The primary model on which archaeologists based this analysis was that of Darwinian evolution.  Each small step towards agriculture was considered as a kind of random mutation which one hunting group or another could have stumbled onto by accident.  In accordance with the principle of survival of the fittest, those groups which adopted practices that increased their food supply would have prospered as the expense of those which did not.  In the course of time, the natural superiority of farming would have ensured its dominance over hunting.

This scenario may have seemed convincing to twentieth century materialists, but there were any number of problems with it, not least the delicate question of just what constitutes evolutionary fitness.  Recent studies of both ancient and contemporary hunters and farmers have shown that farmers work harder, have a less nutritious diet, and die younger than hunter-gatherers.  Rather than taking the superiority of farming for granted, archaeologists are now struggling to answer the question of why hunters would have voluntarily given up their freedom and leisure in order to become peasants bound to the soil.

But perhaps the most profound difficulty with the standard twentieth century account of the Neolithic was the way it cast this dramatic retooling of human society as being the work of terminally clueless idiots.  Farming, for example, was supposed to have resulted when some half-bright caveman noticed useful crops flourishing on the trash-heap of a former campsight and got the daring notion that they had grown there from discarded seeds.  Pottery was similarly supposed to have been discovered when a lump of clay accidentally fell in the fire.

The possibility that the innovations of the Neolithic might have been developed systematically by people with a particular goal in mind and a profound knowledge of the resources at hand was never even considered.  And yet it ought to have been obvious.  Who, after all, would know the habits and breeding requirements of animals better than hunters?  Who would know the patterns of growth and most favorable conditions for plants better than gatherers?  Who would know the properties of rocks and mud better than the people of the Stone Age?

The real roots of the Neolithic stretch far back into the period known as the Epi-Paleolithic -- the several thousand years preceding and just following the end of the Ice Age.  This was the time when hunter-gatherers began to settle to the land, to use local resources more intensively, and to acquire the knowledge and skills that would be essential in the practice of agriculture. 

Longevity & health in ancient Paleolithic vs. Neolithic peoples
 

The Ancient Alchemists

When modern humans first ventured out of East Africa some eighty or a hundred thousand years ago, they were few and the world was very large.  For tens of thousands of years, they were free to wander at will, always seeking the next horizon.  Driven by curiousity and a spirit of adventure, they spread over the entire planet with amazing speed.

Eventually Homo sapiens filled every corner of the Earth, from England to Tierra del Fuego -- and at that point things started to get crowded.  Suddenly people were having to deal with nearby neighbors, who might even be competitors, and they could no longer just pull up stakes and move to the next valley.  Instead, they had to apply their ingenuity and make do with what was available.

The archaeological evidence shows a far more intensive exploitation of resources starting in the late Ice Age.  The people of the time learned how to spear fish and snare birds, they increased their level of cooperative interaction with dogs, and they worked hard at finding useful new food plants.

Most important of all, they began to take increased control of their environment.  They became gardeners, altering local conditions to encourage the growth of plants which they favored.  They developed the habit of bringing home interesting samples to replant and of herding animals to keep them close at hand.  And they devised novel ways of processing plants which had previously been unpalatable, or even toxic, and turning them into heathy and delicious meals.

These new techniques of food preparation, which we take for granted today, were at the leading edge of human intellectual activity 20,000 years ago.  They even set the paradigm for what may have been the earliest form of experimental science.  The central organizing principle of this science was the realization that materials could be radically transmuted through the judicious use of fire and water -- together with certain other procedures, such as grinding things up small and then reconsituting them. 

The application of these basic techniques to foodstuffs would lead to such marvelous discoveries as how to bake bread.  But the alchemists of the Epi-Paleolithic were not merely chefs.  They were also hackers, eager to work their newly-discovered magic on every available material and see what wonders it might produce.

Those experiments proved extraordinarily fruitful.  For example, it turned out that the same methods which changed grain into bread would also change clay into pottery.  (And with pots came a whole new range of possibilities for soaking things in water and then heating them over the fire.)  Burning certain rocks, crushing them, and mixing the powder with water produced plaster.  Other rocks, when heated to a high enough temperature, yielded metal.

As archaeological fieldwork fills in the details of the period between 15,000 and 7000 BC, it is becoming apparent that this was an era marked by a rapid succession of major scientific advances -- possibly even more so than the eight millennia which followed.  Not until the our own time would technological change again become as central to the overall course of society as it was during those years of the Epi-Paleolithic.

First use of wild grains in the Near East  (21,000 BC)
Baking of grains in the Near East (21,000 BC)
Earliest pottery in Japan  (14,000 BC)
Domesticated rice in Korea  (13,000 BC)
Plaster in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Near East  (12,000 BC)
Domesticated wheat and rye in Syria  (1)(2)  (11,000 BC)
Domesticated squash in Ecuador  (10,000-8000 BC)
Hammered copper in Turkey  (before 7000 BC)
 

The First Urbanites

The origins of agriculture could be explained to the satisfaction of twentieth century materialists as resulting from a series of accidental discoveries, refined by natural selection.  However, other achievements of the Neolithic, like the construction of cities and the rise of complex states, were not so easily dismissed as unintended adaptations to circumstances.  It is very hard to build a city by accident.  In order to complete their mechanistic model, the archeologists were thus forced to turn from Darwin to Karl Marx. 

In Marx's theory of historical materialism, all social change starts with changes in the basis of production.  Everything else, from government to religion, is merely a cultural superstructure erected upon the hard foundation of economics.  From this point of view, once the "Neolithic Revolution" had altered the way in which people met their basic needs, a whole array of other changes became inevitable, including all aspects of the "Urban Revolution."  It was just that simple.

However, this ultra-deterministic view of historical causality, which always involved a certain amount of hand-waving, has now been completely undermined by new data.  It is becoming obvious that people were already living in villages before they began taming wild plants, and that even a few fair-sized cities were built by people who practiced relatively little agriculture.  It is beginning to seem as though subjective factors, such as an active desire for the advantages of urban life, may have preceded and been the cause of the shift to farming, rather than its outcome..

The most distinctive feature of the earliest towns (of which Catal Huyuk is the best-known example) is the enormous amount of energy devoted to religious art and the great flowering of novel forms of religious symbolism.  Archaeologists who deal with these materials are now starting to reject the materialist model and to speak of a "cultural revolution" which preceded the Neolithic and made the transition to agriculture both psychologically possible and economically necessary.

Even more radical speculations about the roots of the Neolithic have recently been offered by interested amateurs operating outside the boundaries of orthodox archaeology.  One intriguing suggestion is that the first plants to be domesticated may have been intended not as food crops but as medicines and psychedelics, and that only later was this new technology turned to the mundane business of filling one's belly.  Another is that urban life may have begun in certain favored locations thousands of years before the start of agriculture.

What all these theories have in common is that they give the life of the mind priority over mere subsistence, and creative inspiration priority over historical inevitability.  It begins to seem that the real engine of human history is and always has been a combination of visionary dreaming and open-ended improvisation, a potent mixutre which constantly draws us on beyond the next horizon.

Humans took 1000 years to tame wild plants
Why Settle Down? The Mystery of Communities
Digging Into the Life of the Mind
God's Garden
 
 

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Border courtesy of Eos Development