WORLD ZONES AND EARLY AGRARIAN LIFE

WORLD ZONES AND EARLY AGRARIAN LIFE

By 12000 years ago the human population was split into four world zones – regions where collective learning could be shared but not penetrate the other zones.

AFRO-EURASIA

THE AMERICAS

AUSTRALASIA

THE PACIFIC

The human experiment ran in four different places, in isolation from each other. Within a large world zone, e.g. Afro Eurasia or The Americas, exchange of information might be slow at first… in the early days most info exchange over thousands of miles would take many lifetimes. A new invention in China crept slightly further west for several hundred years before reaching the Mediterranean.

The early agrarian era 12000-5000 years ago before the rise of states info exchange was even slower it would take centuries and millennia for the practice of farming to spread out of the hub regions  around the world where they were independently invented to the hinterlands where people still foraged… same goes for spread of bronze tools instead of stone tools

very little incentive for early farmers to spread their technologies into the hinterlands or even much incentive to travel because the EAE was a world without writing… early farmers were just as dependent as foragers on oral tradition and the imperfect spread of knowledge by WOM

Between the world zones there was little to no communication, the inhabitants of Australasia remained cut off by the rising seas and dwelt in their own fertile world foraging low population and abundant nature… the Pacific was so remote that even the late human migrants to new islands forgot there was a world that was not primarily ocean and sky and that there were huge stretches of land

in The Americas once the Bering Strait filled up with water and the peoples of the Americas had migrated sEurasia outh two massive continents with a diverse range of environments was enough and all trace of Afro was forgotten… it would be several thousand years before the Vikings arrived to briefly set up a colony in Newfoundland or the Spanish arrived in the Caribbean…

as for AE, the continent was a single world zone but apart from the sparsest communications between the Mediterranean, Northern Europe, the Middle East and even further afield to sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia, many of these societies became self-contained… and so the world rested diverged in their course from each other for roughly 10000 years… each world zone operating its own hub of collective learning, driving forward the rise of complexity and the march of history

EARLY AGRARIAN LIVING STANDARDS

Farming was not a wonderful invention in the short term… human foragers had much better lives than early farmers 12000 years ago – a more varied diet, were in better physical shape, worked less

and were less exposed to disease than the early farmers who frequently suffered famine, unvaried diets and repetitive stress injuries from back breaking labour… there is no reason why a forager would want to switch to agriculture unless they were forced to adopt it… nevertheless agriculture represents a massive shift in human activity… unlike human foragers who adapted themselves to the resources provided by the environment, humans increasingly adapted the environment to themselves… this is a trend that continues

The beginning of agriculture did not signal the beginning of States and ancient kingdoms – from 12000 to 5000 years ago these humans lived in a World of Farms with the largest villages being settlements of  a few hundred people… they lived this way for 7000 years, longer than the 5000 that separates today from the earliest ancient Egyptians… a world of farms and villages doesn’t sound very impressive to modern ears yet imagine a hunter gatherer who has spent his entire life living with at most a few dozen of the same people stumbling out of the forest into an artificial clearing and wondering what cleared the trees… he sees more humans than he has ever seen in his life, building huts, controlling animals and making plants spring out of the ground, that early farming scene would have looked just as strange and impressive to him as the Egyptian pyramids would have looked to an early farmer…. foragers could raid these farms and villages and take their resources in the same way you gathered food in nature, however the farmers were far more numerous and could send men after you… some foragers recognised the advantage in power and numbers and if they could not escape to more abundant regions they began to farm themselves… from the core regions over many centuries the practice of farming spread and in many ways it was a curse, gone were the 6.5 hours of foraging followed by a feast at a campsite… now they were awake before dawn, tending the livestock and crops,  spending most time hunched over using primitive tools… bones of farmers from this time show spinal injuries, deformities and weakened bones from the endless labour… your range of fruits and vegetables may be limited

you may rely on a staple crop to remain fed – grain, rice or maize depending on what zone you lived in as a result of a less diverse diet, they suffered from malnutrition and in times of recurring crop failure they had a  horrifying chance of dying of starvation… livestock might provide meat once a week, supplemented by hunting if they had time… the unfortunate side effect was that livestock was likely to defecate in the water supply making it unsafe to drink… not understanding why, they would turn to alternatives and develop alcohol, which while making you light headed didn’t kill you and while it might be tempting to think from the Neolithic to the Modern era, humans went through history drunk, prehistoric alcohol was watered down as it was meant to hydrate… pre-modern alcohol was a lot weaker than today’s booze… if you read about medieval workman downing three bottles of wine a day, they just couldn’t trust the water…

unlike foragers, farmers stayed in one place which meant pathogens could develop… they would mutate and spread among denser and more numerous populations… these farmers were generally less healthy and lived alongside their animals and vermin like rats… diseases would not be able to find hosts in their hundreds or even their thousands spreading like wildfire across the region if they still lived in small disconnected groups like foragers…

so, at what price is complexity… looking at supernovas, at planetary impacts, at mass extinctions – not for the first time complexity has come about in an ugly way… cosmic evolution is blind, and the universe isn’t really worried about whether that process is unpleasant… only our instincts are

It is amazing to think that we existed in small agrarian communities for seven thousand years, yet once we get to the first written records of ancient states, historical records behave like this period never existed, like the long run of time between foraging and civilisation never happened, as if we just picked up farm tools one day and started erecting city walls in a single generation, and as if kings and bureaucrats and a system of top-down laws just appeared out of nowhere… as such it is

likely that power structures or methods of government existed for a long time even in the early farming period… they might be reasonably democratic or meritocratic, though some positions of power may have been inherited but it would appear that larger agrarian villages became so complex that they needed full time administration by a person who wasn’t spending all of their time farming… it probably wasn’t a difficult transition, seeing as foragers already have power hierarchies… in the case of  societies, the farm would have the head of the family, the village would a chief and/or a council of elders… the politics of the family would always have been messier as it remains so today but the complexities of coordinating a community of  several hundred people, resolving disputes, allocating resources, providing protection, would have demanded a greater formality and more concrete processes… it is liable that in many farming villages the chief and the council would have been at first delegated responsibility, ergo it is likely that the first members of a village government would have been chosen upon merit and competence… this may have continued fairly democratically for generations… local government would have required that the chief had enough free time to deal with all the demands placed on them, means they wouldn’t have been able to spend dawn till dusk farming… the chief may own a farm and work the land occasionally but other times they would need others to run the farm while they attended to the affairs of the community – a caretaker, tenants, laborers – perhaps the chief would not farm the land at all and just benefit from a share of the produce… in order to provide services to the community, they might also have the elders who made wider decisions in law and disputes… doctors or shaman being hired to supply what they could in physical or spiritual welfare in times of plague or famine… for protecting the community from raiders, would need a dozen or so muscular enforcers who  provided security… all of these people would have to have an income beyond what they farmed… one could see the danger of a village chief having some muscle in their pay… such a militia could engage in coercion of the people, either to enforce laws  against their will or to keep the chief in power… these might even be the chief’s family members and thus more likely to be loyal to the service of their clan that is one possible source of autocratic rule that might have emerged 12000 to 5000 years ago

by the time we started to arrange ourselves into states these autocratic structures already seemed in place… another path to autocratic rule is more nuanced… the natural tendency for humans can be towards nepotism… we have already seen how in primates the children of those further up the hierarchy are sometimes afforded protection by kin and others in alliances with that kin group… all the way to the other end of the spectrum, even in modern democratic societies we see countless examples of how the  children of rulers or celebrities are given an easier ride to respect, fame, power and even government authority… even if the person has demonstrated only a fraction of the merits of their ancestor… they are generally given more benefit of the doubt than someone who has built themselves up from nothing

Even though we live in an age where we know that virtue is not transmitted by blood, human societies past and present seem highly susceptible to what we can call the Kardashian effect and this deeply wired predisposition is likely to be something that we share with our last common ancestors, chimpanzees, 7 million years ago

Imagine a farming community eight thousand years ago which had a nexus for trade and transport that was a village of about a hundred people, the wider community has a population of about a thousand… got a highly competent administrator elected by a council of elders, the chief does a fairly good job, it just so happens his father was also a chief, his grandfather was one of the village elders, the family holds a lot of respect. The current chief was pretty much trained from childhood in the methods of local government, the chief has a family and the chief asks the council of elders to nominate his son, still a child, as the next village leader when the current chief dies. The elders did not know that virtue was not genetic and perhaps a few bribes and favours were passed around… the son comes of age, becomes chief and when his children are born it is not even put to a vote that one of them should be chosen as the next village chief or perhaps democracy ceases with the grandson, but, after all the family  has ruled the community since time immemorial… throw in some religious or spiritual justification and thing looks quite persuasive to a Neolithic human living 8000 years ago… this is not to belittle the Neolithic farmer since we are sometimes wilful participants of that kind of nepotism today… combine the nepotistic approach with the potential of that family to hire enforcers and enact coercion to protect their rule, and on a long enough time scale autocratic rule becomes not only possible but highly likely the tiny seed of social hierarchy from 7 million years ago is sprouting and blossoming as human societies become more complex… all while the essential human animal remains unchanged from 100000 or even 300000 years ago… it is here in the justification and  preservation of political power that nature meets nurture, where the irrational impulses of our biology meets words and deeds, rituals and superstition… the eternal challenge is to surmount those impulses and use our learning to distribute and exercise power in a way that does the least harm

Mesopotamia 8000 years ago… foraging ancestors all but forgotten… family owns a small farm with primitive irrigation from the Euphrates… father is a farmer covered in dirt toiling in the fields who generally speaks in grunts… he is developing bone problems from consistent stress from using stone tools… mother takes anxious care of her children… three brothers and two sisters… more siblings died shortly after birth… at eighteen years old, been helping on the farm since the age of six, illiterate because writing  does not exist… teeth are crooked and rotten from poor diet, you are thin and short, your diet is unwavering and meat is only an occasional luxury… you have body odour, acne and lice, a bout of plague when younger resulted in pock marks on the face… in this world even where good genetics are involved, beauty is rare… one of your grandparents is still alive, a hardy but senile old man who still helps out on the farm when he is feeling well… your other grandparents also lived with you in your small home but they contracted illnesses and quickly died despite the intervention of the local medicine man who treated them with animal entrails and occasionally tried to bleed out the disease… if anything they seemed to fade quicker once the medicine man began his treatments… you have never travelled further than 20 miles from your farm, 18 miles from your farm is your local village with a population of a hundred people… many of these people grow food in their gardens and raise livestock in their yards even sleeping in the same room as the animals… others own farms nearby the village it  is a busy hub of activity and you have only been there three times in your life… the area is ruled by a council of elders and an elected chief though these positions had usually passed from father to son for as long as you can remember… the current chief is a good person but his father used violence quite often and tended to torment a few dozen people in his village knowing each of them personally and what buttons to push because the early agrarian age was the only period prior to the 20th century where such totalitarianism was possible… once states rose the bureaucracies were generally too small to enforce that kind of rule but the exercise of coercion face to face is perhaps a more considerable form of power than the power wielded by pharaohs despite the low number of subjects… justice is shakier further away from the village and is usually handled by the families involved. Sometimes disputes go unsettled leading to generations-long feuds.

The region is currently overpopulated, crop failures happen occasionally but due to the number of mouths to feed people are already starving and another crop failure may lead to a mass famine

Your farm hasn’t been doing well, but you are better off than the landless labourers who help out on farms in exchange for a meagre amount of food… in order to make up for your farm’s declining fortunes your parents have arranged for you to marry into a family farm next to yours with the aim of combining the two properties… you have known your prospective spouse all your life, they are two years younger than you and while you thought they were annoying when you were both children, you have resigned yourself to the match, they have even become vaguely attractive in their adolescence, though you worry they may have a slight ill temper and may not even be quite right in the head… since the match was made you’ve met a few times with the families present and with a great deal of solemn ritual… you feel great pressure not trying to say the wrong thing… your brother is burly and like all the men in your family he is charged with protecting your farm from raiders and bandits… large scale war is still unheard of but now that you are sedentary you have resources to protect in a starving world… a few months ago another farm had the entire family killed, its livestock either stolen or slaughtered and the farmhouse burned to the ground… the local community never found the culprits… apart from these tragedies and constraints your daily life is one of routine, it is fairly dull but it is all you know… this story would have been repeated with some variation for 7000 years

in the early agrarian era… the family life would be tranquil and wholesome, your life’s wish would go no further than to have strong healthy children who can carry on the farm and for you to live as long as you can without dying of infection or perishing with all your neighbours in a plague, although the plague would certainly help with the population pressure… you simply wished to live to a ripe old age until one night hopefully you die peacefully in your sleep… as an early agrarian farmer, the world has been this way forever… you are not aware of how recent a development farming was, and even less aware that 12000 years is a very short time in the history of the world and that your species is currently engaged in a blizzard of innovation and change, in a race against time, to develop their complexity in order to one day leave this planet, survive, evolve and perhaps outlive the Sun and ideally continue their complexity over billions of years in order to continue waging the only battle that really matters in this universe – the one against the second law of thermodynamics.