From Hunting to Agriculture

I

The archaeological record suggests a rapid expansion of human population commencing around 50,000 years ago. Human hunting techniques are likely to have led to an improved supply of food. At the same time, mortality from predation would have been lower than it had been for the pre-human bipeds. The growing tribes, equipped with new weapons and employing large-scale co-operative hunting and defensive methods, were probably able increasingly to hunt and kill any animal, however big, and keep their children safe from any predator, however clever and powerful. Human populations expanded rapidly and filled more and more of the world. This was the age of the mammoth-hunters and the cave painters.

After expanding to the habitable limits of Africa and Eurasia, people reached Australia by boat as early as 40,000 years ago. At that time, western Indonesia was joined to Asia and New Guinea was joined to Australia. There was still a significant sea crossing, including one island-hop of over 50 miles, but they survived it, and colonised a previously isolated world occupied by a wide variety of giant marsupials.

The effect of human arrival in Australia was dramatic. All the giant marsupials disappeared not long after the arrival of human hunters. They were probably very easy prey. Just how animals can behave when they have no previous experience of man is vividly suggested by Darwin's experience in the Galapagos:

The animals and birds were not used to human intruders and were very trusting in their behaviour. For the Beagle men it was almost like entering a Garden of Eden. Darwin rode a tortoise, caught an iguana by its tail and came so close to a hawk that he could push it off a bough with his gun..

Janet Browne: The Origin of Species: a Biography

Darwin himself summarises his thoughts on the "tameness" of the Galapagos birds, compared with elsewhere:

In regard to the wildness of birds towards man, there is no way of accounting for it, except as an inherited habit: comparatively few young birds, in any one year, have been injured by man in England, yet almost all, even young nestlings, are afraid of him; many individuals, on the other hand, both at the Galapagos and at the Falklands, have been pursued and injured by man, yet have not yet learned a salutary dread of him. We may infer from these facts, what havoc the introduction of any new beast of prey must cause in a country, before the instincts of the indigenous inhabitants have become adapted to the stranger's craft or power.

Darwin: Journal of Researches during the Voyage of HMS Beagle

In Australia, man was that new beast of prey.

Since people had boats, many other extinctions probably also took place on large and small islands during the same period. In the Old World, animal populations had had millions of years to adapt to the dangers posed by bipeds and changes were at first less dramatic. But by 15,000 years ago, organised humans, now increasingly equipped with hafted spears and later with new weapons like the spear-thrower and the bow, had caused widespread extinctions. Elephants and mammoths, rhinos and woolly rhinos, wild horses, giant deer, hippos, musk oxes and the sabretooths which had preyed on them suddenly (in a few thousand years) disappeared from the European fossil record.

The most dramatic effects were felt in America, colonised quite recently (probably less than 15,000 years ago) when weapons and hunting techniques were already highly developed. Glaciation reduced sea levels and for a time, a land bridge existed between Siberia and Alaska. Animals came across from Siberia and colonised first the bridge and then America. People came over at about the same time: perhaps following the game, perhaps fishing further and further along the coast in their boats. Perhaps they even crossed the Pacific a little earlier.

The people who first colonised America were undoubtedly skilled hunters, probably at least as sophisticated and socially organised as the inhabitants of Sungir in Russia, who had lived some 10,000 years earlier. Like their descendants, the peoples living in America at the time of European colonisation, they are likely to have been organized in large tribal units, equipped with relatively modern weapons. They had hafted spears, perhaps spear-throwers, perhaps even bows. They were well able to kill animals of any size, especially those unaccustomed to human attack.

These were the people some of whose descendants, not so long afterwards, set up the empires of the Incas, the Mayas and the Aztecs. They were "prehistoric" only in the sense that they did not initially live in settled communities and they had not yet invented writing - hence we do not know the details of their history. They had much more in common with the Mongols of Genghis Khan than with the Neanderthals and they were much nearer to the Mongols in time.

The newly discovered American continents were uncolonised and unhunted. They were inhabited by an immense range of animals, including many members of the elephant family, camels, wild horses, giant beavers and ground sloths. These animals were preyed upon by predators including sabertooths, scimitartooths and cheetahs. Human predation was unknown to them. Within a few thousand years of the arrival of humans, two things had happened. The human population of America had expanded to fill both continents, down to the tip of South America. And all the big animals listed above - and many more, together with the predators which preyed upon them - had become extinct (see link) .

Hunting has always been, for men, a sport as well as (sometimes) a source of food. We do not know how the hunters reacted to their new situation of power and plenty. Did they conserve the game, once they had all the food they needed? Or like a British landowner shooting his pheasants - or like a fox in the henhouse - did they slaughter far more than they needed, for the sheer joy of it? In the case of the elephants, there was another reason why slaughter may have exceeded what was needed for food. Ivory had already (as we have seen at Sungir) become a useful and valued material.

But the great age of hunting could not last. After America, there was little further scope for human territorial expansion. Animal numbers declined dramatically. The more vulnerable prey animals, once extinct, were no longer available for food. Everywhere, human populations must have grown rapidly until the game became harder and harder to find. Everywhere there is likely to have been a sudden collision between expanding populations and declining resources of food. As growing tribes of hunters followed diminishing supplies of game, tribes undoubtedly fought one another for territory and hunting rights. Accustomed to a meat diet which was now often unobtainable, spending more and more of their energy in fighting other human competition rather than hunting game, people may sometimes have taken to cannibalism (see link).

In the period which followed, all kinds of new food resources were explored. People living by rivers and on the coast devised new means of catching fish in quantity. In north-west Europe, excavation has suggested that communities existed for whom the hazelnut harvest was a major food. But hazelnuts never became a long-term solution to the imbalance between population and food supply. No satisfactory solution emerged until cereal cultivation became the norm. And with elephants and other large animals now less of a problem, large-scale cultivation was now possible.

II

The transition to agriculture has always been hard to explain. Why should people have given up an enjoyable lifestyle and a varied diet and adopted lifestyles and diets which were often very tedious and limited? In the words of Mark Nathan Cohen "the adoption of agriculture probably resulted in an increased per-capita work load and a decline in the quality of the diet".

Pre-agricultural peoples had a varied diet and their food-gathering activities must often have been satisfying for their own sake. The "hunter-gatherers" were after all using their mental and physical resources for the purposes for which they were intended by nature. Their lives were sometimes short, but they were probably happy. By contrast agriculture, particularly before the employment of draft animals, involved a great deal of mechanical back-breaking toil. Food preparation was hard work also, given that cereals had to be ground by hand. And the final result, for most people, was a monotonous staple diet and not much else. Why did people adopt agriculture?

The answer seems to be very simple: expanding human populations meant that they had no choice. Cohen's book explains the only possible reason why humanity embarked on the agricultural revolution: agriculture yields more calories per hectare; it was the only way that the available land could be made to yield sufficient food to feed its human population:

By approximately 11,000 or 12,000 years ago, hunters and gatherers, living on a limited range of preferred foods, had by natural population increase and concomitant territorial expansion fully occupied those portions of the globe which would support their lifestyle with reasonable ease. By that time, in fact, they had already found it necessary in many areas to broaden the range of wild resources used for food in order to feed growing populations. I suggest that after that time, with territorial expansion becoming increasingly difficult and unattractive as a means of adjusting to growing population, they were forced to become even more eclectic in their food-gathering, to eat more and more unpalatable foods, and in particular to concentrate on foods of low trophic level and high density. In the period between 9000 and 2000 B.P. populations throughout the world, already using nearly the full range of available palatable foods., were forced to adjust to further increases in population by artificially increasing, not those resources which they preferred to eat, but those which responded well to human attention and could be made to produce the greatest number of edible calories per unit of land.

(Cohen, Mark Nathan: The Food Crisis in Prehistory)

Ways were to be found to make unpalatable foods more acceptable. But dense agricultural populations living on limited diets became more liable to disease. Repetitive strain injuries must have become the normal lot of people engaged in constant mechanical work. And not everybody adjusted equally well to the work ethic. History shows that those who adjusted less well sometimes adopted what seemed to them like a more attractive alternative - to live on the toil of others.

Wherever a peaceful people under enlightened leadership had settled down to the routine of agriculture, they would have been a continual temptation to their less settled neighbours. Denied the pleasure of hunting animals for a living, many men and many tribes of men preferred to turn their weapons against other men and to attempt, with varying success, to obtain by robbery, conquest and enslavement what they they were unwilling to work for.

Often the restless outsiders, sweeping down from the steppe or the desert (or like the Vikings, from the Northern seas) conquered the agriculturists, reduced them to subjection, took over their land and became a ruling aristocracy. Often (like the Normans in England) they set aside some of their conquered land as a game reserve, where they could escape from the disagreeable realities of agriculture and recreate the golden age of hunting.

Making use of their pooled resources of intelligence and experience, people had expanded to the limits of the world. They now totally dominated their environment. But by their thoughtless abuse of that environment, they had destroyed the quality of their own lives. Most people now lived a life of monotonous toil, often made worse by tyrannical oppression and punctuated by destructive wars.

But life could still be good. And agriculture was the way forward: it meant a much more assured food surplus and permanent human settlements; it led everywhere, quite rapidly, to cities, literacy and civilization.

The Human Species

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