The origin of agriculture: neolithic revolution

[Tower of Bebel]

Simple:

First, why was it that humanity transformed from an equal society of hunters to an unequal society of farmers?

Second, how did the neolithic revolution or agricultural revolution take place?

[Oswy]

Interesting questions - not something I've ever come across in my reading.

This is a possible starting point from wikipedia (under 'Neolithic Revolution'):


Incentive to settle

Hunter-gatherer lifestyles are the product of the depletion of the biological potential of a specific location, either through localised overhunting or over gathering, and lead to a movement to a new area where game and foodstuffs are not depleted, allowing the earlier ranges to recover. If sufficient foodstuffs can be gathered on a permanent basis from a specific locality, there is little incentive to move and permanent settlement may result. This will happen whenever local biological productivity is sufficient to permit permanent settlement.

Having a plentiful supply of basic food does not mean that depletion of important gathered vegetable products does not occur. But a settled population permits year-round observation of the growing cycle, and hunter-gatherers are keen observers of the environmental conditions optimal for specific plant products.

Once you start to develop surpluses you create an environment in which someone, or some group, easily end up taking up a role in which they have the power to control and distribute such surplus. This then kicks off the stratification of society.

[gilhyle]

In his semi marxist work The Paths of History, Igor Diakonoff differentiates between societies that are engaged solely in production and those which also reproduce themselves.

It is this move to reproduction of the social relations that brings with it the initiation of the division of labor and the differential distribution of social product. But in his view, even in the first stage of primitive society there is already some exchange and some social hierarchy, parrticularly sexual division. It may be that truly primitive non class society predates the emergence of Homo Sapiens and was never a characteristic of human society.

While the details are now way out of date V. Gordon Childe was a Marxist anthropologist who considered some of these issues.

[Tower of Bebel]

Here is an interesting part of what F. Engels wrote on this subject:


In the Eastern Hemisphere the middle stage of barbarism began with the domestication of animals providing milk and meat, but horticulture seems to have remained unknown far into this period.[D] It was, apparently, the domestication and breeding of animals and the formation of herds of considerable size that led to the differentiation of the Aryans and Semites[E] from the mass of barbarians. The European and Asiatic Aryans still have the same names for cattle, but those for most of the cultivated plants are already different.

In suitable localities, the keeping of herds led to a pastoral life: the Semites lived upon the grassy plains of the Euphrates and Tigris [Mesopotamia], and the Aryans upon those of India and of the Oxus and Jaxartes, of the Don and the Dnieper. It must have been on the borders of such pasture lands that animals were first domesticated. To later generations, consequently, the pastoral tribes appear to have come from regions which, so far from being the cradle of mankind, were almost uninhabitable for their savage ancestors and even for man at the lower stages of barbarism. But having once accustomed themselves to pastoral life in the grassy plains of the rivers, these barbarians of the middle period would never have dreamed of returning willingly to the native forests of their ancestors. Even when they were forced further to the north and west, the Semites and Aryans could not move into the forest regions of western Asia and of Europe until by cultivation of grain they had made it possible to pasture and especially to winter their herds on this less favorable land. It is more than probable that among these tribes the cultivation of grain originated from the need for cattle fodder and only later became important as a human food supply.

Domestication of animals like sheep and goat must have been the first step towards agriculture.

I know that hunters gatered a lot of meat and of course the disappearance of large animals like f.e. elephants in Europe and the middle east must have led to exploitation of small herds of wild sheep and goats. But you need to hunt more of them to receive the same amount of meat.

This must have lead to a very careful planning (like f.i. only kill old males, not pregnant females), which is a step closer to breeding.

But I don't know how you ulitmately can reach domestication.

And then of course there are evidences in Israël of small paleolithic "villages" with lots of wild grains found near fire places. The knowledge of where such plants grow and when they ripen must have been essential, which is like the planed hunting of small herds an important step towards domestication.

But what exactly made people finaly take the step towards agriculture?

[Tower of Bebel]

A very important factor that made a revolution necessairy for the industrious revolution to take place was a social revolution. The bourgeoisie needed power in order to make the right investment. Examples are both the "Glorious" (1648) and French revolution (1789).
A social barrier needed to be broken. the old aristocracy, holding on to their aboslute king had to be done away with.

So was there a social barrier that had to be broken before the agricultural revolution could take place? Or was it all about ecological differences?

[Oswy]

Going back to V. Gordon Childe. I cam across a snippet about him the other day. He offered the idea that once communities had started to settle, grow crops and raise domestic animals (and, importantly, generate surplus) they became vulnerable to two forces.

1) Settled life and surplus encourages expansion of the population - which can only be accomodated by geographic expansion into new areas. This, sooner or later, leads to conflict with other communities also expanding and seeking control over fixed locations.

2) Natural disasters, such as flooding, or bad winters, become an accute issue because you are now fixed to the land and still in relatively small community units.

Both of these forces, Childe argues, encourage urban development - safety in large numbers (with respect to external aggression) and more substantial shelter, and a bureaucracy which formalises and regulates land use rights.

These forces are over thousands of years it must be remembered, with the emphasis on strong 'tendency' rather than unilinear development.

[rouchambeau]

Jared Diamond addresses this in Guns, Germs, and Steel. It's a pretty good read if you ever get around to it.

[Severian]

Yeah, Diamond does a pretty good synthesis of the modern archaeological findings on this. Apparently agriculture actually came a little before stock-raising, Engels was off on that.

Partly it involved the availability in the Middle East of wild grains that could be harvested and stored, allowing people to settle year-round in the same place. At some point they started planting seeds for the next years' harvest.

As far as social barriers, that's hard to know from archaeological evidence. It may be the main social changes came sometime after the adoption of agriculture, as increased production (no longer everyone just above the starvation line) made possible increased inequality.

You could look at people who've more recently adopted agriculture and/or stock-raising and what kind of internal conflicts they had about doing so....