It is with the emergence of farming that constraints
to cultural
development are lifted. The story begins in the Near East in the ninth
or maybe the tenth millennium B.C. The question "Why there?" comes down
to a point so obvious that it is rarely put into words. The basis of
farming, and hence of the whole historical development of human
societies, is grass. Farming is a cultural package with two major
components: the cultivation of domesticated plants, and the tending of
domesticated animals. Among the plants, the oldest and still by far the
most important are the domesticated forms of grass we know as grain
crops-such as wheat and barley. Among the animals, the analogous
position is occupied by herbivores-the sheep and cattle on which
pastoralists depend for a living. This immediately explains why the
tropics have taken a back seat in the course of history. The action is
now where the grass is; and grass, despite its tropical origin, is most
successful in temperate climates.
Grass, is widely distributed in the world, and with
it herbivorous
animals. But not all grasses are suitable for domestication, nor are
all herbivores; and the species that are suitable are very unequally
distributed. Eurasia is far better supplied on both counts than the
rest of the world's landmasses; wild cows, for example, were found from
Europe to China. And within Eurasia the best habitat region was the
Near East; in particular, it was unusually rich in large-grained
cereals. So it is no surprise that the Neolithic revolution began in
the Near East-more specifically in the Fertile Crescent, the arc of
cultivable land stretching from Palestine in the west to lower
Mesopotamia in the east.
In and around Palestine there existed toward 10,000
B.C. a population
that was already to a considerable extent sedentary enough to provide
favorable environments for rice. What is more, one way in which this
population survived was by harvesting the seeds of wild grasses, as we
know from the hardware they left behind them- sickles, mortars, clay-
lined storage pits, and the like. They would soon have found that they
had inadvertently planted stands of grass in the vicinity of their
huts. What they had done inadvertently they could go on to do
deliberately. By now we are well on the road to domestication. We could
continue in this vein, but the message is already clear.
After these early Near Eastern beginnings, farming
both deepened on its
home ground and made its appearance elsewhere.
It could be that the emergence of farming was a very
unlikely accident
that just happened to occur once and once only. In such a world any
subsequent appearance of farming in another region would arise from the
spread of the original package. This spread might take either of two
forms: a farming population could arrive and displace the local hunter-
gatherers; or the local hunter- gatherers could themselves adopt the
practice from farmers with whom they were in contact.
On the other hand, we could imagine a contrasting world
in which
farming emerged independently in numerous places, without any process
of colonization or cultural borrowing to link them.
It was probably a bit of both. There is no doubt that
a standard Near
Eastern package of cultivated plants and animals within a few thousand
years had made its way as far east as the northwest corner of India (by
5000 B.C.) and as far west as Britain (by 4000 B.C.). Analysis of both
the mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosomes of Europeans has shown that
they are predominantly the heirs of the Palaeolithic population of
Europe, with only a limited input from the Near Eastern population in
Neolithic times. Borrowing other people's culture is something humans
are good at.
At the other end of the spectrum, an incontrovertible
instance of the
independent emergence of farming is provided by the New World-the
Americas, as opposed to the Old World of Eurasia and Africa. The New
World lagged several thousand years behind the Near East, developing
farming in the fourth millennium B.C. rather than the ninth, there is
nothing to indicate that it was subject to influence from the Old
World. None of the American domesticated plants (notably maize) or
animals (notably llamas) owed anything to the Old World, so the
standard Old World farming packages played no part here. There is no
evidence of any kind of contact with Old World farmers in the relevant
period, and at least in the case of maize, the process of domestication
took so long that it could not plausibly have been the result of an
attempt at imitation. We could go on to add some further examples where
the case for independent emergence is strong.
All this confirms that there was something special
about the Holocene,
something that could produce convergent results in populations isolated
from one another since the Pleistocene. But second, it is striking that
the inhabitants of Britain-for example-should have waited several
thousand years for farming to arrive from the Near East, rather than
developing it for themselves on the basis of local species. So even in
the Holocene, an independent emergence of farming must rank as a
somewhat unusual event, albeit not so unusual as to be unique.
