anthro exam 4 CH11
note
Kent Flannery (1969) laid out a series of eras during which the Middle Eastern transition to farming and herding took place. The era of seminomadic hunting and gathering (12,000-10,000 B.P.) encompasses the last stages of broad-spectrum foraging. By the end of this period, some early domesticates had been added to the diet. Next came the era of early dry farming (of wheat and barley) and caprine domestication (10,000-7500 B.P.). Dry farming refers to farming without irrigation; such farming depended on rainfall. Caprine (from capra, Latin for "goat") refers to goats and sheep, which were domesticated during this era.
Mesolithic
STONE tool making
COSTS AND BENEFITS
Other hardships and stresses accompanied food production. Social inequality and poverty increased (see Flannery and Marcus 2012). Elaborate systems of social stratification eventually replaced the egalitarianism of the past. Resources were no longer common goods, open to all, as they tend to be among foragers. Property distinctions proliferated. Slavery and other forms of human bondage eventually were invented. Crime, war, and human sacrifice became widespread. The rate at which human beings degrade their environments also increased with food production. Population increase and the need to expand farming led to deforestation in the Middle East. Even today, many farmers think of trees as giant weeds to be cut down to make way for productive fields. Previously, we saw how early Mesoamerican farmers cut down mesquite trees for maize cultivation in the Valley of Oaxaca. Many farmers and herders burn trees, brush, and pasture. Farmers burn to remove weeds; they also use the ashes for fertilizer. Herders burn to promote the growth of new, tender shoots for their livestock. But such practices do have environmental costs, including air pollution. The by-products of smelting and other chemical processes basic to the manufacture of metal tools also have environmental costs. As modern industrial pollution has harmful effluents, early chemical processes had by-products that polluted air, soils, and waters. Salts, chemicals, and microorganisms accumulate in irrigated fields. Pathogens and pollutants that were nonissues during the Paleolithic endanger growing human populations. To be sure, food production has benefits
note
Eurasia has a much broader east-west spread than does Africa or either of the Americas, which are arranged north-south. This is important because climates are more likely to be similar moving across thousands of miles east-west than doing so north-south. In Eurasia, plants and animals could spread more easily east-west than north-south because of common day lengths and similar growing seasons
NOTE
A recent analysis of mitochondrial DNA in dogs and wolves suggests that there were two phases of domestication leading to contemporary dogs (see Arnold 2015). The first phase began in China around 33,000 years ago. The second phase began around 15,000 years ago, when dogs started spreading around the world. Compared with other dog populations, Asian dogs are genetically closest to the (grey) wolf. They also display the greatest genetic diversity, which we would expect if Asia was indeed the site of their first domestication. Dogs did not begin to spread beyond Asia until around 15,000 years ago. The first dogs may have arrived in Europe no more than 10,000 years ago, where they would have been useful as retrievers in the Mesolithic economy. Broad-spectrum economies lasted about 5,000 years longer in Europe than in the Middle East. Whereas Middle Easterners had begun to cultivate plants and breed animals by 10,000 B.P., farming and herding reached western Europe only around 5000 B.P. (3000 B.C.E.) and northern Europe 500 years later. As the big-game supply dwindled after 15,000 B.P., foragers had to pursue new resources. Their attention shifted from large-bodied, slow reproducers (such as mammoths) to species such as fish, mollusks, and rabbits, which reproduce quickly and prolifically.
Geography and the Spread of Food Production
As Jared Diamond (2005, Chapter 10) emphasizes, the geography of the Old World facilitated the diffusion of plants, animals, technology (e.g., wheels and vehicles), and information (e.g., writing) (see also Ramachandran and Rosenberg 2011). Most crops in Eurasia were domesticated just once and spread rapidly in an east-west direction. The first domesticates spread from the Middle East to Egypt, northern Africa, Europe, India, and eventually China (which, however, also had its own domesticates, as we have seen). By contrast, there was less diffusion of American domesticates.
broad-spectrum revolution
As the Ice Age ended and glaciers retreated in Europe, foragers pursued a more generalized economy, focusing less on large animals. This was the beginning of what Kent Flannery (1969) has called the broad-spectrum revolution
The Tropical Origins of New World Domestication
Based on current evidence, New World farming began in the South American lowlands, spreading eventually to Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean Islands. Archaeologists and botanists have recovered and analyzed microscopic evidence from pollens, starch grains, and phytoliths (plant crystals). This evidence has forced revision of the old assumption that New World farming originated in upland areas, such as the highlands of Mexico and Peru. Domesticated squash seeds from Peru date back 10,000 years. Although found in the highlands (western Andes), those seeds, along with other early domesticates from the same site, were not domesticated there originally. Domestication must have occurred even earlier, most probably in South America's tropical lowlands. By 10,000 B.P., people in Panama, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia were cultivating plants such as squash and gourds in garden plots near their homes (Piperno and Pearsall 1998). Between 9000 and 8000 B.P., changes in seed form and phytolith size suggest that farmers were selecting certain characteristics in their cultivated plants. By 7,000 years ago, farmers had expanded their plots into nearby forests, which they cleared using slash-and-burn techniques. By that time, early farming techniques were diffusing from tropical lowlands into drier regions at higher elevations
THE FIRST AMERICAN FARMERS
Benefiting from an abundance of game, human foragers gradually occupied the Americas, learning to cope with a great diversity of environments. Their descendants would eventually turn to farming, paving the way for the emergence of states based on agriculture and trade in Mexico and Peru. The most significant contrast between Old and New World food production involved animal domestication, which was much more important in the Old World. The animals that had been hunted during the early American big-game tradition either became extinct before people could domesticate them or were not domesticable. The largest animal ever tamed in the New World (in Peru, around 4500 B.P.) was the llama. Ancient Peruvians and Bolivians ate llama meat and used that animal as a beast of burden (Flannery, Marcus, and Reynolds 1989). They bred the llama's relative, the alpaca, for its wool. Peruvians also added animal protein to their diet by raising and eating guinea pigs and ducks.
NOTE
By 10,000 B.P. the glaciers had retreated to such an extent that foragers now lived in the formerly glaciated British Isles and Scandinavia. People still hunted, but their prey were solitary forest animals, such as the roe deer, wild ox, and wild pig, rather than herd species. This led to new hunting techniques: solitary stalking and trapping. The coasts and lakes of Europe, the Middle East, and Japan were fished intensively. Some important Mesolithic sites are Scandinavian shell mounds—the garbage dumps of prehistoric oyster collectors. Microliths were used as fishhooks and in harpoons. Dugout canoes facilitated fishing and travel. For woodworking, Mesolithic carpenters used new kinds of axes, chisels, and gouges. The process of preserving meat and fish by smoking and salting grew increasingly important. (Meat preservation had been less of an issue when the climate was colder, because winter snow and ice, often on the ground nine months of the year, offered convenient refrigeration.) The bow and arrow became essential for hunting waterfowl in swamps and marshes. Dogs were used as retrievers.
The Neolithic in Asia
China was also one of the first world areas to develop farming, based on millet and rice. Millet is a tall, small-seeded cereal still grown in northern China. This grain, which today feeds a third of the world's population, is used in contemporary North America mainly as birdseed. Millet was first domesticated in northern China around 10,000 B.P. By 7500 B.P., two varieties of millet supported early farming communities in northern China, along the Yellow River. Millet cultivation paved the way for widespread village life and eventually for Shang dynasty civilization, based on irrigated agriculture, between 3600 and 3100 B.P. The northern Chinese also had domesticated dogs, pigs, and possibly cattle, goats, and sheep by 7000 B.P.
note
Climate change played a role in the origin of food production . Lewis Binford (1968) proposed that in certain areas of the Middle East (such as the hilly flanks), local environments were so rich in resources that foragers could adopt sedentism—sedentary (settled) life in villages. Binford's prime example is the widespread Natufian culture (12,800-10,200 B.P.), based on broad-spectrum foraging. The Natufians, who collected wild cereals and hunted gazelles, had year-round villages. They could stay in the same place (early villages) because they could harvest nearby wild cereals for six months The climate became warmer and more humid just before the Natufian period. This expanded the altitude range of wild wheat and barley, thus enlarging the available foraging area and allowing a longer harvest season. Wheat and barley ripened in the spring at low altitudes, in the summer at middle altitudes, and in the fall at high altitudes. As locations for their villages, the Natufians chose central places where they could harvest wild cereals in all three zones. Around 11,000 B.P., this favorable foraging pattern was threatened by a shift to drier conditions. Many wild cereal habitats dried up, and the optimal zone for foraging shrank. Natufian villages were now restricted to areas with permanent water. As population continued to grow, some Natufians attempted to maintain productivity by transferring wild cereals to well-watered areas, where they started cultivating those cereals.
COSTS AND BENEFITS
Compared with Paleolithic and Mesolithic foraging, public health declined in food-producing societies. Diets based on crops and dairy products tend to be less varied, less nutritious, and less healthful than foragers' diets, which usually are higher in proteins and lower in fats and carbohydrates. With the shift to food production, the physical well-being of the population often declines. Communicable diseases, protein deficiency, and dental caries increase
COSTS AND BENEFITS
Compared with nomadic or seminomadic foragers, food producers tend to be sedentary. Their populations are denser, which makes it easier to transmit and maintain diseases. Malaria, sickle-cell anemia, and smallpox all spread along with food production. Population concentrations, especially cities, are breeding grounds for epidemic diseases. People live nearer to other people and animals and their wastes, which also affect public health (Diamond 2005). Compared with farmers, herders, and city dwellers, foragers were relatively disease free, stress free, and well nourished.
note
During the era of increased specialization in food production (7500-5500 B.P.), new crops were added to the diet, along with more productive varieties of wheat and barley. Cattle and pigs were domesticated. By 5500 B.P., agriculture had extended to the alluvial plain of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (Figure 11.1), where early Mesopotamians lived in walled towns, some of which grew into cities. (Recap 11.1 highlights these stages, or eras, in the transition to food production in the ancient Middle East.) After two million years of stone-toolmaking, H. sapiens was living in the Bronze Age, when metallurgy and the wheel were invented
The Neolithic in Africa
Excavations in southern Egypt have revealed considerable complexity in its Neolithic economy and social system, along with very early pottery and cattle, which may have been domesticated locally. Located in southern Egypt, Nabta Playa is a basin in the eastern Sahara Desert that, during prehistoric summers, filled with water. Over several millennia this temporary lake attracted people, who used it for social and ceremonial activities (Wendorf and Schild 2000). Nabta Playa was first occupied around 12,000 B.P., as Africa's summer rains moved northward, providing moisture for grasses, trees, bushes, hares, and gazelle, along with humans. The earliest settlements (11,000-9300 B.P.) at Nabta were small, seasonal camps of herders of domesticated cattle. (Note the very early, and perhaps independent, domestication of cattle here.) According to Wendorf and Schild (2000), Nabta Playa provides early evidence for what anthropologists have called the "African cattle complex," in which cattle are used economically for their milk and blood, rather than killed for their meat (except on ceremonial occasions). Nabta was occupied only seasonally, as people came over from the Nile or from better-watered areas to the south. They returned to those areas in the fall. By 9000 B.P., people were living at Nabta Playa year round. To survive in the desert, they dug large, deep wells and lived in well-organized villages, with small huts arranged in straight lines. Plant remains show they collected sorghum, millet, legumes (peas and beans), tubers, and fruits. These were wild plants, and so the economy was not fully Neolithic. By 8800 B.P., these people were making their own pottery, possibly the earliest pottery in Egypt. By 8100 B.P., sheep and goats had arrived from the Middle East.
note
Farming colonies spread down into drier areas. By 7000 B.P., simple irrigation systems had developed, tapping springs in the foothills. By 6000 B.P., more complex irrigation techniques made agriculture possible in the arid lowlands of southern Mesopotamia. In the alluvial desert plain of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, a new economy based on irrigation and trade fueled the growth of an entirely new form of society. This was the state, a social and political unit featuring a central government, extreme contrasts of wealth, and social classes
COSTS AND BENEFITS
Food production brought advantages and disadvantages. Among the advantages were discoveries and inventions. People eventually learned to spin and weave; to make pottery, bricks, and arched masonry; and to smelt and cast metals. They developed trade and commerce by land and sea. By 5500 B.P., Middle Easterners were living in vibrant cities with markets, streets, temples, and palaces. They created sculpture, mural art, writing systems, weights, measures, mathematics, and new forms of political and social organization. Because it increased economic production and led to new social, scientific, and creative forms, food production often is considered an evolutionary advance. But the new economy also brought hardships. For example, food producers typically work harder than foragers do—and for a less adequate diet.
The Mexican Highlands
Long before Mexican highlanders developed a taste for maize, beans, and squash, they hunted as part of a pattern of broad-spectrum foraging. Mammoth remains dated to 11,000 B.P. have been found along with spear points in the basin that surrounds Mexico City. However, small animals were more important than big game, as were the grains, pods, fruits, and leaves of wild plants. In the Valley of Oaxaca, in Mexico's southern highlands, between 10,000 and 4000 B.P., foragers concentrated on certain wild animals—deer and rabbits—and plants—cactus leaves and fruits and tree pods, especially mesquite (Flannery 1986). Those early Oaxacans dispersed to hunt and gather in fall and winter. But they came together in late spring and summer, forming larger groups to harvest seasonally available plants. Cactus fruits appeared in the spring. Since summer rains would reduce the fruits to mush and since birds, bats, and rodents competed for them, cactus collection required hard work by large groups of people. The edible pods of the mesquite, available in June, also required intensive gathering. Eventually, people started planting maize in the alluvial soils of valley floors. This was the zone where foragers traditionally had congregated for the annual spring/summer harvest of cactus fruits and mesquite pods. By 4000 B.P., a type of maize was available that provided more food than the mesquite pods did. Once that happened, people started cutting down mesquite trees and replacing them with cornfields. By 3500 B.P. in the Valley of Oaxaca, where winter frosts are absent, simple irrigation permitted the establishment of permanent villages based Page 199on maize farming. Water close to the surface allowed early farmers to dig wells right in their cornfields. Using pots, they dipped water out of these wells and poured it on their growing plants, a technique known as pot irrigation. Early permanent villages supported by farming appeared in areas of Mesoamerica where there was reliable rainfall, pot irrigation, or access to humid river bottomlands. The spread of maize farming resulted in further genetic changes, higher yields, higher human populations, and more intensive farming. Pressures to intensify cultivation led to improvements in water-control systems. New varieties of fast-growing maize eventually appeared, expanding the range of areas that could be cultivated. Increasing population and irrigation also helped spread maize farming. The advent of intensive cultivation laid the foundation for the emergence of the state in Mesoamerica—some 3,000 years later than in the Middle East
Maize
Maize, or corn, first domesticated in the tropical lowlands of southwestern Mexico,
note
Middle Eastern food production arose in the context of four environmental zones. From highest to lowest, they are high plateau (5,000 feet, or 1,500 meters), hilly flanks, piedmont steppe (treeless plain), and alluvial desert. The last zone is the area watered by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (100-500 feet, or 30-150 meters). The hilly flanks is a subtropical woodland zone that flanks those rivers to the north (see Figure 11.1). It once was speculated that food production might have begun in oases in the alluvial desert, places where water would have been available for humans, plants, and animals. (Alluvial describes rich, fertile soil deposited by rivers and streams.) Today, we know that although the world's first civilization (Mesopotamian) did indeed develop in this arid zone, irrigation, a late invention (7000 B.P.), was necessary to farm the alluvial desert. Plant cultivation and animal domestication started not in the dry river zone but in areas with reliable rainfall.
note
More productive and reliable than foraging, Neolithic economies fueled population growth and expansion, as well as the settlement of new environments. The archaeological signature of Neolithic cultures (which are called Formative in the Americas) includes dependence on cultivation, sedentary (settled) life, and the use of ceramic vessels. The term Neolithic originally was coined to refer to new techniques of grinding and polishing stone tools However, the primary significance of the Neolithic was the new total economy rather than just its characteristic artifacts
note
Neolithic is considered revolutionary because, in just a few thousand years—after millions of years of foraging as the sole human subsistence strategy—it would transform small, mobile groups into societies living in permanent settlements—villages, towns, and eventually cities
note
Sedentary village life thus developed before farming and herding in the Middle East. The Natufians and other hilly flanks foragers had no choice but to build villages near the densest stands of wild grains. They needed a place to keep their grain. Furthermore, sheep and goats came to graze on the stubble that remained after humans had harvested the grain. The fact that basic plants and animals were available in the same area also favored village life. Hilly flanks foragers built houses, dug storage pits for grain, and made ovens to roast it.
NEOLITHIC
Term used to describe economies based on food production (cultivated crops and domesticated animals)
note
The Middle East, along with certain other world areas where food production originated, is a region that for thousands of years has had a vertical economy. (Other examples include Peru and Mesoamerica—Middle America, including Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize.) A vertical economy exploits environmental zones that, although close together in space, contrast with one another in altitude, rainfall, overall climate, and vegetation (see Figure 11.1). Such a close juxtaposition of varied environments allowed broad-spectrum foragers to use different resources in different seasons.
THE NEOLITHIC
The Neolithic Revolution, sometimes called the Agricultural Revolution, was the widespread transition, beginning about 12,000 years ago, of human societies from lifestyles based on foraging to lifestyles based on farming and herding
NOTE
The broad-spectrum revolution in Europe includes the late Upper Paleolithic and the Mesolithic, which followed it. Again, because of the long history of European archaeology, our knowledge of the Mesolithic (particularly in southwestern Europe and the British Isles) is extensive. The Mesolithic had a characteristic tool type—the microlith (Greek for "small stone"). Of interest to us is what an abundant inventory of small and delicately shaped tools can tell us about the total economy and way of life of the people who made them
The hilly flanks
The hilly flanks is a subtropical woodland zone that flanks those rivers to the north
note
The movement of people, animals, and products between zones—plus population increase supported by highly productive broad-spectrum foraging—was a precondition for the emergence of food production (Bocquet-Appel and Bar-Yosef 2008). As they traveled between zones, people carried seeds into new habitats. Mutations, genetic recombinations, and human selection led to new kinds of wheat and barley. Some of the new varieties were better adapted to the steppe and, eventually, the alluvial desert than the wild forms had been.
note
The path from foraging to food production was one that people followed independently in at least seven world areas: the Middle East, northern China, southern China, sub-Saharan Africa, central Mexico, the south central Andes, and the eastern United States. We see that three of these locations were in the Americas, with four in the Old World. In each of these centers, people independently invented domestication, although of different sets of crops and animals.
note
The transition from Mesolithic to Neolithic occurs when groups become dependent on domesticated plants, animals, and animal products for more than 50 percent of their diet. Usually, this happens after a very long period of experimenting with and using domesticates as supplements to broad-spectrum foraging
teosinte
The wild ancestor of maize
broad-spectrum revolution
This refers to the period beginning around 15,000 B.P. in the Middle East and 12,000 B.P. in Europe, during which a wider range, or broader spectrum, of plant and animal life was hunted, gathered, collected, caught, and fished. It was revolutionary because in the Middle East it led to food production—human control over the reproduction of plants and animals.
THE FIRST AMERICAN FARMERS
Three key caloric staples, major sources of carbohydrates, were domesticated by Native Americans. Maize, or corn, first domesticated in the tropical lowlands of southwestern Mexico, became the caloric staple in Mesoamerica and Central America and eventually reached coastal Peru. The other two staples were root crops: white ("Irish") potatoes, first domesticated in the Andes, and manioc, or cassava, a tuber first cultivated in the South American lowlands, where other root crops such as yams and sweet potatoes also were important. Other crops added variety to New World diets and made them nutritious. Beans and squash provided essential proteins, vitamins, and minerals. Maize, beans, and squash were the basis of the Mesoamerican diet. Anthropologists recently have confirmed that the earliest domesticates in the Americas are about as early as the first Old World domesticates.
manioc
manioc, or cassava, a tuber first cultivated in the South American lowlands
sedentism
sedentary (settled) life in villages
Natufians
widespread middle eastern forgaging culture
Mesoamerica
—Middle America, including Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize.
