whom—closely,
distantly, or not at all.
In the latter part of Big Era Three we see emerging an important
long-term and recurring pattern in history: cycles of encounter,
involving both peaceful exchanges and violent clashes, between
agrarian peoples and pastoral nomads of Inner Eurasia, the
Sahara Desert, and other sectors of the Great Arid Zone.
An early example is the far-reaching social and political
change that occurred in the second and first millennia B.C.E.
as a result of large-scale migrations of pastoral peoples
of Inner Eurasia into the agrarian, urbanized regions of Southwest
Asia, India, and Europe.
Also, though pastoral societies were never as populous as
agrarian civilizations, their mobility permitted them to provide
crucial links of communication and trade among several of
these civilizations, thus encouraging the growth of large
networks of exchange. In Big Era Three these networks were
not yet to be found in the Americas or Australia.
Humans and Ideas
It was in Big Era Two that homo sapien evolved its capacity
for language. This wondrous skill meant that humans could
engage in collective
learning, not only sharing information and ideas from
one community to another, sometimes across great distances,
but also passing an ever-increasing stockpile of knowledge
from one generation to the next.
In Big Era Three, world population started growing at a faster
rate than ever before, the size and density of communities
expanded, and networks of communication by land and sea became
more extensive and sophisticated. Along with these developments
came, as we might well expect, an intensification in the flow
of information and a general speed-up in the accumulation
of knowledge of all kinds.
One example is religious knowledge. In the early millennia
of Big Era Three certain ideas, practices, and artistic expressions
centered on the worship of female deities spread widely along
routes of trade and migration to embrace a large part of western
Eurasia.
Another example is the idea and technology of writing, which
emerged first, as far as we know, in either Egypt or Mesopotamia
and spread widely from there to the eastern Mediterranean
and probably India.
A third example is the horse-drawn chariot, which may have
first appeared in the Inner Eurasia steppe and within less
than a thousand years spread all across Eurasia from western
Europe to China.
Cultural Exchange
Within complex societies, such as those that emerged in
the great river valleys, the interchange of information and
ideas tended to be so intense that each society developed
a distinct cultural style. We can discern it today in the
surviving remnants of buildings, art objects, written texts,
tools, and other material remains.
We should, however, keep two ideas in mind. One is that all
complex societies were invariably changing, rather than possessing
timeless, static cultural traits. The style of a civilization
changed from one generation to the next because cultural expressions
and values were invariably bound up with both the natural
environment and the universe of economic, social, and political
relations, which were continuously changing as well.
The second point is that early civilizations were not culturally
self-contained. All of them developed and changed as they
did partly because of their connections to other societies
near and far, connections that played themselves out in trade,
migration, war, and cultural exchange.
