Science Break: Savage or Slave?

Following the last ice age, in a few large river deltas (especially the Tigris-Euphrates, but also the Yangtze, Indus and others), small pockets of humans began to domesticate certain animals and crops. After a period of incubation in these isolated locations, this new lifestyle, with its advantages of a stable and reliable food supply, quickly spread and eclipsed the precarious existence that typified the incumbent hunter gatherer way of life. Farming demanded more organization and technology, and so sophisticated societies developed. The excess production of these economies allowed more spare time, and so specialists in every field evolved – the arts, the military, science, and so on. Life and human culture flourished, and great things were achieved – the pyramids, the Iliad and the Odyssey, astronomy… our full potential as a species was unlocked. Spreading out from their fertile birthing grounds, farming-based cultures took over and absorbed crude formerly nomadic peoples, giving them a greatly improved quality of life. This huge cultural change continues until today, where only a few pockets of primitive cultures still exist in remote and isolated corners of the earth. This general narrative is well understood and accepted knowledge…

…except it is increasingly obvious it doesn’t fit the facts.

As geophysicists, we are familiar with the scientific method. We most closely associate it with pure scientific problems, such as those Newton explained with his Laws of Motion. Observations are made, a model or theory is constructed to explain the data, and then the theory is tested and modified as needed, until it is eventually discarded in favour of a new model that explains things better. Of course the method is equally useful in the social sciences, and in the current scientific reevaluation of the dramatic human shift from a hunter gatherer lifestyle to a sedentary, domesticated one is a fascinating example. Many of my Science Break articles are glorified book reviews, and this one falls into that category. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, by James Scott (2017) really impressed and surprised me as each chapter offered up new revelations and different ways of looking at things, challenging what I had accepted as truths. In this article I will touch on some of the key topics that inform and support a completely different model for the stage in human prehistory where our ancestors abandoned a long established and viable way of life for an entirely different one.

Sedentism as a Natural State

We tend to view living in settled communities as normal for humans and look at nomadic people such as the reindeerherding Sami, or hunter gatherers such as the Yanomami of the Amazon as exotic outliers. In fact, viewed over the full ~300,000 year history of our species, it is we living in settled communities who are by far the minority. Towns aren’t seen in the archaeological record until about 6,000 years ago, larger walled communities 3,000 years ago. And even those early towns and city states were tiny population blips found in a sea of broadly scattered human hunter gatherers. Viewed from this perspective it could be argued that we are living in a highly unnatural state. Humans would be properly viewed as a mobile, opportunistic hunter gatherer species, that has only recently veered into a somewhat experimental alternative life style, on which the jury is still out. Lately one gets the feeling that it is not too long before the “jury”, some kind of natural selection, judges that sedentism is unsustainable.

I find myself pondering along this tangent. We are familiar with natural selection within living organisms, but what about other systems such as societal structures? One could argue the same selective mechanisms are at play. Many micro variations of what we know as society have come and gone over time and space – matriarchies, democracies, tyrannies, etc. – some succeed, some fail. We are currently living in a time when one macro life style – agrarian- based sedentism – has just morphed into extremely dominant and pervasive fossil fuel-based sedentism. Being immersed in it makes it very hard for us to objectively look at our current social structure versus the foraging, hunter gatherer macro structure that served us so well for around 300,000 years. Maybe the whole sedentism experiment will collapse and fragment back towards our previous non-sedentary existence?

Many of the great empires that we read about in the history books were in fact not as great or as long-lived as they are made out to be. The famous Qin Dynasty, China’s first official imperial dynasty, lasted only 15 years! And it didn’t control all of China, just a few small urban pockets. While it seems that our history is a seamless sequence of this and that empire, in fact, most of those empires were punctuated by many gaps in time and space that dominate in proportion to the actual extent and reach of the empires’ ascendancies.

One reason for this distorted view is that archaeology and history are inherently created by the state. It is the state that builds the structures that archaeologists dig up, and it is the state that carves or writes its history in some preservable form (note, often tax and slave details). The much larger and widely spread numbers of hunter gatherers left little behind, except for a few remains in caves, or temporary encampments that are only serendipitously found by archaeologists.

The Myth of Human Progress

At the heart of our accepted human story is an assumption that it is one of progress. I have been aware for a while that the first Europeans to arrive in the Americas were struck by the robust good health and physical strength of the indigenous people they found there (see Terra Preta (Kuhn, 2009)), but it never occurred to me that this may be a normal difference between sedentary and non-sedentary populations. In fact, archaeology repeatedly and convincingly shows that ancient humans living in urban communities tended to be unhealthy, malnourished and disease-ridden, while hunter gatherers were not.

Sedentary communities tended towards an over-reliance on one or two grain crops for nutrition, whereas hunter gatherers have a broader diet that changes with seasonal availability of foods. The dense living conditions of sedentary communities are a perfect environment for a host of diseases and parasites, whereas small groups of hunter gatherers scattered geographically are not nearly as susceptible to such things. Regularly eating grains tended to wear down teeth and cause tooth decay. The drudgery, such as hoeing fields or balancing accounts, that is the norm of most people living in a sedentary society leads to various physical ailments such as back problems, repetitive strain injuries and so on, not to mention the psychological toll exacted by a life of tedium.

As has been documented extensively, denser urban living in close contact with domesticated animals as well as commensal and parasitic freeloaders such as rats and fleas, brought with it devastating plagues (Diamond, 1997). Collapses of towns, cities and entire empires happened with alarming frequency, often due to plagues, but certainly compounded by other factors that I mention here.

Various disciplines, including anthropology which can look at the few remaining hunter gatherer societies, have concluded that hunter gatherers on average have far more free leisure time than people living in a domesticated society. This resonates with modern office workers who often ask themselves whether they are working to live or living to work. Even peoples such as the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert, who have been forced to exist in a small and extremely marginal patch of their former territory, work only 15-20 hours per week to survive (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 2018). What are they doing the rest of the time? Presumably, all the things we dream of doing while chained to our desks or stuck in traffic – hanging out, gossiping, singing, dancing, telling stories, doing crafts, playing with their kids, visiting their friends and families, appreciating the natural world around them, having sex, going for walks, snoozing, looking at the stars… It’s instructive to remember that what we consider two of the greatest works of literature, the Odyssey and the Iliad, are thought to have been the result of writing down stories that were long part of the Hellenic oral story telling tradition, something that plays a significant role in all hunter gatherer societies. These are not unintelligent and crude peoples; they were and are capable of just as sophisticated acts of thought and creativity as we are.

This raises many questions. What exactly is human progress and how should we measure it? Should we judge the success of our social structures by what we achieve? The size and grandeur of our buildings, the scientific inventions, our domination of the landscape? By our numbers? Or is quality of life a better measure, and if so, have we actually progressed? There is a general sense that modern urban people feel somehow unhappy and disconnected. Some fill the void with things like materialism and intoxicants. Perhaps sedentism is a flawed social construct. Philosophizing aside, it is now clear that when we humans began to move into settled communities and left our more nomadic lifestyle behind, we were in fact giving up a lot, the allegorical departure from the Garden of Eden, as many have pointed out.

Astute readers will wonder why, if urbanization brought with it disease and malnutrition, did global human population numbers explode with the shift to sedentism? The answer surprised me. Hunter gatherer societies have lower birth rates than sedentary ones, and even factoring in the higher death rates in towns and cities due to disease and poor nutrition, the higher estimated birth rates there can mathematically explain the rate of population increase. Why the difference? It’s still somewhat speculative, but some factors mentioned include the tendency of nomadic and semi-nomadic mothers to nurse their young for longer, and the tendency for all domesticated mammal species to become more fertile, i.e. ovulate more frequently and regularly (more on that later) than their wild counterparts.

Walls

We all know that the Great Wall of China was built to keep the Mongolian hordes out. Many scholars now believe that’s backwards, that the main purpose of the wall was to keep average peasant farming people in. On reflection it makes sense – a group of aggressive war-mongering males would have no problem getting over any wall as they can only be built so high (and we all know how to build ladders) and it’s simply impossible to patrol every section of a wall 24/7, although apparently Donald Trump believes one can. This changing opinion applies also to walled cities and illuminates an important aspect of these emerging new theories about the shift to statehood. These state-controlled agrarian economies relied on large labour forces that carried out the repetitive mundane tasks involved in grain farming – among other things hoeing, weeding, and dredging irrigation canals, often under the blazing hot sun, open to the predations of parasites such as mosquitoes. Of course these people would have preferred to return to the much freer and easier hunter gatherer lifestyle enjoyed in the neighbouring regions outside of the state’s control. What kept them there? Enforced slavery and walls. It is becoming clear that the main pillars holding up early agrarian-based states were slavery and taxes.

Almost all early states prominently feature slavery in their art and records. In the Middle East surviving cuneiform records andequivalent are dominated by tax records. There is a very interesting link between grain crops and states – grains are the only crops whose yields can be easily estimated (by surveying the area under cultivation), mature in a highly visible and predictable way, and can be stored, measured and transported easily. In other words, perfect for state control. I believe that no known ancient state was ever built on a non-grain crop, such as potatoes.

These pieces of information are building a picture of early states as precarious enterprises built on taxing citizens, and replacing workforce turnover caused by escape, disease, and malnourishment with slave raids into the surrounding hinterlands. When population loss exceeded the supply of new slaves, the society would easily collapse, allowing the remaining citizens to melt into the surrounding areas, back to a more traditional hunter gatherer life. We have been taught to view historical societal collapses as tragedies, the loss of something great, but perhaps they should be viewed as a healthy fragmentation of something negative. Remember, most of these people didn’t die, they just drifted out of the walled cities into the surrounding country side. Dark ages were not necessarily dark for average people.

The Myth of the State-Farming Bundle

We are taught that when farming was “invented”, the state naturally formed. In other words, the two go hand in hand. The evidence does not support this. One complicating factor is that there is no clear dividing line to say that, “This is farming, and this is when it started.” For millennia humans had eaten certain plants and found ways to help things along. As Scott asks, if people chuck pits and seeds into their encampment rubbish dump, knowing they will sprout and provide food in the future, is that farming? He mentions that there are several species of wild grain that grew (and still grow) in Anatolia that are easily harvested; one relatively small area, without much effort by a clan of hunter gatherers, could provide enough grain, if cached, to last until the following year’s harvest.

Hunter gatherers by nature are opportunistic, and just as they use methods such as hunting blinds and traps to assist in the capture of game, and nets to trap fish, so too would they employ methods to assist in the gathering of naturally occurring edible plants, for example small hand dug irrigation ditches. To draw a sharp distinction between farmers and hunter gatherers is facile – hunter gatherers are both. The record shows that humans exploited all available sources of nourishment and moved to pursue them according to general seasonal schedules, including plants. In river deltas such as the Tigris-Euphrates, food sources included game, fish, birds, and plants. People here and in other river deltas found that an easy way to grow plants, especially grains, was to throw seeds onto the fresh mud flats created by the annual spring floods. No preparation, hoeing, weeding required. It’s easy to see how over time this would become one of several staple food sources, and still have nothing to do with a state or overly organized labour.

The archaeological record shows a variety of strategies. Some people did small scale farming of sorts while remaining essentially nomadic, while others became fully or partially sedentary without employing any type of farming. In the marshes of the Tigris-Euphrates delta it was easy enough to live a settled life while living off fish, shellfish, seasonally migrating birds and animals, and naturally growing plants. It is thought that the first instances of sedentism occurred around 12,000 ya, some domesticated plants and animals showed up around 9,000 ya, towns 6,000 ya, crop- and livestock-dependent settlements 5,000 ya, and walled territorial “statelets” around 3,100 ya. There is no direct connection between farming, states, and sedentism, just a gradual convergence of many hybrid, opportunistic hunter gatherer strategies into the agrarian state, involving some domestication, some sedentism, and some farming.

Slaves and Barbarians

If I’ve created a picture of small walled states surrounded by vast untouched areas of hunter gatherer territory, then that is somewhat misleading. A key aspect of a hunter gatherer society is that it is opportunistic. Such humans are expert at identifying and exploiting available food sources. The high concentrations of calories within a walled state – livestock and grains – were an enticing target for hunter gatherers. They were like a stocked fridge to a college student coming home from the bar. What happened was that the evolution of the agrarian state created an expanded hunter gatherer menu – some communities evolved into raiders expert at targeting cities and towns. In one day they could reap nutritional rewards equal to weeks of hunting and gathering. This is the dynamic that created societies such as the Mongol hordes which struck fear into the settled parts of Europe, China and the Middle East. The human landscape changed from a spectrum of hunter gatherer societies to a bimodal one where some of the population lived in sedentary, agriculture-based communities, and most of the rest morphed into hunter gatherer / raider hybrids, depending on their proximity to settled communities. These became generally known as barbarians. Obviously my comments on walls left out their dual usefulness, when viewed from this perspective – keep the slaves in AND the barbarians out.

In the struggle for ascendancy between these two competing but somewhat symbiotic social structures, sedentism appears to have won out, due to factors beyond the scope of this article. But simply put, the settled communities inexorably expanded their territories over time, two steps forward, one step back, their populations continually compounding, until the remaining hunter gatherers really don’t have any room left at all, and are eking out a living on marginal lands, dependent on traditional diets but unable to raid anymore. Superior weaponry and numbers certainly give domesticated humans the upper hand, but perhaps it will be plagues that eventually fell us once more.

Domestication

In the late 1950’s a Russian scientist, Dmitry K. Belyaev, began an experiment in the domestication of foxes (Goldman, 2010). It was overlooked and forgotten for decades but has now jumped back into the scientific limelight because it provides some startling revelations regarding the genetics involved in the domestication of mammal species. Belyaev initially selected only the ~10% of the foxes which displayed docility around humans, and then continued to select on just that one trait. Beyond that they were not treated any differently than the wild foxes used as a control.

Within four generations the docile foxes were domesticated. Not only did their behavior change – they now wagged their tails, and generally acted cute and puppy-like, just like our pet dogs – but there were physical manifestations: shorter and cuter faces, curly tails, floppy ears, shorter legs, different fur colours, etc. This is now known to be typical for all domesticated mammals such as pigs, goats, cattle, and rabbits. These physical changes came about without being selected for. Of critical interest is that the foxes became more fertile – they reached sexual maturity sooner, they ovulated out of season, and they had on average one more cub per litter. The most likely explanation for the emergence of this apparently pre-designed package of domesticated traits is that docility is related to lower adrenaline levels, which mutes the fear/stress response. Adrenaline shares pathways with other biochemicals, for example melanin, which controls fur pigmentation. With the selection for lower adrenalin, subtle biochemical changes tend to produce the physical and psychological characteristics we see associated with domestication.

Now this brings me to what I think is a most fascinating aspect of this changing model to explain the human shift to sedentism. One can picture the selection processes that would domesticate wolves and foxes, leading to dogs. There would be a form of self-selection, as the canines with the most docile response to humans would tend to hang around human encampments picking up scraps. The humans in turn would tend to put up with (i.e. not eat) the most docile and would soon be attracted by their cuteness and responsiveness. Within a few generations they would have evolved into dogs, establishing the long-lasting symbiotic relationship with humans. Similar processes would have been at play between humans and other mammals such as goats, pigs and cattle. These mammals have greatly benefited from domestication, at least from the “selfish gene” and population expansion perspective, and greatly expanded their populations, not in terms of ending up on our plates! Perhaps they helped domesticate us, to their advantage.

So that explains the domestication of livestock, but what about us humans? In our shift to sedentism, have we domesticated ourselves, or allowed the new social system to domesticate us? Over time did more docile humans tend to be attracted to the settled lifestyle, less likely to react with aggression to being packed in tightly with many other humans? Did we in fact allow ourselves to become slaves to a new social structure? Taking this line of thinking even further, perhaps preposterously, if society stays on the sedentism path, will humans eventually evolve into a colony-like species, like ants or bees, with each of us designed to work away at our specialized tasks, slaves to our own biochemistry?

Konner (2019) goes further and puts forward a theory that humans did in fact domesticate themselves. At some point way back in time, we did become far less violent and aggressive than our closest primate relatives. How did that happen? Note that all primates, with a few exceptions (such as the matriarchal bonobos – who through good luck evolved in a little pocket of Africa without any real predators – are gentle and solve all problems with sex) are by our standards extremely violent and murderous. The theory goes that more docile males in our prehistory tended to gang up and kill more aggressive males, thus counterintuitively using inherent violence to selectively weed out violence. There are indeed many examples of humans doing this, and maybe the concepts of police and criminal justice, including capital punishment, are extensions of this human tendency. The previously mentioned !Kung tribesman do identify and kill repeat violent offenders, and the tribeswomen tend to favour less violent males as mates. So perhaps sedentism is just the latest in a very long evolutionary process that is creating a human social structure that simply put, crowds more of us and our more docile DNA onto the planet.