Behavioral Ecology and the Transition to Agriculture

1. Behavioral Ecology and the Transition from Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture

1 Behavioral Ecology and the Transition from Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture Bruce Winterhalder and Douglas J. Kennett 1 he volume before you is the first systematic, comparative attempt to use the concepts and models of behavioral ecology to address the evolutionary transition from societies relying predominantly on hunting and gathering to those dependent on food production through plant cultivation, animal husbandry , and the use of domesticated species embedded in systems of agriculture. Human behavioral ecology (HBE; Winterhalder and Smith 2000) is not new to prehistoric analysis ; there is a two-decade tradition of applying models and concepts from HBE to research on prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies (Bird and O’Connell 2003). Behavioral ecology models also have been applied in the study of adaptation among agricultural (Goland 1993b; Keegan 1986) and pastoral (Mace 1993a) populations . We review below a small literature on the use of these models to think generally about the transition from foraging to farming, while the papers collected here expand on these efforts by taking up the theory in the context of ethnographic or archaeological case studies from eleven sites around the globe. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TRANSITION There are older transformations of comparable magnitude in hominid history; bipedalism, encephalization , early stone tool manufacture, and the origins of language come to mind (see Klein 1999). The evolution of food production is on a par with these, and somewhat more accessible because it occurred in near prehistory, the last eight thousand to thirteen thousand years; agriculture also is inescapable for its immense impact on the human and non-human worlds (Dincauze 2000; Redman 1999). Most problems of population and environmental degradation are rooted in agricultural origins. The future of humankind depends on making the agricultural “revolution” sustainable by preserving cultigen diversity and mitigating the environmental impacts of farming. Simple population densities tell much of the story. Huntergatherers live at roughly 0.1/km2 ; rice agriculturists in Java at 1,000/km2 , a ten-thousand-fold difference. There were an estimated ten million humans in the world on the eve of food production (Price and Feinman 2001: 194); now over T six billion people live on this planet, an increase of 600% in only ten millennia. Agriculture is the precursor, arguably the necessary precursor, for the development of widespread social stratification , state-level societies, market economies, and industrial production (Diamond 1997; Zeder 1991). Social theory (e.g., Trigger 1998) maintains that present-day notions of property, equality and inequality, human relationships to nature , etc., are shaped, at least in part, by the social organization, technology, or food surpluses entailed in our dependence on agriculture. Domestication today is a self-conscious enterprise of advanced science and global-scale effort , an applied research endeavor comprised of thousands of highly trained and well-supported international specialists. Major research centers like the International Potato Center in Lima, Peru (www.cipotato.org/) support ongoing efforts to further the domestication of useful species; seed banks have been established in many countries to insure the future diversity of the world’s key domesticated plants (www.nal. usda.gov/pgdic/germplasm/germplasm.html). The prehistoric beginnings of agriculture though were quite different. The modern world that funds and depends on this continuing process of domestication is, in fact, a creation of the first early humans that pursued, consumed and, in doing so, modified the wild ancestors of the staples that we consider to be important today— wheat, millet, sweet potato, rice, and domesticated animals such as camelids, pigs, sheep, goats, and cows—to name a few. At present it appears as if at least six independent regions of the world were the primary loci of domestication and emergent agriculture: the Near East; sub-Saharan Africa; China/Southeast Asia; Eastern North America; Mesoamerica; and South America (Smith 1998), roughly in the time period from thirteen thousand to eight thousand years ago (Binford 1971; Diamond 2002; Flannery 1973; Henry 1989). The archaeological record suggests that this transformation took place in societies that look much like modern day hunter-gatherers (Kelly 1995; Lee and Daly 1999). Many of the early domesticates were transmitted broadly through preexisting exchange networks (Hastorf 1999), stimulating the migration of agriculturalists into the territories of hunter-gatherers, who were in turn ultimately replaced or subsumed into agricultural economies (Cavalli-Sforza 1996; Diamond and Bellwood 2003). Foraging peoples initiated domestication. They did so through the mundane and necessary daily tasks of locating, harvesting, processing , and consuming foodstuffs. The Mass from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer (Protestant...