William H. McNeill wrote:
In the Beginning …
… On the analogy of hunting peoples who have survived to the present, it is likely that Paleolithic men lived in small groups of not more than twenty to sixty persons. Such communities may well have been migratory, returning to their caves or other fixed shelter for only part of the year. Very likely leadership in the hunt devolved upon a single individual whose personal skill and prowess won him authority. Probably there existed a network of relationships among hunting groups scattered over fairly wide areas or, at the least, a delimitation of hunting grounds between adjacent communities. Exogamous marriage arrangements and intergroup ceremonial associations may also have existed; and no doubt fighting sometimes broke out when one community trespassed upon the territory of another. There is also some evidence of long-distance trade, although it is often impossible to be sure whether an object brought from afar came to its resting place as a result of an exchange or had been picked up in the course of seasonal or other migrations …
… During the Paleolithic and Mesolithic ages man had already become master of the animal kingdom in the sense that he was the chief and most adaptable of predators; but despite his tools, his social organization, and his peculiar capacity to enlarge and transmit his culture, he still remained narrowly dependent on the balance of nature. The next great step in mankind’s ascent toward lordship over the earth was the discovery of means whereby the natural environment could be altered to suit human need and convenience. With the domestication of plants and animals, and with the development of methods whereby fields could be made where forests grew by nature, man advanced to a new level of life. He became a shaper of the animal and vegetable life around him, rather than a mere predator upon it.
This advance opened a radically new phase of human history. The predator’s mode of life automatically limits numbers; and large-bodied predators, like early men and modern lions, must perforce remain relatively rare in nature. Thus larger populations, with all the possibilities of specialization and social differentiation which numbers permit, could only be sustained by human communities that found ways of escaping from the natural limits imposed by their predatory past. This constituted perhaps the most basic of all human revolutions. Certainly the whole history of civilized mankind depended on the enlargement of the human food supply through agriculture and the domestication of animals. The costs were real, however; for the tedious labor of tilling the fields was a poor substitute for the fierce joys, sharp exertions, and instinctive satisfactions of the hunt. The human exercise of power thus early showed its profoundly double-edged character; for a farming folk’s enlarged dominion over nature, and liberation from earlier limits upon food supply, meant also an unremitting enslavement to seed, soil, and season …
… It is probable that agriculture was invented more than once. The fact that the crops of pre-Columbian America were botanically quite different from those of the Old World has persuaded most students of the question that agriculture developed independently in the Americas. Even within the Old World, agriculture probably originated in at least two different areas. The principal evidence for this is the basic contrast which until recently divided Eurasian agriculture into two distinct styles. Field agriculture, depending on reproduction by seed, dominated Europe and the Middle East, where grains constituted the principal crop. On the other hand, garden farming, involving propagation of crops by transplantation of offshoots from a parent plant, prevailed in much of monsoon Asia and the Pacific islands, where root crops were of major importance. Such differences are fundamental and may stem from independent discoveries of the possibility of raising vegetable food by deliberate human action. Yet the contrast may also arise merely from an intelligent exploitation of varying local flora under conditions imposed by diverse climates …
The grain-centered agriculture of the Middle East provided the basis for the first civilized societies. Careful work by archeologists permits us to know something of the natural conditions which made the development of that agriculture possible. Radiocarbon dating suggests we should look for the beginnings of Middle Eastern agriculture at about 6500 B.C., when the icecap had vanished from Continental Europe, and the earth’s climatic zones were probably distributed more or less as at present. In western and central Europe this meant the appearance of heavy forests and the corresponding human shift from Paleolithic to Mesolithic tool kits …
… The spread of grain fields so enlarged human food resources that men began decisively to transcend their predatory past, escaping the limits upon number and density of population that had hitherto made humankind relatively rare in the balance of nature. No date can confidently be assigned to this tremendous departure; and indeed, no completely satisfactory archeological evidence for the transition has yet come to light. But assuming that as new food-producing methods proved their advantage, they spread far and wide among the wild-grain gatherers of the Middle East; and assuming further that enlarged food resources resulted in comparatively rapid population growth, then it is probable that this earliest agriculture did not much antedate 6500 B.C. Village sites, created by the necessity for a more sedentary existence when fields had to be cultivated and guarded against browsing animals, have not been found dating from before about 6250 B.C. (plus or minus 200 years), but become increasingly numerous for later periods.
Middle Eastern agriculture must at first have been conducted on a small scale, and was women’s work. Hunting remained the task of the menfolk; but by discovering even rudimentary agriculture, women rudely upset a delicate ecological balance. Human hunters became too numerous; game animals within range of the pullulating grainfields must quickly have been almost exterminated. As this happened, agriculture gradually displaced hunting from the center of community life. Men, whose bows had lost much of their usefulness, may have been persuaded to take on part of the work of the fields—fencing to keep out animals, harvesting in the precious days when the grain must be gathered before it scattered its seeds irreparably on the earth; and at last, as food for the year came to depend mainly on the size of the cultivated plot, men may in some communities have taken spade or hoe reluctantly in hand to work the fields side by side with their womenfolk.
But there was another possibility. Men could tame some of the beasts upon which they were accustomed to prey. It was logical for intelligent hunters confronted with a dwindling game reserve to protect their potential victims from rival predators and to conserve the herds for their own future use. This still falls short of full-scale domestication, however, which implies exploitation of the living animal for its milk, wool, and even its blood.
No one really knows how or by what stages a hunting-collecting way of life retreated before agriculture and stock raising. Perhaps the first fully domesticated animals were used to decoy their wild fellows within the reach of hunters; and other uses for them may have been discovered only gradually, as the numbers of wild herds decreased. No doubt the innovators failed to foresee how domestication of animals would transform their familiar customs. Reason presumably had little scope in this transformation, for the whole relationship of man to animals was saturated in magical conceptions. Ritual slaughter of captured beasts played a part in the religions of some hunting peoples; and perhaps protecting and nurturing herds of potential victims in the hope of assuring better hunting through more regular and sumptuous sacrifices seemed the only proper answer to an increasing shortage of wild game.
All that can be said with certainty is that men in the Middle East did succeed in domesticating goats, sheep, pigs, and cattle at an early stage of their agricultural development, and were able thereby to secure a continued and perhaps even an enlarged supply of meat and other animal products. Conceivably, domestication of animals may have begun even before agriculture caused human population to increase beyond the level that could be maintained by predation; but even if so, domesticated flocks and herds can have had only a very limited importance before hunters found their accustomed prey becoming scarcer. As long as hunting continued to bring in the usual amount of food, why abandon a way of life inculcated by the practice of untold generations and sanctified by firm religious and moral values?
Discoveries in the Middle East suggest that once agriculture had begun to transform human life, the range of material equipment at the disposal of the new farming communities rapidly increased. The apparent suddenness with which new accouterments appear in the archeological strata may partly be due to gaps in the record. Yet the new routines of daily life must have called for new tools and methods; and the human response to such new needs may have been relatively rapid. Presumably the drastic transformation implicit in the shift from hunting to agriculture and stock-raising temporarily freed men’s inventive capacities from the bonds of custom. Normal resistance to innovation was reduced for a time, until a series of brilliant inventions and adaptations of old methods provided the basis for a new and satisfactory way of life, which then in its turn formed a stable, customary pattern: that of the Neolithic village community.
Archeology permits us to know something of the technical and material side of this social mutation. Tillage and stock raising were associated with brewing, weaving, and the manufacture of pottery and polished stone tools. Some pre-pottery sites have been discovered where traces of agriculture are discernible; and no doubt some centuries were needed before the mature assemblage of what archeologists call “Neolithic” tools had been worked out and adopted by the primitive farming communities of the Middle East.
Once a community had come to rely on cereal foods, its members automatically became far more firmly rooted to a given spot than had been the case in the days of hunting economy. Throughout the growing season, at least part of the community had to protect the fields from browsing animals; and even during the rest of the year the difficulty of transporting harvested grain, together with the need to work old fields and clear new ones, must have kept the women of the community tied to a fixed location for nearly the whole circle of the seasons …
Polished stone tools, particularly axes, constitute the hallmark of every Neolithic site. Flint, chipped and flaked in a fashion to produce sharp cutting edges, had been perfectly adequate for the arrowheads, knives, and scrapers needed by hunters; but flint was too brittle for stripping the bark and branches from trees or cutting them down. Usable axes could only be made from tougher kinds of stone, which could not be shaped by traditional methods of flint-knapping. The solution to this difficulty was found by transferring to the harder medium of stone the methods of rough-hewing and polishing which had long been in use for shaping bone and horn implements. Polished stone axes and other tools therefore became characteristic of agricultural settlements; and the conspicuous difference between them and the older flints caused archeologists to name such remains “Neolithic” long before the connection between the technique of tool manufacture and the changed requirements of the community was understood.
The first agriculturalists were not fully sedentary. Soil repeatedly cropped lost its fertility after a few years, so that if harvests were to be maintained, old fields had to be abandoned and “virgin soil broken in from time to time. The sort of land that lent itself to primitive agriculture was thickly wooded ground where the tree cover prevented heavy undergrowth. In such areas, once the trees had been killed by stripping their bark, the soil beneath lay relatively open and might easily be worked with digging stick, spade, or hoe by going around the stumps. After a season or two of cropping such soil, fertility could be renewed by burning the dried limbs and tree trunks and scattering their ashes. By contrast, natural grassland offered stubborn resistance to wooden digging sticks; and it was almost impossible to prevent the native grasses from growing up through the grain and crowding it out. Hence the earliest agriculturalists, like eighteenth-century American pioneers, preferred the woodlands and clung at first to the slopes and foothills of the Middle East where trees grew naturally. It was probably this style of slash-and-burn agriculture, involving a semi-migratory pattern of life, which was practiced by the “mature” Neolithic villages of the ancient Middle East, as it still is today by primitive farmers in tropical rain forests and in subarctic birch and spruce forests on the fringes of the agricultural world.
As agriculture evolved in the Middle East, mixed economies, combining cereal-cropping with stock-raising, became characteristic. No doubt some communities put more emphasis upon the one or the other activity. At lower altitudes along the margins of the woodlands, where grasslands shaded off into desert, the domestication of animals made possible a predominantly pastoral mode of life … Since pastoral peoples leave few traces for archeologists, it is uncertain when a distinct divergence between pastoral and agricultural modes of life first developed. The occupation of the steppe and desert was gradual. Indeed, the full potentiality of pastoral nomadism was not realized until men learned to ride horseback habitually—not before about 900 B.C.; while the earliest peoples who followed their flocks onto the grasslands also cultivated favorable patches of ground, so that the difference between the two ways of life was at first rather of emphasis than of kind.
In all probability, pastoralism was divorced fully from agriculture only by communities that had remained hunters until the migratory expansion of stock-raising farmers brought the new style of life to their attention, perhaps by usurping some part of their accustomed hunting grounds. Clearly, hunters would find the labor of the fields little to their liking; whereas the arts of the herdsman fitted smoothly and easily into traditions of the hunt. Hence, if for any reason hunters had to modify familiar routines, it is not difficult to believe that they might accept domesticated animals eagerly but repudiate crop tillage as unworthy of free men. It was therefore toward the margins of the earliest centers of agricultural life—in the steppes of Europe and central Asia and in northern Arabia, where natural grasslands made cultivation difficult at best—that pastoralism found its principal home.
The occupation of the grasslands by pastoral peoples meant that two divergent styles of human life, partially interdependent and capable of endless interaction, came to exist side by side in the Middle East. As they still do today, pastoralists must from the earliest times have brought their animals to feed on the grain stubble. No doubt from the beginning they entered into trade relations with farming populations, for the surpluses produced by farmer and by herdsman naturally complement each other; and the more mobile life of the pastoralist made it easy and natural for him to act as carrier of such special and precious goods as hard stone for axes, shells for decoration, and valued perishables which have not left archeological traces. Finally, the perennial warfare between peasant and herdsman, symbolized in the biblical story of Cain and Abel, must have brought recurrent violence into the lives of Neolithic peoples.
Communities of hunters, whose way of life was essentially uniform throughout wide areas, and whose skills were exquisitely adapted to the existing environment, could find little stimulus to social change from contact with neighboring human groups. But with the development of agriculture and pastoralism, ways of life were no longer uniform. A new and fertile stimulus to fresh departures had arrived on the human scene. Once men had started re-creating their environments to suit themselves, older limits to social change were removed, and the spectacular ascent to our contemporary level of skill in manipulating the forces of nature began.
“For farmer and herdsman alike, the cycle of the seasons assumed an importance unmatched in the older hunting life. Storms and drought, recurring irregularly though within a loosely predictable seasonal pattern, set the basic rhythm of life for communities dependent upon grain fields and pastures …
Of necessity, therefore, the caprices of weather and season provided the central themes of Middle Eastern Neolithic religion. The generative and destructive aspects of earth, rain, and sun pressed themselves upon the farmers’ attention; and religious ceremonies underwent a corresponding development in the hope of persuading or compelling the forces of nature to act in accordance with human desires. Older pieties, centered upon animal and vegetable spirits, persisted; and rites that had been designed to propitiate or to increase the fecundity of these spirits blended easily with new, or newly important, cults of earth, sky, and sun to produce the Middle Eastern fertility religions.
A widespread shift in human relations brought about by the transition from hunting to agriculture seems also to have affected Neolithic cults. In proportion as women became the major suppliers of food for the community, their independence and authority probably increased; and various survivals in historic times suggest that matrilineal family systems prevailed in many Neolithic communities. Correspondingly, the spread of agriculture was connected everywhere with the rise of female priestesses and deities to prominence. The earth itself was apparently conceived as a woman—the prototype for the Great Mother of later religions—and the numerous female figurines which have been unearthed from Neolithic sites may have been intended as representations of the fruitful earth goddess. In addition, stone axes (which cleared the trees to make fields), sacred fire (which fertilized the plots and kept the hearth alive), and sacred mountains, trees, and stones seem to have played varying parts in Neolithic religious observances. Indeed, one may imagine that just as a new tool kit developed by appropriate elaboration of older elements, so also the intellectual, emotional, and moral aspects of the new agricultural society soon became rationalized by myth, ritualized by practice, and suffused with a sense of the sacred.
Although the foci of religious practice, symbols, and ritual were thus rather drastically displaced, there was no fundamental break with the older animism of the Paleolithic and Mesolithic hunters. In one respect, however, the Neolithic pattern of life and religion did mark an important departure, ritually expressed in the worship of the moon, and practically in the necessity of time-reckoning. The waxing and waning of the moon offered primitive peoples their only obvious calendar …
… The importance of measurement and calculation in the agricultural routine of the Middle East profoundly affected the subsequent development of human society and thought. To hunters, neither temporal nor spatial measurement matters much. Life consists of alternate feast and famine, somewhat mitigated by freezing or drying surplus meat or accumulating modest stores of wild-growing seeds and roots. But the time until the next kill is incalculable, nor is it feasible to preserve and store food against a definite period of foreseeable shortage. All this is different for the cultivator. For him the seasons set a basic rhythm of existence, with fixed and foreseeable times of plenty and of dearth. Rationing grain consumption to last until harvest, reserving surplus against a year of drought, and calculating what is needed for seed, how much land to dig, and when to dig it—all these and similar acts of foresight and measurement were necessary to the primitive agriculturalist. Basic to all such calculation was a method of foreknowing the seasons—how long it would be till seed time and harvest came round once more. Hence under Middle Eastern conditions the arts of measurement were an indispensable and absolutely vital part of the agriculturalist’s equipment …
Rough measurement of dimensions, accurate enough to allow men to estimate how much seed to save for sowing a given plot of ground, probably offered little difficulty to the earliest farmers. Rule of thumb served. A basketful of seed per field, basket and field being about “so” big, would do. Not until men undertook large-scale irrigation and monumental architecture were more accurate spatial measurements needful. But the measurement of time presented a formidable problem; for under Middle Eastern conditions the arrival of the winter rains does not announce itself from year to year in any unambiguous way. Erratic summer or autumn showers might easily lead a hungry farmer to plant the irreplaceable seed too soon, so that his grain would sprout only to wither in a renewed drought. The fact that the phases of the moon do not fit exactly into the solar year vastly complicated the problem. Only when men had learned to watch and interpret correctly the seasonal movements of moon, sun, and stars could they know for certain under which cycle of the moon to plant their crops. The supreme importance of measuring the seasons accurately, and the difficulty of doing so, provided a basic stimulus to intellectual and scientific development in the Middle East. Not until the rise of Sumerian and Egyptian civilization was the problem fully solved by the development of reliable calendars.
… the problems of time measurement in monsoon Asia were far less serious … the preoccupation of the earliest Middle Eastern farmers with time measurement may well have imparted a fundamental cast to Western and Moslem minds …
In agricultural communities, male leadership in the hunt ceased to be of much importance. As the discipline of the hunting band decayed, the political institutions of the earliest village settlements perhaps approximated the anarchism which has remained ever since the ideal of peaceful peasantries all round the earth. Probably religious functionaries, mediators between helpless mankind and the uncertain fertility of the earth, provided an important form of social leadership. The strong hunter and man of prowess, his occupation gone or relegated to the margins of social life, lost the unambiguous primacy which had once been his; while the comparatively tight personal subordination to a leader necessary to the success of a hunting party could be relaxed in proportion as grain fields became the center around which life revolved.
Among predominantly pastoral peoples, however, religious-political institutions took a quite different turn. To protect the flocks from animal predators required the same courage and social discipline which hunters had always needed. Among pastoralists, likewise, the principal economic activity—focused, as among the earliest hunters, on a parasitic relation to animals—continued to be the special preserve of menfolk. Hence a system of patrilineal families, united into kinship groups under the authority of a chieftain responsible for daily decisions as to where to seek pasture, best fitted the conditions of pastoral life. In addition, pastoralists were likely to accord importance to the practices and discipline of war. After all, violent seizure of someone else’s animals or pasture grounds was the easiest and speediest way to wealth and might be the only means of survival in a year of scant vegetation.
Such warlikeness was entirely alien to communities tilling the soil. Archaeological remains from early Neolithic villages suggest remarkably peaceable societies. As long as cultivable land was plentiful, and as long as the labor of a single household could not produce a significant surplus, there can have been little incentive to war. Traditions of violence and hunting-party organization presumably withered in such societies, to be revived only when pastoral conquest superimposed upon peaceable villagers the elements of warlike organization from which civilized political institutions without exception descend.
With all its technical limitations, the ancient Middle Eastern style of agricultural life offered substantial advantages over the older hunting existence. If life was less exciting, food was more nearly assured, and more people could survive on a given area of land. Such advantages meant that agriculture was bound to spread outward from its center of origin, establishing itself wherever cultivation was easiest. In Europe at least, this meant a preference for light soils, especially loess and chalk hillsides, where natural drainage was good and the soil could be worked easily …
… in metalliferous regions some of their settlements engaged in mining …
… techniques of grain agriculture which originated in the Middle East met and mingled in north China during the third millennium B.C. with another style of cultivation deriving from monsoon Asia. This strengthens the hypothesis that agriculture originated in two separate areas of the Old World …
… The harnessing of animal power for the labor of tillage was a step of obvious significance. Human resources were substantially increased thereby, since for the first time men tapped a source of mechanical energy greater than that which their own muscles could supply. The use of animal power also established a much more integral relation between stock-breeding and agriculture. Mixed farming, uniting animal husbandry with crop cultivation, was to become the distinguishing characteristic of agriculture in western Eurasia. It made possible a higher standard of living or of leisure than was attainable by peoples relying mainly or entirely upon the strength of merely human muscles.
The spread of traction plowing served also to reverse the role of the sexes in agriculture. Hunting and tending animals had always been primarily a man’s job; and when animals came into the field, men came with them. Women lost their earlier dominion over the grain fields; and as followers of the plow, men became once again the principal providers of food. Therewith they were able to reinforce or restore masculine primacy in family and society. By the time of the earliest written records, patrilineal families and male dominance were universal among plowing peoples in the Middle East, although enough traces of an earlier system remain to suggest that this had not always and everywhere been so. The rise of male deities and priests-established features of Sumerian and Egyptian religion—may also be connected with the new masculine role in agriculture. Political organization was probably less affected. Traces of a system of government based upon the informal decisions of an assembly of elders survived into historic times in Mesopotamia; and this sort of “primitive democracy” seems a likely model for whatever government the earliest plowing villagers found needful …
… Whether built around hoe, spade, or plow, Neolithic agriculture involved prolonged and heavy labor at certain times of the year. Particularly in the harvest season, the whole year’s food supply depended upon intensive and steady effort, for which every man, woman, and child had to be mobilized. But in other seasons, for long stretches of time no very pressing work in the fields required attention. Such slack periods, when men were freed from the immediate necessity of finding food, offered hitherto unparalleled opportunities for the elaboration of human culture.
How the first farmers used the leisure thus laboriously won can be known only imperfectly. Song and dance, together with scarcely less evanescent arts like tattooing, dyeing of fabrics, wood carving and construction, feather and leather work, and all decoration of perishable materials, can only be guessed at. Pottery sherds, with a few statuettes and models made from fired clay, constitute by far the largest stock of surviving artifacts, while polished stone tools are the most conspicuous. A few bits of copper on village sites attest the beginnings of metallurgy. Such surviving fragments suffice at least to indicate the increased variety and complexity of Neolithic craftsmanship, as compared to what had been before.
Such craftsmanship had its limits. With the possible exception of experts in the supernatural, it is unlikely that anyone in Neolithic villages specialized full-time at any of the crafts which were normally pursued only in the interstices of the agricultural year. Thus a fully professional level of skill was not attainable in the village context. The attainment of such specialized skills was the distinguishing mark of the earliest civilized, urban societies, which appeared in the Middle East toward the close of the fourth millennium B.C.
Chronologically, the spread of Neolithic agriculture and village life through the Old World overlapped the rise of civilized societies in the valleys of the Tigris-Euphrates, the Nile, and the Indus rivers. As the peoples of these valleys became civilized, they came to exert powerful influences upon their neighbors, thereby affecting village life over wide stretches of Eurasia. We must therefore next turn to the history of the river valley civilizations and then trace among bordering peoples the repercussions of their rise.
The Source:
William H. McNeill, Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, University of Chicago [1963] 1991 [pp.3-28]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.
