Customer Reviews

Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began (Darwinism Today series)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Colin Trudge's book is a delightful little essay on the origins of agriculture. The theories of this London School of Economics scholar are innovative and well informed. He breaks down the complex that we think of as "agriculture" into its constituent activities, then argues convincingly that humans were increasing their food production through some of these activities tens of thousands of years before the Neolithic revolution--and changing their enviroment in the process. He manages to incorporate explanations for many Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic phenomena--from Pleistocene overkill to farmer-pastoralist antipathy--into his remarkable discourse. A small book well worth the money.

Tudge challenges the traditional view that agriculture arose suddenly about ten thousand years ago. "Civilisation" is also credited with emerging simultaneously in a mutually reinforcing feedback cycle with surplus crop farming. The evidence supporting this stance comes from archaeological finds in places like the Tigris-Euphrates Valley [Iraq], Jericho [Palestine] and Catul Hayak in Turkey. In these places grain storage facilities bespeak intense cereals agriculture. Surplus grain production and distribution techniques suggest social hierarchy, fluent communication and new approaches to the environment. The standard view stumbles a bit in how knowledge of farming spread to remote places like Central America. It's also silent on why isolated peoples like Aborigines in Australia failed to adopt "domestic" farming methods.

Tudge wants a fresh assessment - starting with a proper definition of "farming". By his definition, "farming" is simply any modification of an environment supporting edible resources. "Modification" ranges from protecting a known resource from predation to diverting water to stimulate growth. There are no "fields" dedicated to crop production - the sites were opportunistic finds. Tudge here raises the point overlooked by most scholars -"farming" began at the end of the last Ice Age. The best crop sites were low-lying stream valleys containing rich soils and available water. As the glaciers melted and sea levels rose, these locations were inundated and lost to research. The Middle Eastern "burst" of agrarian development was due to a dislocated population that had already practiced farming elsewhere. The Tigris-Euphrates was an exile.

Neither, Tudge argues, will we find paddocks for domestic animals in the early locations. In Tudge's view animal domestication began by selecting those animals amenable to human contact. Continuous association evoked genetic changes in these creatures until domestication became the norm. Nor were the keepers of goats, sheep and other small animals necessarily constant in the practice. Tudge notes a South African people who keep goats for some years, then abandon them for a spate of hunting.

He also insists on a Darwinian perspective on farming and pastoralism's origins. The "sudden" outburst of Middle Eastern agriculture violates the Darwinian process by obscuring earlier evidence. Like any evolutionary process, each step is slow, hesitant and scattered in time and place. Success builds on success until a new pattern is firmly established. Farming and pastoralism emerged in steps, but once established, it became an irreversible process. Agriculture produces not only excess crops, but excess population to consume them. Extra land is needed to supply the new population - and the cycle repeats. This surge in population of modern humans due to agriculture , Tudge contends, was the death knell of the Neanderthals. With Tudge's form of farming originating forty thousand years ago, modern humans outproduced the Neanderthals in both population and resource dominance.

This slim volume proposes many innovative and challenging ideas. Tudge is on solid ground in negating the "abrupt flowering" of modern humans and agriculture in the Middle East. He rightly argues for simpler beginnings of such a complex process. This is an important book in an important series. Tudge's excellent prose skills make this small book a delight to read. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

This is a wonderful book. It is so short that each page, indeed each sentence has to be filled with information and thoughts that derive from this data. My greatest interest is in the first domestication of livestock, a subject usually covered with trite inaccuracy in books dedicated to the subject, let alone works like this with such a broad sweep of study. This book covers domestication using reference to the latest scientific publications, and if it is as accurate as this in the tiny bit for which I have some background knowledge, it gives me reassurance that the rest of the book is filled with information of a similar high quality.

Is it pessimistic to feel that the whole of life is made of choices made because things change? This is what reviewer Ted Rushton says. Surely his perception of what is written in this book is flavoured by his belief in 'human progress'as he actually quotes. There is no such thing as human progress, and this is the underlying concept behind the whole of the Darwinian School of Thought. It was Darwinian Thought that brought 'How Agriculture Really Began' to us, with its little set of illuminating companion volumes.

The book is superb, Mr Rushton's critique is flawed, and enters the realms of fantasy with his discussion of flowers. But why not judge for yourself?

This brilliant little book contains more interesting ideas in 53 pages than most books on human origins contain in 500. Of course it's not all true, and it's not all original. Tudge's explanation for the origin of serious agriculture - the "pleistocene overkill" in which human hunters rapidly killed off the game and produced a food crisis - probably derives from a very thorough, if much less exciting book, Mark Nathan Cohen's The Food Crisis in Prehistory, published as long ago as 1977. And Tudge's other thesis - that late palaeolithic people engaged in a kind of "hobby agriculture" is perhaps more questionable.

It's certainly true that initial agricultural activity would not have left much trace, so it undoubtedly goes back further than we think. But any thesis about proto-agriculture before the widespread game extinctions has to contend with the fact that the game themselves - and particularly the elephant family - would have made man's first attempts at environmental manipulation quite difficult, simply by trampling over things and eating the "crops". So the great slaughter of the big game had three effects. Firstly it provided a splendid source of food, permitting a great growth in the human population. Secondly, it then used up most of the game, producing an urgent need for new sources of food for the expanded population. Thirdly, by killing off most of the game and scaring away what remained, it made agriculture possible.

But nobody expects Colin Tudge to come up with all the answers. What is wonderful about this book is that it puts forward exciting ideas in an exciting way and provokes thought and discussion. It's just the kind of book we need.

The book barely caught my eye as it is so small, something like 5 X 8 in size and small as in 52 pages. I even wondered how much ionformation could someone share in 52 small pages. First off, this is a small book that is a series of short books by leading experts in evolutionary theory from the Darwin@LSE programme at the London School of Economics.

Having said that, the book has 3 basic Chapters I The Several Faces of Agriculture II The End of the Neanderthals and Pleistocene Overkill and III The Neolithic Revolution.

The authors explain that before about 10,000 years ago there are virtually no signs of plant cultivation or the domestication of animals anywhere in the world. Then archaeologists began to find evidence that there were several sites in the Middle East such as Jericho the West Bank and in Catal Huyuk in Turkey and further east in the Indus Valley of China and some locations in the Americas where plant cultivation or the domestication of animals became the norm.

The subject of horticulture, arable and pastoral farming. And the opinion that the late Paleolithic proto-farmers were not full time farmers. But more of a hobby. And there is a wonderful discussion of how farmers were often seen as put upon and preyed upon types. This is used to suggest that the Cro Magnon and Neanderthals may have had a similar view of each other i.e. bandits.

I learned that the grain found by archaeologists suggests that the grain was grown is a very organized community or sustainable fashion since the seeds/grain was much larger than that grown in the wild. And that palaeontologists emphasize that fossilization is very rare and when a fossil is found of any creature that the chance are that the creature had already been around for a very long time.

The authors also share that hunters and gatherers take from their environment only what their environment happens to produce and if they take to much that the desirable prey species collapse. (page 32) That sustainable farming works because it produces expected crop. That with organized farming techniques populations grew and the chance of mankin ever going back to a simple hunter gatherer mode was gone, since there simply wasn't, isn't enough wild food for the human animal to live on.

There is so much more information in this book that I just do not have the time to share. PLEASE buy it and consider it a gift to you intellect/brain.

This slim volume is an installation in the Darwinism Today series, a collection of ruminations on evolutionary topics by smart and creative individuals. Tudge is one such person; his book The Time Before History is an excellent overview of the last five million years of human history, and an essential for the bookshelves of anyone interested in humans and their interactions with the natural world. In 'Neanderthals', we are shown Tudge's fascinating theories on the origin of modern agriculture, delivered in an appetizer-style nibble of 52 (small) pages.

The punchline? Tudge challenges the common assumption that the Agricultural Revolution (and thus the origins of civilization) began 10,000 years ago with the end of the last ice age. Drawing on evolutionary theory to fill the the gaps, he offers a fascinating alternative: namely, that humans have been "hobby farmers" of a sort for thousands of years before the archaeological record reveals systematic, intensive farming. What we know of evolution is drawn largely from fossil data, often spotty at best, and in this same way Tudge reminds us that simply because we cannot find (or notice) the remnants of small-scale early agriculture doesn't mean it doesn't exist. He also points to the fact that, as with evolution, change occurs gradually, and so the seeming explosive burst of agricultural know-how couldn't have come without a gradual, historical context. Tudge defines this "hobby farming" as anything from cutting down the growth around a favored fruit tree to the take-it-or-leave-it approach to animal husbandry still practiced by some African tribes.

Not only is the evidence for early agriculture lacking because of its small scale, but also because most of it would have taken place in the fertile valleys and lowlands now inundated after the rising sea levels following deglaciation. Some of the most enjoyable thought experiments come when Tudge points to the Old Testament of the Bible as a source of ecological memory: namely, that if you trace the rivers of Eden, they converge at a point that is now underwater but was exposed during the Pleistocene.

The fact that Homo sapiens may were likely practicing rudimentary forms of agriculture during the last ice age has several important repercussions, and Tudge explores these with great gusto: First, humans would have been afforded a competitive advantage over the Neanderthals, and this might have contributed to the Neanderthals' extinction. Secondly, humans, faced with an increasing food surplus and the increased scarcity of the megafauna (mammoths, mastodons, and the like), would have been more likely to hunt these large beasts to extinction, as hunting took on less of a subsistence importance and became more of a ritualistic, male dominance-related activity (particularly as the megafauna became rarer).

This book is a fun opportunity to listen to the ruminations of a very well-read and well-educated individual. You could curl up with this little volume and finish it in an hour, but it will keep you thinking long afterwards. I will definitely be investigating the rest of the Darwinism Today series.

~ Jacquelyn Gill

Colin Tudge, who documented the first 5 million years of hominids in "Time Before History", has delivered a powerful lecture (presented here in book form as part of the Darwinism Today series) on the origins of agriculture - and thus the origins of modern civilization. His take on early farming were not completely new to me as I have read a few pieces along this line, but it may be new to many who missed the history class in high school or college on this subject (the class that probably didn't exist).

Essentially, Mr. Tudge argues quite convincingly that agriculture didn't just spring up 10,000 years ago in an instant or as a result of a culture who discovered its virtues (of which it had very few at the time), but was practiced as part of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle where plants were harvested as a beneficial and helpful food source and thus become favored by these people.

Mr. Tudge posits that the rise of large scale agriculture was a reaction to the loss of a plentiful lifestyle at the end of the last ice age...a loss that was the result of a changing climate and biozones (the "fertile crescent" was a virtual garden of eden during the last ice age with plenty of food for a society that naturally controlled its population), but was also affected by the continually improving hunting skills of humankind (something also seen as contributing the decline of the large fauna in North America around the same time).

Another fascinating area of this topic is the story of Cain and Abel as an allegory for the expansion of the new agriculturalists and the loss of hunter-gatherers that this caused. Basically, an agricultural lifestyle requires a larger population to support itself, which leads to the need to expand a society's territory, which led to conflict with the outnumbered hunter-gatherers and their destruction. (Simplified here, as I suggest everyone read the book)

Another negative side-effect of this new lifestyle was the rise of diseases and plagues in the human civilization due to over-crowded living conditions and a poor diet (yes, the agricultural lifestyle was a poor diet compared to hunting and gathering). A great example of this would be North America, where Europeans came and found hunting and gathering cultures (who also practiced natural agriculture will call it) where bigger, stronger, and free of many of the diseases that plagued Europe (i.e. smallpox, which - along other diseases - may have caused the death of 90% of Native Americans before they even knew of the new immigrants.

I highly recommend that this book for everyone - it should be required reading in high school history. You may not agree with all of the conclusions, but you need to read it to make up your own mind.

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A Guide to my Book Rating System:

1 star = The wood pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper.
2 stars = Don't bother, clean your bathroom instead.
3 stars = Wasn't a waste of time, but it was time wasted.
4 stars = Good book, but not life altering.
5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.

This book is like a 10 to 15 minutes conversation in a Conference coffee break! Do I mean it is good or bad? Good because it is a very interesting and well presented hypothesis... you cannot please everybody: some may not like the lack of a discussion of the literature. What is important is that this book brings important questions for the reader to continue his/her search for beginning of agriculture.
I learned a lot in coffee breaks!

Colin Tudge surmises that, in many cases, late paleolithic hunter-gatherers (maybe from about 40.000 B.P. on) already practised "proto-agricultural" techniques, that enabled them to manipulate the ecosystem they were living in, so that its productivity was increased. Quite a few recent hunter-gatherer people knew such practices (Australian aborigines, for instance, who never developed agriculture, used practises like burning brush land in order to make place for a vegetation in which more useful plants could grow, protecting trees bearing usefull fruits and enhancing their growth by selectively cutting down competiting trees, putting back into the earth the vegetative upper part of an excavated tuber so that a new tuber can grow at the same spot, etc.), so the author's assumption is anything but unlikely.

"Real" agriculture, when it did start from about 10.000 B.P. on, was thus less a "revolutionary invention" than an intensification and extension of already existing practices. The problem is, as the author himself aknowledges, that these "proto-agricultural" techniques almost never leave any traces that the archeologist of today could identify without ambiguity. His assertion is therefore of a rather speculative nature. Nevertheless, the book is an eye-opener. We should not exclude the possibility that our late paeolithic ancestors used more sophisticated food producing techniques than is usually thought, simply because these techniques did not leave any traces in the archeological record.

The booklet is well written and very short. You could read it in about two hours.

I can't remember when I've ever read a book so small, that was so thought provoking and profound. Easily the best book I have ever read on the subject of the birth of civilization. Fantastic.