"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.
Thanks for this, Kollibri! A couple of years ago (3?), I was persuaded by the presentation in Daniel Quinn's 'Ishmael,' foliis. While I always suspected it might be a bit too neat and tidy, your article makes a stronger case for where I wind up more and more: It's complicated. FYI, I have passed this along to several groups, including a few of Quinn enthusiasts.
Biblical references to Cain and Able. The two brothers. One brother represented the herder lifestyle the other the tiller lifestyle. Farmer verse hunter-herder.
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.
Thanks for this, Kollibri! A couple of years ago (3?), I was persuaded by the presentation in Daniel Quinn's 'Ishmael,' foliis. While I always suspected it might be a bit too neat and tidy, your article makes a stronger case for where I wind up more and more: It's complicated. FYI, I have passed this along to several groups, including a few of Quinn enthusiasts.
Biblical references to Cain and Able. The two brothers. One brother represented the herder lifestyle the other the tiller lifestyle. Farmer verse hunter-herder.
Property rights is a whole other story!