Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Excellent Little Essay, April 15, 2000
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.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Small, but powerful, April 18, 2004
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]
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How Agriculture Really Began, January 30, 2001
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?
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