Chapter 5 Chapter 4 The Power of Peasants

I spent the summer of 1956 in Montana as a teenager, working for an elderly farmer named Fred Hirsch.Born in Switzerland, Fred came to southwestern Montana as a teenager in the 1890s and went on to start one of the first farms in the area.Many of the original hunter-gatherer Native Americans were still living there when he arrived. The farmhands I worked with were mostly able-bodied white men who were often foul-mouthed and who worked every day except weekends so they could spend their week's wages hanging out in the local tavern all weekend.However, among these farm workers was a Blackfoot Indian named Levi.The man's demeanor was very different from that of a rough miner--he was courteous, suave, responsible, clear-headed, and eloquent.He was the first Indian with whom I spent much time, and I could not help admiring him.

One Sunday morning, after a Saturday night orgy, Levi was staggering drunk and swearing.So I'm shocked and disappointed.Among his swear words, there is one I always remember very clearly: "You fuck Fred Hirsch, fuck the ship that brought you from Switzerland!" In the past, like other white schoolchildren , I was brought up to view the development of America as a heroic act of conquest, and I now feel deeply how the Indians view it.Fred.The Hirsch family is proud of him as one of the first farmers to succeed under difficult conditions.However, Levi's hunting tribes and famous warrior lands were taken away by immigrating white farmers.How did these peasants defeat these famous warriors?

Since the ancestors of modern humans diverged from the ancestors of the current great apes about 7 million years ago, all human beings on the earth have lived by hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants for most of the time, just like the Blackfoot Indians in the 19th century People are still doing that.Only in the past 11,000 years have some peoples turned to so-called food production: that is, to domesticating wild animals and plants to feed on the resulting livestock and crops.Today, most people on the planet eat food that they produce themselves or that others produce for them.At the current rate of change, within the next 10 years, the few remaining hunter-gatherers will abandon their way of life, disintegrate or disappear, thus ending our millions of years of hunter-gatherers. lifestyle.

Different tribes learned food production at different times in prehistory.Some tribes, such as the Aboriginal Australians, never learned to produce food.Among those tribes that learned to produce food, some (such as the ancient Chinese) developed food production independently, while others (including the ancient Egyptians) learned food production from neighboring tribes.But, as we shall see, food production was, in an indirect sense, a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel.Geographical differences in whether or when groups on different continents became farmers and herders thus largely account for their very different later destinies.Before we dedicate the next six chapters to understanding how geographic differences in food production arise, this chapter examines some of the major causal relationships through which food production brought about all the problems that made Pizarro The people who captured Atahualpa and Fred Hirsch deprived Levi's people of their advantages.

The first causality is the most direct: having access to more expendable calories means more people.Of the wild plant and animal species, only a few are edible by humans or worth hunting or gathering.Most plants and animals cannot be used as our food for a number of reasons: they are either indigestible (such as tree bark) or poisonous (monarch butterfly and phallus amanita - a poisonous mushroom ), low nutritional value (jellyfish), troublesome to eat (tiny dried fruit), difficult to gather (larvae of most insects), dangerous to hunt (rhinoceros) most land creatures Biomass (living biological matter) exists in the form of wood and leaves, most of which we cannot digest.

By selecting, raising and growing the few plants and animals we can eat so that they make up 90 percent of the biomass on an acre instead of 0.1 percent, we can get far more from food per acre calories.As a result, far more herders and farmers could be supported per acre—typically 10 to 100 times more than hunter-gatherers.The power generated by these unemotional numbers was the first of many military advantages that food-producing tribes gained over hunter-gatherers. In human societies that kept domesticated animals, livestock fed more people in four different ways: by providing meat, milk fat, manure, and by pulling plows.Most immediately, livestock replaced wild game as society's primary source of animal protein.Britons today, for example, typically get most of their animal protein from cows, pigs, sheep and chickens, while game such as venison is a rare delicacy.In addition, some large domesticated mammals became a source of milk and dairy products such as butter, cheese, and yogurt.Mammals that produce milk include cows, sheep, goats, horses, reindeer, buffalo, yaks, Arabian dromedary camels, and Central Asian Bactrian camels, which produce more calories than they would if they were killed for meat The calories are several times more.

Domesticated large mammals also interacted with domesticated plants in two ways to increase crop yields.First, the modern gardener or farmer still knows empirically that using animal manure as fertilizer improves crop yields.Even with the modern availability of synthetic fertilizers produced by chemical plants, the primary source of crop fertilizer in most societies today is animal waste—especially cow droppings, but also yak and sheep droppings.Animal dung also had value as a fuel source in traditional societies. In addition, the largest domesticated mammals interacted with domesticated plants to increase food production, as demonstrated by their ability to pull plows, allowing people to cultivate land that had previously been too expensive to cultivate.The animals used for plowing are oxen, horses, buffaloes, Bali oxen, and crossbreeds of oxen and oxen.Here is an example to illustrate the value of these animals: the earliest prehistoric farmers in Central Europe, the Linirban Kramyk culture, which arose a little before 5000 BC, were at first limited to plowing pine trees with pointed sticks. earth.Only 1,000 years later, thanks to the ox-drawn plow, these farmers were able to expand their cultivation to a much wider range of hard soils and unmanageable vines.Likewise, Native American farmers on the Great Plains of North America cultivated crops in the river valleys, but worked the unmanageable, weedy fields of the vast uplands until the advent of Europeans and their animal-drawn plows in the nineteenth century.

All of this is a direct result of the fact that domestication of plants and animals produced more food than hunter-gatherers, leading to denser populations.A more indirect factor is directly related to the consequences of the sedentary lifestyle required for food production.People in many hunter-gatherer societies were constantly on the move in search of wild food, but farmers had to stay near their fields and orchards.The resulting fixed dwellings contributed to a denser population by shortening the intervals between births.A hunter-gatherer mother who changes camps frequently has only one child and few belongings.She couldn't have a second child until the previous toddler was able to walk briskly and keep up with the group without becoming a liability.In fact, nomadic hunter-gatherers spaced their children about every four years through lactational amenorrhea, abstinence, infanticide, and abortion.In contrast, since the settled tribes do not have the restrictions of carrying children during migration, they can have as many children as they can, as long as they can support themselves.Birth intervals in many agricultural tribes were around two years, half that of hunter-gatherers.This higher birth rate of food producers, combined with their ability to feed more people per acre, allowed them to achieve greater population densities than hunter-gatherers.

Another consequence of sedentary life was that people could hoard surplus food, because hoarding would be pointless if people couldn't stay nearby to tend the stored food.While some nomadic hunter-gatherers might occasionally hoard food that would last them several days, this bounty was of little use to them, since they could not protect it.But stored grain is indispensable for feeding specialized personnel who do not produce food, and it is certainly indispensable for feeding the entire village community.Consequently, nomadic hunter-gatherer societies had little or no dedicated specialists of the kind that first appeared in sedentary societies.

There are two classes of such specialists: kings and officials.Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be relatively egalitarian. They have no full-time officials and hereditary leaders, but only small-scale administrative organizations at the ethnic and tribal levels.This is because all able-bodied hunter-gatherers had to dedicate a large part of their time to obtaining food.Once there is a grain reserve, the upper administrative figures can control the grain produced by others, maintain the right to taxation, and do not need to support themselves, but spend all their time engaged in administrative activities.Thus, medium-sized agricultural societies were usually organized in chiefdoms, while kingdoms were restricted to very large agricultural societies.These complex administrative units are better able to wage protracted wars of conquest than egalitarian groups of hunters.Some hunter-gatherer tribes also gradually formed settled societies due to living in particularly affluent environments, such as the Pacific Northwest coast of North America and the coast of Ecuador, with food reserves and nascent chiefdoms, but they were not on the road to the kingdom. Go one step further.

The establishment of surplus food reserves through taxation can not only support the king and officials, but also support other full-time professionals.Most directly related to wars of conquest, surplus food reserves could be used to feed professional soldiers.This was the decisive factor in the British Empire's final defeat of the well-armed native Maori in New Zealand.Although the Maori scored some stunning temporary victories, they were unable to maintain a standing army in the field and so were ultimately overwhelmed by the 18,000 dedicated British troops.Food reserves also fed the clergy who provided religious justification for wars of conquest, artisans such as metalworkers who made swords, guns and developed other technologies, and scribes who preserved information as they recorded There is far more information than people can accurately remember. So far I have emphasized the direct and indirect value of crops and livestock as food.However, they also serve other purposes, such as keeping us warm and providing us with valuable materials.Natural fibers produced by crops and livestock that can be used to make clothes, blankets, nets and rope.Most important centers of plant domestication cultivated not only food crops but also fiber crops—notably cotton, flax (the raw material for linen), and hemp.Several domesticated animals produce animal fibers—notably wool and silk from sheep, goats, llamas, and alpacas.The bones of domesticated animals were an important raw material used for artifacts by Neolithic tribes before the invention of metallurgy.Cowhide is used to make leather.One of the first plants to be cultivated in many parts of the Americas for non-edible purposes was the gourd used as a container. Domesticated large mammals further revolutionized human society by becoming our primary means of land transportation before the development of railways in the 19th century.Before the domestication of animals, the only means of transporting goods and people by land was to use people to carry them.Large mammals changed that: for the first time in human history it was possible to quickly transport not only people but also large and heavy cargoes overland to great distances.Domesticated animals for riding include horses, donkeys, yaks, reindeer, Arabian dromedaries, and Central Asian camels.These five animals, like alpacas, are used to carry luggage.Cows and horses are harnessed to carts, while reindeer and dogs pull sleds across the Arctic.In much of Eurasia, horses became the main means of long-distance transportation. Three species of domesticated camels (Arabian dromedary, Central Asian llama, and alpaca) play similar roles in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, Central Asia, and the Andes, respectively. The most immediate contribution of domestication of plants and animals to wars of conquest was made by the horse of Eurasia, whose military role made it the jeep and Sherman tank of ancient warfare on that continent.As I mentioned in Chapter 3, horses enabled Cortes and Pizarro, who led only small groups of adventurers, to overthrow the Aztec and Inca empires.Even much earlier (around 4000 B.C.), horses may have been essential to the westward expansion of Indo-European speakers from the Ukraine, although they were still ridden on bare horses military elements.These languages ​​eventually replaced all but the early European dialects.While horses were later harnessed to carts and other vehicles, the horse-drawn chariot (invented around 1800 BC) began to revolutionize warfare in the Near East, the Mediterranean region, and China.In 1674 BC, for example, horses even enabled foreigners to conquer horseless Egypt and briefly establish themselves as pharaohs. Later, after the invention of the saddle and stirrup, the horse brought the Huns from the Asian steppes and wave after wave of other peoples a threat to the Roman Empire and subsequent states, culminating in the Mongols in the 13th and 14th centuries AD. Climax by conquering many locations in Asia and Russia.It was only with the introduction of trucks and tanks in World War I that the role of the horse was finally replaced instead of the main means of assault and rapid transport in warfare.The Arabian and Central Asian camels also served similar military functions within their respective geographic ranges.In all these examples, peoples who domesticated horses (or camels) or improved their use had a huge military advantage over peoples who did not have these animals. Equally important in wars of conquest are the germs that evolved in societies that domesticated animals.Infectious diseases such as smallpox, measles, and influenza arose as specialized germs of man, derived from mutations of very similar ancestral germs that infected animals (Chapter 10-1).Humans who domesticated animals became the first victims of these evolved germs, and these humans then gradually developed strong resistance to these new diseases.When these partially immune people come into contact with people who have never been exposed to the germ, epidemics ensue and kill 99 percent of the people who have never been exposed to the germ before.Germs eventually acquired in this way from domesticated animals played a decisive role in the European conquests of the natives of America, Australia, South Africa, and the Pacific Islands. In short, the domestication of animals and plants means that human beings have more and more food, which means that the population is getting denser.The resulting food surplus and (in some areas) the use of animal power to transport the surplus became the development of a sedentary, administratively centralized, socially hierarchical, economically complex, and technologically innovative society. prerequisites.The availability of domesticated plants and animals thus ultimately explains why empires, literacy, and steel weapons developed first in Eurasia and later, or not at all, on other continents.The military use of horses and camels and the deadly power of animal-derived germs finally connected many important links between food production and conquest, which I examine below.

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