Chapter Six - The Inevitability of Agriculture

The farmer takes a wife, the farmer takes a wife... -- from the nursery song, "The Farmer in the Dell"

Anthropologists have always found it rewarding to come up with complex explanations for the rise of agriculture when in fact it really needs none -- it was a good idea just like the hunting and gathering techniques humans had embraced were good ideas. This view was put forth first by Robert Braidwood in 1960, but it didn't end the debate. Research now points to the fact that it would have been more difficult for early farmers to make a living than hunter-gatherers of the time. If this is the case, then breaking through that threshold would seem to be a 'lucky break', and make the rest of human history less inevitable.

Happy Hour

Studying the Kung San has shown that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle may not have been so bad. Most of a day's daily needs could be obtained in a few hours of work -- Marshall Sahlins called them the "original affluent society". In contrast, some archaeologists studying early farming societies believe that the life of the farmers was shorter, and contributed to more rotten teeth. Increased population density due to agriculture would have spread disease, and the work day was probably longer. Why then would a society choose to be farmers? TMillhe answer is to refute the question -- it relies on Misconception #1: Change is guided by farsighted reason. It was not one big decision to become farmers, but a series of small steps. Humans are naturally curious, and dozens of so-called proto-agricultural societies have been documented, from the Kumeyaay of Southern California who radically groom thier environments to produce the best wild foods to the aboriginal Austrailians who replant the tops of their harvested yams and even the Shoshone who burned off unwanted species and planted wild food sources. It would seem that the trend towards agriculture is universal.

The Myth of Equilibrium

The fact that so many proto-agricultural societies exist often has not been accepted as proof of cultural evolution, however. In contrast, it has been taken as proof of the opposite -- that these societies knew enough to be agricultural, but chose not to be. This leads us to Misconception #2: The idea of intrinsic equilibrium. This idea is that societies are static unless pushed by major outside forces. This tends to be backed up by the idea that if a society is meeting its needs, it has no reason to change. This reasoning is based on Misconception #3: Human societies are fundamentally unified. Even if a society as a whole is meeting its needs, there are internal social forces that push individuals to innovate for status or security. A surplus of food can be given for an IOU, to be seen as generous and prosperous, or traded for status goods.

The Farmer Takes A Wife (Or Two)

The amassing of food can easily be seen as a way to increase social status, and farming is a good way to amass food. Since social status tends to mean easier access to sex, the desire for social status is 'in the genes'. Since stratified societies are mainly seen in agricultural societies, agriculture has often been seen as a cause of social inequality. However, closer inspection shows that even among subsitance level hunter gatherers, there is social inequality, and that the abundance of food provided by agriculture (or natural bounty, as seen by the Northwest Coast indians) simply removes the barrier to stratification, namely the severe interdependence of families due to their precarious situation. This is based on the refutation of Misconception #4: The notion of the 'egalitarian' hunter-gatherer band. Hunter-gatherers are as status hungry as the next group, and only their situation keeps them from creating a highly unequal society. Once a society is more stable, a Big Man can begin to exert control and organize other members to harness NZS logic to benefit himself, but also obliquely benefiting the society as a whole.

Miller Time Reconsidered

Along with the quest for status pushing agriculture, it turns out that the idea that hunter-gatherers only worked a few hours a day may have been exaggerated. In making spears, processing food, and the other tasks involved in daily life, it seems they work nearly as hard as agriculturalists. Also, the precariousness of their situation would push them towards agriculture, which is a more stable source of food. Many hunter-gatherers planted or managed small gardens in their hunting grounds to support them on long hunts, and many times food from managed lands was an imortant secondary food source. On top of this, war would help to spread agriculture, since sheer numbers are the most important factor in primitive wars, and agricultural societies can feed more mouths. With all these forces driving agriculture, no 'external motivation' is needed.

Three Struggles

Survival, status and war. The latter two leave archaeological evidence in the form of status symbols and weapons (and evidence of violent deaths), and the first is pretty much inevitable for hunter-gatherers. Agriculture would help in all three of these struggles, and therefore be adopted by individuals and societies or help adopting individuals and societies destroy those who didn't adopt it, either through violence or simple attrition. As proof of its usefulness, it arose separately at least five times (three in the New World and two in the Old), and once invented, spread rapidly to surrounding societies.

-- SamPreston - 24 Mar 2007