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Chapter 3 - The Archaeology of Commensalism
- Michigan State University Press
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37 3 The Archaeology of Commensalism one of the most intriguing questions regarding our species and our animal neighbors is to wonder how far back into our prehistory such associations extend. To some extent we can address that question through the historical and archaeological records, looking for direct and indirect evidence that may show commensal relationships. Digging into that rich and diverse record to examine the material evidence for a number of different times and places might seem to be the logical place to start. however, such an approach would be open-endedly empirical, looking for evidence without having considered a priori what form that evidence might take. First, then, we need to approach the question from a different direction by asking what environmental impact our species and its ancestors may have had in the more distant past. Where and when might other species have found some adaptive benefit in living more closely with humans, or we with them? Perhaps hominins would be better than humans, as this exploration of our ecological prehistory needs to begin before the appearance in the fossil record of something that we would recognize as human. because modern humans have become so effective at constructing the environment around themselves, we may tend to assume that much of what we associate with that modern environment, including our commensal neighbors, is of relatively recent origin. The discussion then becomes circular: if we only look for the attributes of the modern human environment in comparatively recent periods of time, we can be sure of never finding those attributes anywhere, or anywhen, else. by taking a starting point long before the advent of modern humans, we can work forwards in time looking for the earliest traces of familiar human environmental modification, and adaptation to it by other species. Perhaps, too, we can avoid the mistake of associating “man-made” environmental change only with Western industrialism, seeing it as a damaging byproduct of global capitalism.1 Certainly our capacity to change the face of the earth has reached new levels since the end of the eighteenth century, for some the time of the Anthropocene epoch. however, in recent years we have realized more and more that past cultures and societies had their own impacts—perhaps smaller in extent and less in intensity than today, but nonetheless a marked ecological impact.2 A consequence of our attitude to modern environmental change is our desire to seek out, value, and protect those few and scattered places that we believe (often wrongly) to be remnants of the “natural world.” our prevailing culture draws a contrast between a constructed world of towns, roads, and industry, and a natural world that is unaffected, unspoiled. The origins of this contrast can be traced back to the nineteenth century, to John muir and other advocates for wild places, supplemented by the 1960s rebirth of environmentalism, reacting against the increasing evidence that pollution was detrimentally affecting large parts of most 38| Chapter 3 continents. The fact that modern environmental change is modifying landscapes and biotas that are often already substantially modified by past human activity tends to get lost in the entirely understandable alarm and despondency over recent impacts. Towns, roads, and industry date back at least to classical times, environmental engineering to the riverine civilizations of egypt and mesopotamia, and our fractious relationship with fire predates our species. The aim of this chapter, then, is to look at our evolution as an agent of environmental change, from the earliest emergence of the hominin clade,3 through the introduction of agriculture, to the time of historic towns and empires. What part did close interspecies relationships such as commensalism play in our own evolution, and when and in what ways did people become a significant and attractive source of shelter and food for other species? That would have brought other species into the everyday lives of our ancestors, opening up the possibility that they were culturally incorporated in some way. We tend to regard the other animals whose remains accompany those of our early ancestors as if they were either prey or predator, or irrelevant to the hominin story. That rather assumes that the human disposition to develop affiliative relationships with other animals is exclusively a human, not a hominin, trait—an assumption that is quite unjustified, not least because it is untested. The earliest part of the story is that of our clade—that is, our species and all of its ancestors and side branches back to our...