[No time for a new post this week, so here’s a couple excerpts from my book, The Failure of Farming & the Necessity of Wildtending, which is available as a digital download or a paperback.]
Our understanding of the past is limited by how well we dispense with our cultural filters in the present. A 21st Century human with indoor plumbing, a permanent roof overhead and an automobile often has little or no experience with—let alone appreciation for—activities like bathing in a stream, changing abodes with the season, or moving through landscapes on foot, to say nothing of the profoundly deep backdrop of life that these were woven into. Many of the differences between these types of lifestyles can be objectively described. However, doing so accurately entails striving to discard one's own unverifiable assumptions. In other words, personal prejudices have no place in honest reckoning. Regardless, they are usually present in the reckonings you'll run across, even those issued by scientists. Though the intention of the scientific method is to avoid subjectivity in terms of what is measured, that's only part of the equation.
Another part is the measurer, whose scientific education rarely (if ever) includes exercises to foster the self-awareness to even identify (let alone avoid) such prejudices. But that's only because such concepts are largely absent from Western culture in general.
Consider, for example, one of the more popular stories about how humans started farming. A few versions exist, but here is the gist: Nomadic humans had seasonal camps where they stayed every year, and where they processed their harvests. They discarded unwanted plant parts (including some seeds) in piles. Then, one special year, they noticed plants growing from the previous year's pile of cast offs, and they deduced that plants grow from seeds. With this new knowledge, they started sowing seeds on purpose and the "Agricultural Revolution" followed shortly thereafter.
This story has at least three major issues:
First, it assumes that people never observed seeds germinating in the wild, though they would have had numerous opportunities:
☙ When properly moistened, seeds can sprout while lying on the ground in plain view. Acorns are an example that are large and hard to miss and that humans were harvesting to eat in non-agricultural societies.
☙ Some plants exhibit “epigeal germination,” in which the seed—after splitting open and sending down a root—is carried above ground on the sprout where it is easily recognizable. Many foods, including grapes, tamarind, papaya and some species of beans germinate this way.
☙ Foraging activity like digging in the soil, sifting through leaf litter, and turning over stones would have regularly revealed germinating seeds. Furthermore, samples of every life stage between seedling and adult would often have been present in profusion in the same area, illustrating the whole life cycle.
☙ Seeds can germinate inside a ripe fruit and be exposed when the fruit is broken open to eat. This can occur in various citrus fruits, which were domesticated in China around 4500 years ago.
☙ Occasionally, seeds will germinate on the plant after the flower has become desiccated. I have personally seen this multiple times with Teasel (genus Dipsacus), which is native to Europe, Asia and northern Africa and is now common throughout the USA, and with Coneflower (genus Echinacea), which is native to eastern and central North America.
Second, the story assumes that planting seeds was not a human activity until agriculture began, but that is not factual. Gathering activities were not merely acquisitive but also involved intentional plant propagation and seeds were knowingly sown, often in planned conjunction with harvesting. For example, such practices were traditional in the Great Basin of the western USA for many thousands of years among nomadic Native Americans who never settled down into a sedentary, horticultural lifestyle.
Third, the story is undergirded by a quasi-determinist premise that's certainly up for debate. A particular choice—agriculture—is presented as inevitable once particular knowledge—that plants grow from seeds—has been "discovered." In the ongoing debate about how and why humans took up farming, one of two motivations is usually offered: “necessity” (we did it because we had to) or “opportunity” (we did it because we could). The seed-discovery story is an “opportunity” narrative so it presupposes that a) agriculture is an improvement over gathering-hunting and b) so of course humans would jump at it as soon as they could, even though—lacking any farming experience, by definition—they would have no criteria for making such a judgment. Wait, what?
This seed-discovery story says more about current Western humans than it does about prehistoric ones: it projects a contemporary perspective backwards in time, in effect imagining how educated city folks nowadays—without plant knowledge—might "discover agriculture" if they were transported to the Paleolithic and set loose to figure it out in the wild starting tomorrow. But that's not what it was like for our prehistoric ancestors. They weren't suddenly dropped into the world to "discover" these things. Though unfamiliar with agriculture, they were not without plant knowledge; on the contrary, they had been invested in that wisdom for a long time.
…
The immediate results of the Neolithic Revolution were declines in human health and the general quality of life. These were followed by oppressive social structures based on inequality, powered by slavery and expanded through warfare. Not too long after followed environmental consequences, such as the desertification of the Near East. Long story short, the transition to agriculture was a disaster, and this would have been obvious at many points along the way from the very beginning. So why, then, did humans do it?
Many different hypotheses have been put forward over the years, and Jacob L. Weisdorf, of the University of Copenhagen, presents and dispenses with the major ones in his 2005 article, "From Foraging to Farming: Explaining the Neolithic Revolution."[1] Weisdorf also leaves us with a few ideas that are still being explored. A summary of his work follows.
The "Stage" hypothesis paints agriculture as the highest rung of achievement on a ladder of progress with gathering/hunting at the bottom and pastoralism in the middle. First proposed by the Greeks—who believed the stages were ultimately cyclical—it was embraced by the Victorians as they found it illustrative of their concept of "progress" and the supposed inevitability thereof. Scientists stopped supporting this hypothesis by 1930, and since then have sought to identify what external pressures could have motivated the transition. Despite this, and as mentioned earlier, the contemporary, popular perspective of agriculture remains essentially Victorian, though with the additions of higher rungs for industry and hi-tech.
In the 1930s, the "Oasis" hypothesis was proposed, which suggested that climatic changes related to the end of the last glacial period—namely dryness—drove humans to seek refuge in oases and river valleys where they domesticated plants as a survival strategy. This hypothesis was eventually rejected because a) the climatic changes were too gradual to force such a move and b) agriculture was adopted in other areas of the world without those climatic circumstances.
In the 1960s, the "natural habitat" hypothesis emerged, based on the idea that agriculture was "a response to opportunity rather than necessity," and that people started farming because they were living in bountiful places and had leisure time to explore new methods. However, as anthropological research demonstrated that farming was much harder work than gathering-hunting, this idea lost favor. Who, after all, would spend their leisure time seeking a lifestyle with less leisure time?
From the 1960's through the 1980's, a number of new theories were floated that claimed that rising human population and dwindling wild resources were responsible for the switch. The "marginal zone" hypothesis suggested that farming was a response to more people in areas with marginal or scant resources. However, archaeological evidence shows that agriculture began in "resource-abundant" locales. The "overkill" hypothesis posited that the extinctions of particular animals, especially megafauna, motivated agriculture as an alternative means of sustenance. But the animal extinctions in question did not coincide in place or time with agriculture's beginnings. Finally, the "population pressure" hypothesis said that humans turned to farming because their numbers had risen too high and had led to starvation. The problem with this theory is that evidence of nutritional stress in skeletons does not show up until after agriculture was adopted.
Since the 1980's, new theories have been proposed that are still under consideration. For example, the "human/plant symbiosis" and "people/plant interaction" hypotheses imagine processes in which plant-human codependencies resulted from unintentional plant-breeding. That is, through accidental selection, humans domesticated plants that could not live without human interaction and which, in turn, humans could not feed themselves without.
Other scientists emphasize climatic changes at the end of the Paleolithic, specifically the "Younger Dryas," a period of cooler, drier conditions that lasted from ~12,900 to ~11,700 years ago. The trends of the Younger Dryas reversed the worldwide warming that had been happening since the Last Glacial Maximum began receding 7000 years previously (20,000 years ago). Because the onset of the Younger Dryas was quite abrupt—transitioning within a decade or even less—wild plant populations could have declined rapidly, necessitating their purposeful cultivation and subsequent domestication.
However (and finally moving on from Weisdorf), there is scant evidence for the cultivation of domesticated plants during the Younger Dryas. Of the Neolithic "founder crops," Emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum), Einkorn wheat (Triticum monococcum) Barley (Hordeum vulgare/sativum), Lentils (Lens culinaris), Peas (Pisum sativum), and Chickpea (Cicer arietinum) have not reliably been dated back to before 10,600 years ago. [2] That being said, wild progenitors of some of these plants were being harvested, cooked and stored as far back as 23,000 years ago [3] and distinguishing between wild and domesticated forms can be challenging. With Einkorn, for example, researchers look at two aspects of the seed's morphology (shape) to make the call: its size—smaller in wild, larger in domestic—and the scar where the seed broke off from the stem—smooth in wild, rough in domestic. (The rougher scar results from the fact that domesticated seeds "held on" to their stems until being intentionally dislodged by threshing, rather than "shattering" easily, as in the wild form. The lack of shattering made it easier to harvest large amounts at once.) [4] This can be subtle stuff, for sure, and seems a weak peg to hang a big idea on.
Regardless, all of the above theories are focused on the Neolithic Revolution and its crops on the Eurasian continent, but the domestication of plants and adoption of agriculture in the Americas took place as much as 6000 years later, with very different circumstances of geography, climate, flora and fauna, etc., and with no apparent input from the outside.
This might very well be a situation where the facts will always remain a mystery. Though the truth is a different matter…
Agreed that we don't know. In Global Eating Disorder (https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/global-eating-disorder-c63) 2016 I described the process like this:
"There are no strong reasons to believe that human beings were forced to farm in order to feed an increasingly hungry population. It was rather improved methods of hunting and fishing or life in particu¬larly rich border zones, such as an oasis or coastal flats, which enabled people to settle in certain places. The Norte Chico settlements just north of today’s Lima in Peru are an interesting, and perhaps odd example. These are more than 5000 years old, the oldest known civilization in the Americas. The Carla-Supe people who lived there were ostensibly engaged in farming. But they did not grow staple foods; instead they grew cotton and gourds, needed primarily for their extensive fishing. The cotton was used to make nets and lines, while the gourds were used as floats.
The first farmers could not feed themselves from farming alone to begin with; if they had tried, they would have starved to death. On the contrary, farming was almost certainly developed by settled people who still got most of their food through the old ways of hunting and gathering. They farmed certain crops that were uncommon and difficult to find, such as medicinal herbs, or crops that they fancied a lot, more like gardening. In Mesoamerica, domestication of maize, beans and pepper can be traced back ten thousand years, but it was not until five thousand years later that domesticated plants and animals dominated the food system, a clear indication that a foraging culture can be competitive with farming, even under conditions which are conducive to farming. As settled populations grew, farming changed from being an opportunity to a necessity.
The distinction between foraging and domestication is not always clear cut, this is particularly clear when it comes to pastoralism. Humans certainly manipulated the movements of herds as part of their hunting methods. They burned the forest to drive animals, but also to create an open and accessible landscape with a lot of grass – and ease of hunt. For example, Native Americans managed the prairie as ‘a game farm’ for bison and the forests were managed to stimulate the presence of trees such as chestnuts and oaks and be good habitat for elk and deer. Many assume that cattle, goats, sheep and camels were domesticated by a process where agrarian societies captured individ¬ual animals for keeping. Others think that it is more likely that these kinds of herd animals were domesticated in a gradual process of hunters managing the herds they hunted. Both processes might have occurred in different places. I believe that the domestication of our common herd animals such as cattle and sheep most likely emerged through gradual management and co-evolution with wild herds rather than through domestication of individual wild animals.
There is not a straight-forward dividing line to be drawn between foraging and farming societies. Some foragers manipulated their environment a lot in order to ‘produce’ more of the kind of animals that humans like (such as bison) and less of those that humans don’t like (wolves and tigers). Some dropped nuts in fertile soils to have more nuts to collect, or cleared the bush that threatened to crowd out that mouth-watering herb. Some had a tame dog as part of the hunting party. In North America before colonization, many native cultures successfully ‘improved the wilderness’ as an ecological strategy. The Kumeyaay in California planted cacti, created groves of wild oaks and pines and regularly burned the chaparral (shrublands) to improve the browsing for deer. On the Australian continent people developed ‘fire-stick farming’ primarily for small-game hunting. The fires created a high diversity of successional habitats, which, in turn, led to a better food supply. The extensive use of fire for hunting or other landscape manipulation also contributed to the emergence of farming by stimulat¬ing the kind of pioneer annual crops which still today dominate farming as well as the grasses which formed the basis for livestock production. Most grasses are very resistant to fire, so burning favors grassland over other vegetation. A study of foraging cultures that still exist today concludes that “many of the wild foods are actively managed, suggesting there is a false dichotomy around ideas of the agricultural and the wild: hunter–gatherers and foragers farm and manage their environments, and cultivators use many wild plants and animals.”
There is no doubt about that farming has taken over from foraging and hunting as the main source of food. Nevertheless hunting, in the form of fishing provided more food for humans than ever before in the last century. Fishing also gives us a perspective on the domestication process. Humans have practiced aquaculture for a very long time; it was documented by the Ancient Romans and in China some four thousand years ago. Yet, people have continued fishing, simply because, in most cases, it has been the easiest way to get fish. With increasing energy prices and depleting fish stocks, aquaculture is gradually taking over from wild catch.
Before taking to farming people had not only developed a large number of tools for hunting and fishing, but also tools to harvest plants, such as digging sticks and sickles. We cannot compare the methods of agriculture of the first human beings with those of the farming societies that emerged after thousands of years of trial and error. That would be like compar¬ing floating on a log with sailing in a boat. Farming wasn’t a single ready-made technology waiting to be picked up or discovered; it was a complex of technologies, biology and human knowledge and, ulti¬mately, a society. The philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau maintained that society as such must have emerged before farming because many functions and institutions need to be in place for farming to be possible. This is clearly a valid point. If we see the transformation as a gradual process we can avoid some of the pitfalls of trying to sort out what came first. "
I found this article very interesting and the whole idea of farming, and where it has carried us today, to Industrial Farming and Agriculture, is in need of serious discussion. We homo sapiens have pretty much destroyed the land in so many ways, from monoculture, to deforestation, to pesticides to air and soil pollution, to Animal Agriculture, and on and on it goes.
It might be important to know how and why we started farming, but then again it might now be much more important to find ways to heal the Earth. And in doing so, we will heal ourselves. Thank you for this article.