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[5] Agriculture The Birth of Civilization . . . and Famine Man’s life in the natural state would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” —Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651 Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization. —Daniel Webster (1782–1852) Why did agriculture develop? The sentiments of the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes stated above suggest that humans’ lives in our ancestral environment would be incentive enough to find a better way. The archeological record, however, suggests that members of early agrarian societies were potentially worse off than contemporaneous hunter-gatherers. Evidence suggests that, at least in some cases, they were less well-nourished, had more serious diseases, and died at younger ages. Furthermore the above quote from the great American statesman Daniel Webster seems like a rather simplistic, overreaching claim for a very complex process. Yet Webster was known as an intelligent, eloquent, and ethical political leader of the nineteenth century; in 1957 the U.S. Senate named him one of five of the most outstanding members of the Senate in history. So what did Webster mean when he made the bold comment above? If we agree he was correct, why and how did agriculture evolve as our dominant strategy for access to nutrition after millennia of success as hunter-gatherers, and why, as the chapter title states, is it a prerequisite for famine? Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel,1 outlines the present thinking on why and how agriculture developed when it did. According to Diamond, there are five factors that explain why agriculture became the predominant lifestyle for early man.° Decreased availability of certain wild foods, perhaps in part due to man’s increasing proficiency as a hunter.° Increased availability of other wild foods suitable for domestication, due to the end of the Pleistocene glaciation about 10,000 years ago. Agriculture [] 97° The development of technologies that had originally been developed for collecting and storing wild foods, but were then applicable to processing the larger quantities that could be produced by agriculture.° An autocatalytic process during which an increasing population caused an increased demand for food, which in turn led to pressures to produce reliable supplies of foods on a predictable basis. Agrarian societies have substantial competitive advantages over huntergatherer societies as the former’s sedentary lifestyle is conducive to producing more children, and only a proportion of an agrarian population is needed to produce enough food for all, allowing others to develop additional skills (like making tools and weapons). Although Diamond presents a coherent and useful explanation for the development of agriculture 10,000 to 13,000 years ago, there are, in fact, a number of competing hypotheses as to why and how agriculture developed. Raphael Pumpelly, a professor of geology at Harvard University in the early 1900s,2 first suggested an oasis theory, suggesting that an increasingly drier climate forced humans and animals into close proximity, which drove the process of domestication, a theory later expanded and popularized by the archeologist Vere Gordon Childe3 (about whom we say more later in this chapter). There is a feasting hypothesis suggesting that man’s natural tendency to exert dominance led to the development of agriculture in order to enable would-be rulers to host feasts (and control the food supply).4 Saur and Binford have proposed and expanded a demographic theory of increasingly large sedentary populations requiring more abundant and predictable food supplies (one arm of Diamond’s autocatalytic process).5 There is an evolutionary/intentionality theory proposed by David Rindos suggesting a coevolution of plants and humans6 (which to our minds is basically an explanation of the process of domestication). Since agriculture developed and evolved de novo in a number of independent sites and spread throughout areas of human habitation at varying speeds, it is most probable that all the factors addressed by these theories, as well as others not mentioned here, played a significant role in man’s discovery and expansion of the basic concepts and further development of agricultural science. Diamond’s fifth point, however, is directly pertinent to the title of this chapter and speaks to Webster’s important observation. The development of agriculture enabled increasingly large percentages of agrarian populations to engage in other pursuits , developing surpluses of food and other goods but, more importantly, developing their uniquely human capital. For this reason the development of agriculture...

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