The Great Divide Read online

  For the Old World, then, the location and timing of agriculture is understood, as are the plants and animals on which it was based. Further, there is a general agreement among palaeobiologists that domestication was invented only once and then spread to western Europe and India. Whether it also spread as far afield as South East Asia and central Africa is still a moot point.

  Much more controversial, however, are the reasons for why agriculture developed, why it developed then, and why it developed where it did. It is also a more interesting question than it looks when you consider the fact that the hunter-gathering mode is actually quite an efficient way of leading one’s life. Ethnographic evidence among hunter-gatherer tribes still in existence shows that they typically need to ‘work’ only three or four or five hours a day in order to provide for themselves and their kin. Why, therefore, would one change such a set of circumstances for something different where one has to work far harder? In addition, reliance on grain imposed a far more monotonous diet on early humans than they had been used to in the time of hunting and gathering. Again, why the change?17

  The most basic of the economic arguments stems from the fact that, as has already been mentioned, some time between 14000 and 10000 BP, the world suffered a major climatic change. This was partly a result of the end of the Ice Age which had the twin effects of raising sea levels and, in the warmer climate, encouraging the spread of forests. These two factors ensured that, in a world with as yet no metal tools, the amount of open land shrank quite dramatically, segmenting formerly open ranges into smaller units. The reduction of open ranges encouraged territoriality and people began to protect and propagate local fields and herds. A further aspect of this set of changes was that the climate became increasingly arid, and the seasons became more pronounced, a circumstance which encouraged the spread of wild cereal grasses and the movement of peoples from one environment to the next, in search of both plants and animal flesh. There was more climatic variety in areas which had mountains, coastal plains, higher plains and rivers. This accounts for the importance of the Fertile Crescent.

  Mark Nathan Cohen is the most prominent advocate of the theory that there was a population crisis in prehistory and that it was this which precipitated the evolution of agriculture. Among the evidence he marshals to support his argument is the fact that agriculture is not easier than hunter-gathering, that there is a ‘global coincidence’ in the simultaneous extinction of megafauna, the big mammals which provided so much protein for early humans, a further coincidence that domestication emerged at the end of the Pleistocene age, when the world warmed up and people became much more mobile, and that the cultivation of wild species, before agriculture proper, encouraged the birth of more children. It is well known, as has been pointed out, that nomads and hunter-gatherers control the number of children by not weaning them for two years. This limits the size of a group that is continually on the move. After the development of sedentism, however, this was no longer necessary, and resulted, says Cohen, in a major population explosion. Evidence for a population crisis in antiquity can be inferred, he says, from the number of new zones exploited for food, the change in diet, from plants which need less preparation to those which need more, the change in diet from larger animals to smaller (because larger ones were extinct), the increasing proportion of remains of people who are malnourished, and smaller than hunter-gatherers, with shorter life-spans, the specialisation of artefacts which had evolved to deal with rare animals and plants, the increased use of fire, for cooking otherwise inedible foodstuffs, the increased use of aquatic resources, the fact that many plants, though available as food in deep antiquity, were not harvested until around 12000 BP, that grass (cereals) is a low priority in food terms, and so on and so on.18 For Cohen, therefore, the agricultural revolution was not, in and of itself, a liberation for early humans. It was instead a holding action to cope with the crisis of overpopulation. Far from being an inferior form of life, the hunter-gatherers had been so successful they had filled up the world, insofar as their lifestyle allowed, and there was no place to turn.19

  It is another attractively simple hypothesis but there are problems with it. One of the strongest criticisms comes from Les Groube, who is the advocate of a rival theory. According to Groube, who is based in France, it is simply not true that the world of deep antiquity was in a population crisis, or certainly not a crisis of overpopulation. His argument is the opposite, that the relatively late colonisation of Europe and the Americas argues for a fairly thinly populated Earth. For Groube, as people moved out of Africa into colder environments, there would have been fewer problems with disease, simply because, from a microbial point of view, the colder regions were safer, healthier. For many thousands of years, therefore, early people would have suffered fewer diseases in such places as Europe and Siberia, as compared with Africa. But then, around 25,000–15,000 years ago, an important coincidence took place. The world started to warm up, and humans reached the end of the Old World – meaning that, in effect, the known world was ‘full’ of people. There was still plenty of food but, as the world warmed up, many of the parasites on humans were also able to move out of Africa. In short, what had previously been tropical diseases became temperate diseases as well. The diseases Groube mentions include malaria, schistosomiasis and hookworm, ‘a terrible trinity’. A second coincidence then occurred. This was the hunting to extinction of the megafauna which were all mammals, and therefore to a large extent biologically similar to humans. All of a sudden (sudden in evolutionary terms), there were far fewer mammals for the microbial predators to feast on – and they were driven on to people.20

  In other words, some time after 20,000 years ago, there was a health crisis in the world, an explosion of disease that threatened humankind’s very existence. According to Groube’s admittedly slightly quirky theory, early humans, faced with this onslaught of disease, realised that the migrant pattern of life, which limited childbirth to once every three years or so, was insufficient to maintain population levels. The change to sedentism, therefore, was made because it allowed people to breed more often, increase numbers, and avoid extinction.

  One thing that recommends Groube’s theory is that it divorces sedentism from agriculture. This discovery is one of the more important insights to have been gained since the Second World War. In 1941, when the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe coined the phrase ‘The Neolithic Revolution’, he argued that the invention of agriculture had brought about the development of the first villages and that this new sedentary way of life had in turn led to the invention of pottery, metallurgy and, in the course of only a few thousand years, the blossoming of the first civilisations. This neat idea has now been overturned, for it is quite clear that sedentism, the transfer from a hunter-gathering lifestyle to villages, was already well under way by the time the agricultural revolution took place. This has transformed our understanding of early humans and their thinking.

  OF DOGS, DINGOES AND DOMESTICATION: GENESIS, THE FALL AND THE MEANING OF MONOGAMY

  The fact that sedentism preceded agriculture stimulated the French archaeologist Jacques Cauvin to produce a wide-ranging review of the archaeology of the Middle East, which enabled him to reconcile many developments, most notably the origins of religion and the idea of the home, with far-reaching implications for the development of our more speculative/philosophical innovations. In other words, he explained how, in the Old World, there was a development in ideology to move beyond shamanism.

  Cauvin (who died in 2001) was director of research emeritus at the Institut de Préhistoire Orientale at Jalés in Ardèche, France (between Lyons and Marseilles). He started from a detailed examination of the pre-agricultural villages of the Near East. Between 12500 BC and 10000 BC, the so-called Natufian culture extended over almost all of the Levant, from the Euphrates to Sinai (the Natufian takes its name from a site at Wadi an-Natuf in Israel). Excavations at Eynan-Mallaha, in the Jordan Valley, north of the Sea of Galilee, identified the presence of storage pits,
suggesting ‘that these villages should be defined not only as the first sedentary communities in the Levant, but as “harvesters of cereals” ’.21

  The Natufian culture boasted houses, grouped together (about six in number), as villages, and were semi-subterranean, built in shallow circular pits ‘whose sides were supported by dry-stone retaining walls; they had one or two hearths and traces of concentric circles of posts – evidence of substantial construction’. Their stone tools were not just for hunting but for grinding and pounding, and there were many bone implements too. Single or collective burials were interred under the houses or grouped in communal cemeteries. Some burials, including those of dogs, may have been ceremonial, since they were decorated with shells and polished stones (note the early presence of dogs). Mainly bone artworks were found in these villages, usually depicting animals (an aspect of shamanism?). At Abu Hureyra, between 11000 BC and 10000 BC, the Natufians intensively harvested wild cereals but towards the end of that period the cereals became much rarer (the world was becoming drier) and they switched to knot grass and vetch. In other words, there was as yet no phenomenon of deliberate specialisation.22

  Cauvin next turned to the so-called Khiamian phase. This, named after the Khiam site, west of the northern end of the Dead Sea, was significant for three reasons: for the fact that there were new forms of weapons; for the fact that the round houses came completely out of the ground for the first time, implying the use of clay as a building material; and, most important of all, for a ‘revolution in symbols’. Natufian art was essentially zoomorphic, whereas in the Khiamian period female human figurines (but not ‘Venus’-shaped) begin to appear. They were schematic initially, but became increasingly realistic. Around 10000 BC the skulls and horns of aurochs (a now-extinct form of wild ox or bison) are found buried in houses, with the horns sometimes embedded in the walls, an arrangement which suggests they already have some symbolic function. Then, around 9500 BC, according to Cauvin, we see dawning in the Levant ‘in a still unchanged economic context of hunting and gathering’ (italics added), the development of two dominant symbolic figures, the Woman and the Bull. The Woman was the supreme figure, he says, often shown as giving birth to a Bull.23

  Cauvin sees in this development the true origin of non-shamanistic religion. His main point is that this is the first time humans have been represented as gods, that the female and male principle are both represented, and that this marked a change in mentality before the domestication of plants and animals took place.

  James Mellart, the original excavator of Çatalhöyük – see below – agreed with this reasoning, but we now need to amend part of Cauvin’s theory.

  It is easier to see why the female figure in Khiamian art should be chosen than the male. The mystery of birth had conferred on the female form a sacred aura, easily adapted by analogy as a symbol of general fertility. For Cauvin, therefore, the bull conveniently symbolised the un-tameability of nature, the cosmic forces unleashed in storms, for example. Moreover, Cauvin discerns in the Middle East a clear-cut evolution. ‘The first bucrania of the Khiamian . . . remained buried within the thickness of the walls of buildings, not visible therefore to their occupants.’ Was this because they wanted to incorporate the power of the bull into the very fabric of their buildings, so that these structures would withstand the hostile forces of nature? Perhaps they only wanted metaphorically to ensure the resistance of the building to all forms of destruction by appealing to this new symbolism for an initial consecration (i.e., when the houses were built). After that, however, bovine symbolism diffused throughout the Levant and Anatolia and at ‘Ain Ghazal, north-west Jordan, we see the first explicit allusions, around 8000 BC, to the bull-fighting act, in which man himself features. Man’s virility is being celebrated here, says Cauvin, and it is this concern with virility that links the agricultural revolution and the religious revolution: they were both attempts to satisfy ‘the desire for domination over the animal kingdom’. This, he argues, was a psychological change, a shift in ‘mentality’ rather than an economic change, as has been the conventional wisdom. As people acquired more familiarity with herding, with non-territorial mammals, their interest and appetite for control over such creatures would have grown.24

  But there is surely more to the story – the transition – than this, especially if we return to the idea that early peoples were later in understanding the link between coitus and gestation than has been generally thought. Animals, as we have seen, were domesticated on the whole about a thousand years after plants. Why the delay? Was it because people had only just discovered how infant humans – and therefore infant cows and sheep – were ‘made’?

  As many prehistorians have noted, the moon at certain stages in its cycle resembles the horns of a bull. This would have been recognised by ancient peoples, who would also have noted the menstrual cycle, linked to the phases of the moon and therefore, by implication, to the bull (recall the Venus figurine with 28 red dots painted on it, mentioned above). Early peoples would have observed that menstruation stopped immediately before gestation and may therefore have linked the ‘bull-shaped’ moon with human gestation and birth. Is this why so many early Neolithic images show women giving birth to bulls? It is important to say that bulls are represented by their bucrania far more than by their penises, a discrepancy that is difficult to understand on straightforward ‘fertility symbol’ reasoning. Furthermore, no one can actually have seen a woman giving birth to a bull, so what did this imagery mean? In shamanistic religions, shamans undergo soul flight to other realms and can take the form of animals. On such a system of understanding, the bull/shaman of the heavens could visit Earth and enter inside a woman. Did early peoples think that women were made pregnant by one or other of the mysterious forces of nature?

  That is a plausible theory made more so by the fact that, in the Middle Eastern sites of Çatalhöyük and Jericho, which followed the Natufian and Khiamian cultures, at ~11,000–9,500 years ago, yet more changes are observable – two in particular. First, as Brian Fagan and Michael Balter have pointed out, at both Çatalhöyük, in Turkey, and Jericho in Palestine, ‘there was a new preoccupation with ancestors and with the fertility of animal and human life’.25 And there was, secondly, another change, with people being buried not in communal graves (as Cauvin noted) but under the houses where they had lived. Sometimes they were decapitated, with the ancestors’ skulls being plastered over and given new features. These are the very houses where, previously, bucrania had been sequestered, in the walls and under the floors of houses.

  Now recall that the dog is present in these Middle Eastern sites – this is precisely the area where, Von Holdt and Wayne say, domestication of the dog first occurred. If people had only recently discovered the link between coitus and birth, as is here being suggested, a number of things would have followed. For example, not only would the discovery have revealed new relationships in Neolithic society between men and women, and between parents and children, but it would have transformed ideas about ancestors as well. Until that point, the understanding of ‘ancestors’ would have been general, communal, tribal – ancestors were ‘the people who had gone before’. After the breakthrough, however, ‘ancestorship’ would have become a much more individual, personal phenomenon, which is why ancestors at Çatalhöyük and Jericho were now buried under the floors of the houses where they had lived, replacing bucrania. They were decapitated precisely because of this new, more individualistic understanding. Decapitation and plastering with human facial features was a way of preserving the power of specific ancestors, specific relations, rather than a more general, communal force that had been the practice earlier. Plastering the skulls with human features was another way of claiming specific ancestors, a way of remembering, conserving, preserving the forces of particular forebears.

  Is the disappearance of the Venus figurines across Eurasia, at about 12,000 years ago, and the appearance of the female figures at these Middle Eastern sites, about 11,000 years ago, giving bi
rth, rather than nearing birth, coincidental, or yet more evidence of the change in understanding that we are considering?26

  And there is one other factor that has only recently come to light. We now know that, as people transferred from hunter-foraging to a cereal-based, more sedentary diet, changes occurred in the pelvic canal of females. The pelvic canal, recent science shows, is very susceptible to nutrition and the change in diet caused it to narrow – even today, the canal has not regained its Palaeolithic dimensions.27 And so, we may conclude that, at the very time sedentism and a change in diet were taking place, and a new understanding of reproduction – and what it meant for family/religious life – was occurring, the act of birth itself was getting more traumatic and dangerous.

  At this point we may well ask ourselves whether, with all that was happening, more or less at once, and with some of the changes being shocking – even moving – then, like other powerful events, would they have been remembered in myth form?

  Did this happen? There is one piece of evidence, one myth, that suggests there was just such a powerful change in human consciousness.

  Could it be that this development, this all-important change in mentality, is in fact contained in the very first book of the bible? Is this what the beginning of the bible is all about? Is this why the bible begins as it does? Genesis is known partly for its account of the Creation of the world, and of humankind, but also for the otherwise rather strange episode of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden because they had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge against God’s explicit instructions.

  Some parts of this story are easier to understand/decipher than others. The expulsion itself, for instance, would seem to represent the end of horticulture, or the end of humankind’s hunter-gatherer lifestyle and its transfer to agriculture, and the recognition, discussed earlier, that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was easier, more enjoyable, more harmonious, than farming. The bible is not alone in making this observation. In more or less contemporary traditions (Elysian Fields, Isles of the Blessed, in Hesiod or Plato) human beings are understood to have hitherto lived free from toil, in a fruitful Earth, ‘without help from agriculture’, and ‘untouched by hoe or ploughshare’.28