Chapter 6 Chapter 5 The Poor and the Rich in History

Much of human history has been filled with unequal struggles between rich and poor: between peoples with peasant power and those without, or between peoples who have acquired peasant power at different times.It is not surprising that food production has not existed in the past in vast areas of the planet, where it remains difficult or impossible for ecological reasons.For example, neither agriculture nor animal husbandry arose in the prehistoric North American Arctic, while the only food production element present in the Eurasian Arctic was reindeer herding.Food production is also unlikely to arise spontaneously in desert regions far from irrigation water sources, such as central Australia and some parts of the western United States.

What urgently needs to be explained is, rather, why certain ecologically favorable areas, which had been largely absent from food production until modern times, are today some of the world's richest agricultural and pastoral centers.Some of the most puzzling areas are California and other states on the Pacific coast of the United States, the Argentine pampas, southwestern and southeastern Australia, and a large part of the Cape of Good Hope region in South Africa.Indigenous groups in these areas were still hunter-gatherers when European settlers arrived.If we look at the world in 4000 BC, thousands of years after food production arose in its earliest cradles, we might also be surprised that few other modern granaries were not producing food at that time.These grain-rich areas include: all the rest of the United States, Great Britain, a large part of France, Indonesia, and all of Africa south of the equator.If we go back to the origins of food production, its earliest origins again surprise us.Far from being the granaries of modern times, these places include areas that today would be classified as somewhat arid or ecologically degraded: Iraq and Iran, Mexico, the Andes, parts of China, and parts of Africa.Why did food production first take shape on seemingly infertile lands, only to develop later on today's most fertile croplands and pastures?

Geographical differences in the ways in which food production has emerged are equally puzzling.In some places, it developed independently, the result of domestication of local flora and fauna by local people.In most other places, crops and livestock that had been domesticated elsewhere were introduced.Since these areas that did not develop food production independently became suitable for prehistoric food production immediately after the introduction of domesticated plants and animals, why did the various groups in these areas become farmers by domesticating local plants and animals without outside help? What about the Shepherd?

Among the areas where food production did emerge independently, why did the timing of its emergence vary so widely—for example, thousands of years earlier in East Asia than in the eastern United States, but never in eastern Australia?Among the areas where food production was introduced in prehistoric times, why did the timing of the introduction vary so widely—for example, thousands of years earlier in southwestern Europe than in the southwestern United States?Also, of these areas where food production was introduced, why in some areas (such as the American Southwest) local hunter-gatherers adopted crops and livestock from neighboring groups and ended up as farmers, while in others (such as Indonesia and equatorial Africa) What about the introduction of food production in many places to the south) that caused a catastrophe in which the original hunter-gatherers of the region were replaced by outside food producers?All these questions involve the different stages of development that determine which peoples have been historically poor and which have been historically rich.

Before we can hope to answer these questions, we need to figure out how to determine where and when food production originated, and where and when a particular crop or animal was first domesticated.The clearest evidence comes from the identification of plant and animal remains unearthed at some archaeological sites.Most domesticated species of animals and plants differ morphologically from their wild ancestors: for example, domesticated cattle and sheep are smaller, domesticated chickens and apples are larger, domesticated peas have thinner and smoother seed coats, Domesticated goats grow horns in a spiral shape rather than a scimitar shape.Therefore, if the remains of domesticated plants and animals can be identified at a dated archaeological site, then there is strong evidence that there was food production at that time, whereas if at a site only Without wild species, it cannot prove that there has been food production, but only that it coincides with hunting and gathering life.Of course, food producers, especially the early ones, continued to collect certain wild plants and hunt wild animals, so that the food residues at their sites often included not only domesticated species, but wild species as well.

Archaeologists use carbon-14 dating to determine the carbon content of the site to date the food production.The principle behind this assay is this: Carbon, the ubiquitous building block of life, has a very small amount of radioactive carbon-14 in its composition, which decays into the non-radioactive isotope nitrogen-14.Cosmic rays are constantly producing carbon-14 in the atmosphere.Plants absorb atmospheric carbon in which carbon-14 and the ubiquitous isotope carbon-12 maintain a known almost constant ratio (about 1 to a million).The carbon in the plants in turn forms the bodies of the herbivores that eat those plants, and the carnivores that eat those herbivores.However, once these plants or animals die, half of the carbon-14 content in their bodies decays into carbon-12 every 5,700 years, until about 40,000 years later, the carbon-14 content becomes very low and difficult to measure It is difficult to distinguish it from contamination by small amounts of modern materials containing carbon-14.Therefore, the age of material unearthed from archaeological sites can be calculated from the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in the material.

Radiocarbon is plagued by many technical problems, two of which are worth mentioning here.One problem: Carbon-14 dating before the 1980s requires a lot more carbon (a few grams), much more than is contained in a small seed or bone.As a result, scientists often have to rely on dating material found near the same site that is thought to be "linked" to the food remains—that is, disposed of at the same time as the people who left the food.Often the "connected" material of choice is burnt charcoal. But archaeological sites are not always neatly sealed temporal containers of material that was all disposed of on the same day.Materials disposed of at different times can become intermingled as worms, rodents and other forces disturb the formation.Burnt charcoal debris may thus have ended up near a dead plant or animal that was eaten at one time or another over thousands of years.Today, archaeologists are increasingly addressing this question with a new technique called accelerated mass spectrometry, which allows carbon-14 dating to date samples so small that people The age of a small seed, a small bone or other food residue can be measured directly.C-14 dating has been done in recent years either by this new direct method (which has its own problems) or by the old indirect method.In some cases, however, large discrepancies were found between the dates obtained by the two methods.Of the resulting and still unresolved controversies, perhaps the most important for the subject of this book is the question of the age of the emergence of food production in the Americas: the indirect dating of the 1960s and 1970s It is as far back as 70,000 BC, while more recent direct methods date it no earlier than 3500 BC.

The second problem with carbon-14 dating is that the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere is not in fact strictly constant, but fluctuates up and down with time, so, from some constant Calculation of carbon-14 dating dates from this assumption of proportion often leads to small errors.Determining the extent of each dating error in the past can in principle be done with the help of annual rings recorded by old trees, since by simply counting the rings one can obtain the absolute calendar age of each ring in the past, and then use this A sample of charcoal dated by this method is analyzed to determine the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in it.In this way, dates measured by carbon-14 dating can be corrected to estimate fluctuations in the proportion of carbon in the atmosphere.The result of this correction is that for some material apparently (i.e. uncorrected) dated between about 1000 and 6000 B.C. years or 1000 years.More recently, some earlier samples have been corrected using an alternation method based on another method of radioactive decay, which concludes that the apparent date of about 9000 B.C. The actual age of the sample is around 11,000 BC.

Archaeologists often distinguish between corrected and uncorrected dates by writing the former in uppercase and the latter in lowercase (for example, 3000B.C. and 3000b .c.).However, the archaeological literature can be confusing in this regard, as many books and treatises write BC when reporting uncorrected dates, failing to mention that these dates are actually uncorrected.The dates I report in this book for events of the past 15,000 years are corrected dates.This is why the reader may notice discrepancies between some of the chronologies in this book and chronologies quoted from certain standard references on the subject of early food production.

Once ancient remains of domesticated plants and animals are identified and dated, how can one determine whether the plant or animal was actually domesticated near the site, rather than domesticated elsewhere and later transferred to the site? ?One way to do this is to look at a map of the geographic distribution of the crop or animal's wild ancestors and deduce that domestication must have occurred where the wild ancestors arose.For example, chickpeas were commonly grown by traditional farmers from the Mediterranean and Ethiopia eastwards to India, where 80 percent of the world's chickpeas are produced today.Therefore, people may mistakenly think that chickpeas were domesticated in India.But it turns out that the chickpea's wild ancestors only occur in southeastern Turkey.That chickpeas were actually domesticated there is an explanation supported by the fact that the oldest finds of possibly domesticated chickpeas at Neolithic sites are from southeastern Turkey and adjacent areas in northern Syria, It is dated to around 8000 BC; archaeological evidence for chickpeas does not appear in the Indian subcontinent until more than 5000 years later.

A second way to determine where a crop or animal was domesticated is to map each area with the dates when the domesticated species first appeared.The site with the earliest date of occurrence may have been the site of the earliest domestication—and if the ancestors of the wild species also occurred there, if the age of their first appearance in other sites increases progressively with distance from the putative site of earliest domestication, suggesting that This is especially true as domesticated species spread to those other locations.For example, the earliest known cultivated emmer wheat appeared in the Fertile Crescent around 8500 BC.Shortly thereafter, the crop gradually spread westward, reaching Greece around 6500 BC and Germany around 5000 BC.These dates indicate that emmer wheat was domesticated in the Fertile Crescent.This conclusion is supported by the fact that the distribution of the wild ancestor of emmer wheat was restricted to the "region from Israel to western Iran and Turkey. In many cases, however, complications arise when the same plant or animal is domesticated independently in different locations.These can often be found by simply dissecting the resulting morphological, genetic or chromosomal differences in the same crop or animal specimens from different regions.For example, the zebu breed among domesticated cattle in India has meat crests that are not found in western Eurasian cattle breeds.Genetic analyzes show that modern Indian cattle breeds and western Eurasian cattle diverged hundreds of thousands of years ago, long before any animals were domesticated anywhere.That is to say, cattle have been independently domesticated in India and western Eurasia in the past 10,000 years, and they were originally subspecies of bison in India and western Eurasia that diverged hundreds of thousands of years ago . Now, let's return to our original question about the emergence of food production.Where, when and how did food production develop in different parts of the world? At one extreme, food production arose entirely independently in some areas, with many native crops (and, in some cases, animals) domesticated before any crops or animals from other areas arrived.There are only five such areas for which detailed and convincing evidence can be produced: Southwest Asia, also known as the Near East or the Fertile Crescent; China; Mesoamerica (a term used to refer to central and southern Mexico and Mesoamerica the contiguous region of the Amazon basin); the Andes region of South America, and possibly the contiguous region of the Amazon basin; and the eastern United States (Fig. 5.1).Some or all of these centers of food production may actually contain several nearby centers that emerged more or less independently of food production, such as the Yellow River Basin in northern China and the Yangtze River Basin in Southern China. In addition to the five regions where food production is unmistakably present, four other regions—Africa's Sahel, tropical West Africa, Ethiopia, and New Guinea—are candidates for the honor.However, every region has some kind of uncertainty.Although domestication of native wild plants in the Sahel along the southern edge of the Sahara in Africa has undoubtedly been domesticated, cattle grazing there may have begun before the advent of agriculture, and it is not yet certain that these cattle were independently domesticated. The introduction of the Sahel cattle, or cattle raised in the Fertile Crescent originally, triggered the domestication of native plants.It also remains uncertain whether the introduction of these Sahel crops in turn triggered the undoubted domestication of native wild plants in tropical West Africa, and whether the introduction of Southwest Asian crops led to the domestication of native wild plants in Ethiopia. The cause of the plant.As for New Guinea, archaeological research there provides evidence of early agriculture long before food production occurred in any contiguous areas, but what crops were grown there has never been definitively identified. Table 5.1: A brief list of some notable crops or animals and the earliest known dates of domestication for those areas domesticated and others.Among the nine candidate areas for independent development of food production, Southwest Asia has the earliest clear dates for plant domestication (around 8500 BC) and animal domestication (around 8000 BC); , which also apparently has the most accurate carbon-14 dates.China developed food production almost as early as Southwest Asia, while in the eastern United States it was apparently almost 6,000 years later.As far as the other 6 candidate areas are concerned, the earliest well-attested dates do not exceed the age of Southwest Asia, but in these other 6 areas, because there are too few sites that can be confidently dated, we cannot be sure that they are really behind In Southwest Asia and (if at all) by how much. The next set of regions includes some regions where at least two or three native plants or animals were domesticated, but food production in these regions relied primarily on crops and animals domesticated elsewhere.These introduced domesticated plants and animals can be thought of as "grandfather" crops and animals because they established local food production.The introduction of ancestral domesticated plants and animals allowed native peoples to live sedentary lives, thereby increasing the likelihood that wild plants, which they collected and brought home by chance and then planted by accident but later on purpose, would evolve into native crops. planted. In three or four of these areas, the ancestral plants and animals introduced came from Southwest Asia.One such area is western and central Europe, where food production arose between 6000 and 3500 BC with the introduction of Southwest Asian crops and animals, but at least one plant (poppy and possibly oats and other plants) were domesticated locally at the time.Wild poppies only grow on the western Mediterranean coast.Poppy seeds have not been found in excavated sites of the earliest agricultural societies in eastern Europe and Southwest Asia; they first appear at some early rural sites in western Europe.In contrast, the wild ancestors of most crops and animals in Southwest Asia were not found in western Europe.It therefore seems clear that food production did not develop independently in western Europe.Instead, food production there was sparked by the introduction of domesticated plants and animals from Southwest Asia.The resulting farming societies of western Europe domesticated the poppy, which then spread eastward as a crop. There is also an area where indigenous domestication of plants and animals appears to have begun after the introduction of ancestral crops from Southwest Asia.This area is the Indus Valley region of the Indian subcontinent.Agricultural societies there emerged in the seventh millennium BC, utilizing wheat, barley, and other crops previously domesticated in the Fertile Crescent and then apparently spreading through Iran to the Indus Valley.It was only later that animals and plants domesticated from species native to the Indian subcontinent, such as zebu and sesame, emerged in agricultural societies in the Indus Valley.Likewise, in Egypt, food production also began around 6000 BC with the introduction of crops from Southwest Asia.The Egyptians domesticated the sycamore fig and a plant called the water chestnut. The same pattern presumably applies to Ethiopia, where wheat, barley and other Southwest Asian crops have a long history.Ethiopians also domesticated many indigenous species for crops, most of which are still only found in Ethiopia, but one of them (the coffee bean) has now spread all over the world.However, it remains unknown whether the domestication of these native plants by Ethiopians preceded or followed the introduction of domesticated species from Southwest Asia. In these and other areas that relied on ancestral crops imported from elsewhere for food production, did local hunter-gatherers adopt those ancestral crops from neighboring farming groups, thereby making themselves farmers?Or was the basket of ancestral crops brought by invading farmers, enabling them to multiply locally and kill, drive away, or outnumber native hunters? In Egypt, the former seems likely to happen: the native hunter-gatherers, who used to feed on wild animals and plants, now have Southwest Asian domesticated animals and plants and farming and animal husbandry techniques, so they gradually stop eating wild foods.That is to say, it was exotic crops and animals, not alien peoples, that allowed food production to begin in Egypt.This may also be the case in Atlantic Europe, where hog-gatherers apparently adopted Southwest Asian sheep and grains over many centuries.In the Cape of Good Hope region of South Africa, the Khoi hunter-gatherers became herders (rather than farmers) because they acquired sheep and cattle from far north Africa (and ultimately Southwest Asia).Likewise, hunter-gatherer Indians in the American Southwest became farmers as a result of their access to Mexican crops.In these four regions, the onset of food production provided little or no evidence for domestication of local plants and animals, and little or no evidence for population replacement. At the other extreme, food production in some areas undoubtedly began not only with the introduction of exotic crops and animals, but also with the sudden arrival of outsiders.We can be so sure because the arrival of aliens has also occurred in modern times and is also directly related to literate Europeans, who have described what happened in many books.These areas mentioned above include California, the Pacific Northwest coast of North America, the Argentine pampas, Australia and Siberia.Until recent centuries, these areas were still occupied by hunter-gatherer groups—Native Americans in the first three areas and Aboriginal Australians or Aboriginal Siberians in the last two.These hunter-gatherers were killed, infected by disease, driven out, or replaced on a large scale by successive arrivals of European farmers and herders.These farmers and herders brought their own crops and so did not domesticate any of the local wild species (with the exception of the Australian nut tree) upon their arrival.In the Cape of Good Hope region of South Africa, the Europeans who came successively discovered not only the hunter-gatherers of the Khoi tribe, but also the herders of the Khoi tribe who had only domesticated animals but no crops.The result is still: agriculture started with exotic crops, non-domestication of native animals, and a massive replacement of the modern human population. Finally, the same pattern of sudden start of food production with reliance on exotic crops and sudden large-scale population replacement seems to have occurred many times in many areas in prehistoric times.In the absence of written records, evidence for prehistoric population turnover must be sought from the archaeological record, or inferred from linguistic evidence.Some of the most well-documented instances show that population replacement was beyond doubt, since the newly arrived food producers were markedly different anatomically from the hunter-gatherers they replaced, as well as Because these food producers introduced not only crops and animals, but also pottery.Two of the most obvious examples will be described in subsequent chapters: the expansion of the Austronesians from South China to the Philippines and Indonesia (Chapter 17) and the expansion of the Bantu in Africa south of the equator (Chapter 19) . Southeastern and Central Europe present us with a similar picture of the sudden onset of food production (depending on Southwest Asian crops and animals) and pottery.This sudden start is probably also directly related to the replacement of the ancient Greeks and Germanic peoples by the modern Greeks and Germanic peoples, just as the old people gave way to the new arrivals in the Philippines, Indonesia and sub-equatorial Africa. same as people.However, the skeletal differences between the original hunter-gatherers and the farmers who replaced them were less pronounced in Europe than in the Philippines, Indonesia, and subequatorial Africa.Thus, the case for population replacement in Europe is less convincing or less straightforward. In summary, only a few regions of the world developed food production, and the timing of these developments varied widely.Some adjacent hunter-gatherer groups learned food production from these cores, while other adjacent groups were replaced by food producers from these cores—the timing of the replacement still varied widely.Finally, some groups lived in areas where the ecological conditions were suitable for food production, but they neither developed nor learned agriculture in prehistoric times; they remained hunter-gatherers until the modern world finally eliminated them.Peoples in areas that had a head start in food production gained a head start on the road to guns, germs, and steel.The result is a series of long-term conflicts between rich and poor societies. How do we explain geographic differences in the timing and patterns of onset of food production?This question is one of the most important about prehistory, and it will be the subject of the next five chapters.

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