Lecture 3: The Pre-Modern Economy From Apes to Barbarians Flashcards
Human Evolution and Out of Africa
- 7000K BP: biological divergence from chimps
- 2500K BP: Homo Habilis, first stone tools 2.5M (3.5M?)
- 2000K BP: Homo Erectus, first outward waves. First use of fire (600K BP)
- 300-200K BP: Homo Sapiens - Anatomically modern humans
- 200K-50K BP: “Out of Africa” – One (or two) outward migrations (130K-200K BP and 50-80K BP)
- 50K BP: Upper Paleolithic Revolution
Upper Palaeolithic Revolution?
“Behaviourally modern humans” (contested concept): mobile and stationary art, burials, language
• Migration and the colonization of the world
Upper Palaeolithic Revolution tools?
• New tools:
– Standardized and multipiece stone tools
– New artefacts made of new materials like bones and fibres: ropes, nets, hooks, needles, awls, bows, arrows, spear throwers, → Big game hunting, fishing
UPR and colonization?
• 60K?-40K: Australia - requires watercraft
– 35K Megafauna extinction
• 20K: Siberia - requires needles, sewn clothing and warm housing
– 16K-11K Megafauna Extinction
• 15K?-13K: America - requires surviving Siberia
– 11K Megafauna Extinction
• 13K: Mediterranean islands
Palaeolithic economy?
• Yet, the main way of living remained foraging - hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants
• Features:
– Nomadism
– Small groups (“bands”)
– Egalitarian, non-stratified, stateless societies: cooperative production and decision-making
Neolithic Revolution:
standard account
- New technique invented (Agriculture)
- Usefulness immediately appreciated
- Humans decide becoming sedentary in order to take advantage of it
- They “civilize” and organize politically into State, abandoning the potentially conflictive primitive anarchy (functionalist approach)
- Problem with the standard account: to a large extent, it is false
Problems with standard account of Neolithic Revolution?
• No immediate shift from hunter-gathering to agriculture: centuries (or millennia) of coexistence
• Welfare reduction after transition:
– Shorter skeletons (more diseases, less varied diet)
– Time budget studies of modern hunter-gatherers suggest agriculture very time-consuming activity as compared to foraging: they avoid it is possible
- How do you “invent” agriculture without a model?
- Evidence of sedentism preceding agriculture
- Evidence of use of agriculture-related tools (sickles, baskets) before emergence of agriculture
- Long temporal lag (millennia!) between emergence of settled, fully agricultural, dense societies and “State” formation (3000 BC)
Then, why did it (really) happen the Neolithic revolution?
• No agreed upon answer
• Main explanations:
– Pull forces: agriculture became increasingly rewarding as against hunting and gathering
– Push forces: humans were forced into agriculture as other options became less rewarding
- In most explanations, some combination of climate change and population growth were the main drivers
- All may be true, with different impact in different places at different times
Settling down: sedentism
• Oasis Hypothesis (Gordon Childe, 1930s-1950s):
– desertification brought humans into restricted “refuges” (“oasis”),
where they were forced to adopt agriculture – but little evidence
• Population growth
– increasingly reduced the range of seasonal hunter-gatherer migrations (each band had less territory to travel around), establishing routes of year-round camp migrations – where they could store resources and eventually begin small-scale farming
• Climate change (end of Last Ice Age, ca. 15K BP)
– increased the habitat and yields of some wild plants and animals (cereals), making migration unnecessary: hunter-gatherers eventually settle in sedentary or semisedentary sites to take advantage of this abundance
Farming: Agriculture?
- Global Food Crisis (Cohen, 1977, but no evidence of dietary deterioration prior to adoption)
- Overkill Hypothesis: reduced returns to hunting (evidence of less abundant gazelle remains in Near East)
- Sedentism (↑ births) accelerated population growth, increasing pressure on resources
- Broad Spectrum Revolution (BSR): population pressure and climatic instability at the end of Pleistocene made humans expanding their dietary base, gathering previously ignored resources (small prey and small grained grasses – cereals)
- Ratchet effect: climatic changes at end of Ice Age suddenly reversed and climate became cooler and dryer during 1K years (“Younger Dryas”), reducing wild plants’ yields – whose more intensive exploitation (leading to cultivation) was the only way to sustain expanded population
- Growing dietary importance of cereals and other plants (BSR) gradually improved technologies and specific tools associated to their gathering
- Sedentism allowed Coevolution (Human-Plant Symbiosis), gradually increasing the returns to gather (and eventually, plant) certain plants biologically improved by repeated interaction
How did farming happen?
- Gradual transition
- We should think about hunter-gathering and farming-herding as alternative strategies for obtaining food
- For long time, humans alternated between them at convenience (mixed strategy)
- Increased sedentism even before agriculture first stage in the selection of the most useful varieties of plants
Plant domestication?
• As hunter-gatherers in resource-rich environments became increasingly sedentary, they brought to base camps useful varieties of wild plants and fruits
• Such varieties were selected:
– Conciously: seed/fruit size, bitterness, fleshiness, oiliness, fibre length
– Unconsciously: seed dispersal mechanism (non- shattering stalks for cereal, non-popping pops for pulses), lack of germination inhibition, self-pollination
• Next year new plants grew from their seeds from latrines and garbage deposits, whose seeds were in turn gathered
- As the process was repeated, the share of wild plants with mutations/properties desirable to humans increased around base camps and in consumption…
- …and wild plants gradually evolved into the domesticates that we know today
- In turn, increasing yields and harvest ease made gathering those cereals increasingly productive as a strategy for obtaining food
- Planting those seeds, taking care of the plants and harvesting (i.e., farming) was just the last step (if needed)
Animal domestication?
• Similar process (and similar biological mutation)
– Ease of reproduction in captivity, tameness, yields
• Advantages of domestication of large mammals
– Meat, milk, transport, warfare, draft power (ploughing), fertilization.
• Form a technological pack with agriculture, and both often spread together, as well as other related technologies
Consequences of the Neolithic Revolution?
• Health deterioration and rising mortality
– Large concentrations of humans permanently exposed to excrements and waste
• Resistance to Epidemic Diseases
– Infection from human-animal interaction
– Large populations allow lethal epidemic diseases to become endemic (instead of killing everyone)
- Population growth: sedentary societies reduced birth spacing (compensating ↑ m)
- Greater technological dynamism owing to non-food producing specialists (Smithian process)
- Eventually, social stratification (inequality) and hierarchy, States, writing
Why not farming?
- Adoption of agriculture, not simultaneous across the world
- Early transition shaped by geography, with huge impact on present-day world income distribution (Diamond, 1997)
• Differences in timing of independent transition explained by environment
– Existence of wild ancestors of useful plants and animals
– Mediterranean climate more suitable for useful cereals (biology of the plant invests in large seeds requiring surviving dry summers – easing its storage)
• Differences in timing of adoption explained by environment
– Continental Axes’ Orientation and Isolation determine ease of adoption of varieties domesticated at other latitudes
