NEOLITHIC AGE : AGRICULTURE AND LIVESTOCK

Although the Paleolithic saw notable developments, it was in the Neolithic Age (meaning “New Stone” Age) that humans made the breakthrough to more complex forms of civilization. As we saw, Paleolithic groups were essentially nomadic. Before about 800,000 years ago, they were scavengers. In the later Paleolithic, they depended more on hunting and gathering wild plants and animals for food. These hunter-gatherers had a mobile life. They moved with the seasons and the migration of the animals they hunted; therefore, they had no reason to attempt to settle down and every reason not to. In the Neolithic, this situation changed. The gradual adoption of agriculture demanded more sedentary, or settled, ways of life. Moreover, even societies that lived primarily as nomadic pastoralists typically migrated within regions that included only those pasturelands and other resources they claimed against the claims of other societies.

The beginnings of humans’ ability to grow or breed their food used to be called the Agricultural (or Neolithic) Revolution. Now we know that if this was a revolution, it was a very slow one. Most peoples took about five to ten generations (200–400 years) to complete it. Gradually, gathering and hunting as the primary ways to acquire food gave way to livestock breeding and herding, sowing and harvesting. Usually, such domesticated ways of obtaining food continued to go hand in hand with hunting for a long, long time. Some members of the group would hunt while others raised some form of grain from wild grasses—the usual form of agriculture—or raised livestock. When plant and animal husbandry became the primary ways of getting something to eat, the Neolithic Revolution was complete for that group. Throughout this book, we shall be watching traditional beliefs and lifestyles giving way, however grudgingly, to the challenges brought forth by changes in the natural or the manmade environments.

The Neolithic Revolution was one of the vastest of such changes. (The Science and Technology boxes will provide a perspective on others).

With such a slow transition, is revolution an appropriate word to describe the adoption of food production? Archaeologists now know that humans were managing their environments in ways that included limited stockbreeding and plant growing long before the appearance of the settled ways of life commonly associated with the Neolithic Revolution. Therefore, what actually was “revolutionary” was not the transition to growing and breeding their food sources, but rather the dramatic series of changes in human societies that resulted from this changeover.

First, it often—but not always, in cases where people had to rely principally on herding livestock—meant that people settled down in permanent locations. To be near the area used for cultivation, people settled in villages and then in towns, where they lived and worked in many new, specialized occupations that were unknown to pre-Neolithic society. These settlements could not depend on the luck of hunting or fishing or on sporadic harvests of wild seeds and berries to supply their daily needs. Only regularized habits of farming and herding could support the specialists who populated the towns, and only intensive methods could produce the dependable surplus of food that was necessary to allow the population to grow. Of course, occasional years of famine still occurred. But the lean years were far less frequent than when people depended on hunting-gathering for sustenance.
Thus, one major result of the food-producing revolution was a steadily expanding population that thrived primarily in permanent settlements.

Second, food production was the force behind creating the concept of privately owned property in land or livestock. Until farming and livestock breeding became common, there was no concept of private property; land, water, game, and fish belonged to all who needed them. But once a group had labored hard to establish a productive farm and grazing rights to land, they wanted permanent possession. After all, they had to clear the land, supply water at the right time, and organize labor for preparing the soil, planting, weeding, and harvesting or for tending their livestock.

Who would do that if they had no assurance that next year, and the next, the land would still be theirs? Third, food production necessitated the development of systematized regulation to enforce the rights of one party over those of another when disputes arose over access and use of resources, including land and water. Codes of law, enforced by organized authority (or government officials), were important results of the introduction of agriculture and animal husbandry. The function of law is to govern relations between individuals and groups so that security is established and the welfare of all is promoted. Law and the exercise of lawful authority is one of the recurrent themes in this book, and we will look at it in the Law and Government boxes.

A fourth change was the increasing specialization of labor. It made no sense for a Neolithic farmer to try to be a soldier or carpenter as well as a food grower. Efforts were more productive for the entire community if people specialized; the same principle applied to the carpenter and the soldier, who were not expected to grow or breed the food supply.

Some believe that agriculture also led to an enlarged public role for women in Neolithic societies based on farming—apparently a direct result of the fact that the first farmers were probably women. There is even some evidence of matriarchy (female social and political dominance) in Neolithic China, the Near East, and West Africa, as well as among many Native American societies. Th e association of women with fertility, personifi ed in a whole series of Earth Mother goddesses in various cultures, was certainly related to this development. As those who brought forth life, women were seen as the key to assuring that the Earth Mother would respond to the villagers’ prayers for food from her womb. In many areas where agriculture became important, fertility-centered religious rituals, female priestesses, and graphic reenactments of human reproduction were crucial components of cults intended to promote human, animal, and plant fertility.

Changes in religious belief and practice carry the widest-ranging consequences for any society, ancient or modern. Often, they have been manifested in the concepts of good and bad that dictated public and private behavior patterns, or morality. We will observe many such changes as we progress through this world history, and the Patterns of Belief boxes will reinforce the theme.

Generally, most of us who live in the modern world think of the Neolithic Revolution and the changes it wrought in positive terms, as an inevitable series of changes that led straight to “civilization” as we know it. But were such developments always one way? Actually, there are instances in world history where hunting-gatherers adopted breeding or growing their food supply, then later abandoned it. Some Khoi-khoi-speaking groups in southern Africa, for example, fluctuated between lifeways of hunting and gathering sometimes and cattle herding at other times. Some pastoralists like the Huns and the Mongols stoutly resisted incorporation into the farm-based societies they conquered in the fifth and thirteenth centuries, respectively.

The adoption of food-producing lifeways brought significantly harmful consequences for humans. As humans domesticated and lived closer to their livestock, diseases jumped from animals to people. Once this happened, disease-bearing vectors found it easier to spread through entire societies (and later regions, and now the world) as people lived in ever-larger communities.

And, while people were generally better fed, their quality of life and health often declined. Consequently, death came earlier for them. Alterations in lifestyle came about gradually, of course, as a group learned to depend on domesticated crops and animals for its main sources of food.

When that change took place varied sharply from one continent or region to the next. In a few places, it has still not occurred. Even today, a few nomadic hunter-gatherer groups can be found in regions that are useless for crop growing or animal grazing, although they are fast disappearing due to the intrusions of modern communications and technology Where were the first food-producing societies?
For many years, researchers believed that agriculture must have emerged first in a region of the Near East called the Levantine Corridor and spread gradually from there into Asia and Africa. According to this diffusion theory of cultural accomplishment, knowledge of new techniques spreads through human contacts, as water might spread on blotting paper. But it is now known that by 7000 BCE, agriculture had developed in at least seven separate areas, independent of outside influences: the Near East, Central America, South America, northern China, southern China and Southeast Asia, northeast Africa, and West Africa.

About the same time or slightly later, the first domesticated animals were being raised. The raising of pigs, sheep, cattle, goats, guinea fowl, dogs, and turkeys for food and work goes back at least as far as 4000 BCE.

Agrarian and Irrigation Civilizations

Wherever ancient gathering-and-hunting peoples discovered how to grow and breed their food, populations swelled dramatically; surplus wealth supported more complex societies; craft production and trade appeared; new farming technologies evolved, such as the use of draft animals and irrigation; urban life developed; ruling elites emerged; and the need to maintain records necessitated the invention of writing.

In short, the most ancient civilizations known to us arose. As we shall see, each of these civilizations acquired and elaborated its own unique characteristics and “style” of life. Yet, as distinctive as each of these earliest civilizations was, to varying extents they shared eight attributes. Together, these features comprise a type of civilization called agrarian civilization. As we study a few of the earliest world civilizations, see how many of these features you can find in each one. These eight features are:

• They were primarily rural societies. Most people lived in country villages and had rural outlooks and ways of life. This does not mean that these civilizations had no cities. Because they were socially complex (stratified), cities were the locales where members of the ruling classes—as well as priests, craftspeople, merchants, and nobles—lived. Relationships between rural villages and cities were complex, but generally the city dwellers directed the productive activities of rural folk through their control of religious beliefs and rituals thought to be essential to fertility and through the enforcement of laws, customs, and traditions.

• They were based primarily on peasant agriculture and/or livestock breeding. The overwhelming majority in such civilizations relied on farming and herding to sustain themselves and their families, as well as to support nonfood-producing members of society such as craftsmen, merchants, and ruling elites. They employed relatively simple technologies to perform their labors. They crafted their tools out of materials at hand: mud, clay, grasses, leather, wood, wattle, and stone. Wind, water, human strength, or animals powered what simple machinery they fashioned, such as irrigation devices and ploughs. The rulers often skimmed off as taxes what surpluses they produced, keeping the people poor.

• Most people maintained life in balance with their natural environment. In civilizations that relied on simple technology, people’s survival and ability to produce food hinged on their understanding of their natural world. It was this ability, acquired from many generations of observation and experiment, that enabled them to work with what these surroundings provided them.

• Their religion was based heavily on gods and spirits that controlled their natural environment. Because the earliest civilizations relied so much on agriculture, the ability of humans to control natural phenomena was crucial to life. One way this was achieved was through an intimate understanding of the natural environment. But because total understanding and predictability were impossible, people came to believe that capricious gods and spirits controlled natural forces. Frequently, people believed that these spirits could assume human and animal forms.

• Their religion emphasized ritual and sacrifice as ways to control the deities. Because the gods and spirits could control nature, people thought they could control nature by controlling the spirits. Communal religion centered on complex rituals and sacrifices to the gods to win their cooperation in controlling rainfall, river floods, soil and animal fertility, births, and even death.

• They relied on religious specialists to communicate with the gods. The rituals and sacrifices on which so many people relied were complicated and had to be carried out with great precision to be effective. Only trained specialists—priests, priestesses, spirit mediums, and medicine men and women—could perform them flawlessly.

• They believed time to be cyclic. Farmers and animal pastoralists lived their lives according to the rhythms of nature. Consequently, they perceived the workings of time and the universe as occurring in endlessly repeating rounds of birth and death, death and renewal.

• Their social values emphasized kinship and the clan. Another strategy employed as a hedge against natural disaster was to create wide social contacts among kin, fellow clans people, clients, and allies.
These extensive groupings constituted networks of mutual rights and responsibilities as a form of “social insurance” that helped guarantee the survival of individual members. A corollary to this was a veneration of elders and the spirits of dead ancestors.

Several of the earliest civilizations in the world developed in the plains bordering on major rivers or in the valleys the rivers created. They depended on intensive, productive agriculture, and the development of agriculture depended in turn on the excellent soil and regular supply of water provided by the river. In ancient Mesopotamia, the dual drainage of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers made possible the first urban civilization. In Egypt, the Nile—the world’s longest river, at more than 4,000 miles— was the life-giving source of everything the people needed and cherished. At a slightly later date, the Niger River nurtured the early development of agriculture and city life in West Africa.
The earliest available evidence of the beginnings of Indian civilization is found in the extensive fields on both sides of the Indus River, which flows more than 2,000 miles from the slopes of the Himalayas to the ocean. In northern China, the valleys of the Yellow River (which is about 2,700 miles long) and the Yangtze River were the cradles of the oldest continuous civilization in world history. Recent studies in the western valleys of the Andes in Peru also show that an advanced ceramic-making civilization, previously unsuspected, flourished in the third millennium BCE.
What else did the rivers provide besides good crops and essential water? They also off ered a sure and generally easy form of transport and communication, allowing intervillage trade and encouraging central—usually citybased—authorities to extend their powers over a much greater area than would have been possible if they had had only overland contacts.

The interchange of goods and services between individuals or groups is a constant motivating force in human history as a strategy to avoid the catastrophic effects of crop failure through the creation of supplementary forms of wealth. (We shall look at this theme in differing contexts in later chapters.) Moreover, it was trade as well as migrations that provided the usual means by which early societies established and maintained connections with each other. Trade and other forms of human contact, such as migration and conquest, will be common themes throughout this text.

The rivers had very different natures. The Tigris and the Yellow were as destructive in their unpredictable flooding as the Nile, the Niger, and the Indus were peaceful and predictable. The Yellow River was so ruinous at times that its ancient name was the “sorrow of China.” But without its water, early farming in northern China would have been impossible. Climate, too, created differences among the earliest civilizations.

Egypt and most of the Indus Valley, for example, The course of the year and are suitable for crops all year long. It is not unusual for an Egyptian family farm to grow three crops annually. Northern China and Mesopotamia, on the other hand, experience much more severe changes in weather— not only from season to season, but also from day to day.

In deserts and steppe lands where soils or drier conditions made farming harder, people were forced to rely more (or exclusively) on stockbreeding for food and clothing. Conditions usually made settled life impossible, so groups continually had to be on the move in search of water and pasturelands for their livestock. Their homes in the deserts and grasslands usually bordered on terrain where farming was the principal mode of production and where farmers and their food stores were valuable as trading partners or, alternatively, as targets of raids.

As a rule, the pastoralists’ way of life made them heartier people, and their methods of mounted warfare made them formidable opponents whose movements and raiding could be held in check only by powerful, highly centralized states. As we shall see in the following chapters, the tension and frequent warfare between pastoralist tribesmen—such as Semitic-speaking nomads, Indo- European Iranians, and Turco-Mongolian peoples— and neighboring agrarian civilizations forms one of the important constants in world history.

By Philip J. Adler & Randall L. Pouwels in the book 'World Civilizations', Wadsworthy, 2010, Chapter 1, p. 8-14. Digitzed, edited and adapted to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.