CONSEQUENCES OF THE NEOLITHIC

61
CHAPTER
6
CONSEQUENCES OF
THE NEOLITHIC
One of humanity’s most important inventions is agriculture. This
decisive step freed people from the quest for food and released
energy for other pursuits. No civilization has existed without an
agricultural base, whether in the past or today. Truly, agriculture
was the fi rst great leap forward by human beings.
Richard S. MacNeish, The Origins of Agriculture and Settled Life
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONSEQUENCES
As we have seen, save in northern Europe, the Neolithic Revolution did
not bring abrupt change. But it did bring profound change to every aspect
of human existence in no small part because of the more rigorous demands
of an agricultural way of life. The original impulse for animal taming and
domestication was not so much a desire for the meat, milk, eggs, and hides
that came later as it was a perceived need for sacrifi cial animals. This, of
course, suggests that the uncertainties inherent in planting and harvesting
crops had led to religious rituals aimed at removing some of those uncer-
tainties. The production of agricultural surpluses meant that not everyone
was needed for agricultural labor and most likely those fi rst freed from it
were individuals with explanations for the forces of nature and the gods.
Formalized religion, then, grew out of the Neolithic just as surely as the
crops it gave rise to.
62
A Movable Feast
Other cultural changes followed. As agriculture removed the constraints
on the food supply that confronted hunter-gatherers, up to a quarter of
the labor force was released for other activities and, at the same time,
Middle Eastern priests (and later on their Egyptian counterparts) trans-

formed themselves into agricultural administrators and invented writing to
keep records.
1
Vastly increased social organization was another product of
the Neolithic and, in those early civilizations that arose in Mesopotamia,
Egypt, eastern Asia (dominated by northern China), and the Indus Valley,
people with power evolved into rulers – although often ruling in concert
with the priestly and noble classes, commanding administrators, and war-
riors as well as the common people. Food control was power and, in each
of the early agriculture-based civilizations, governments claimed a hefty
portion of its production.
2
To be sure, those governments stored food as a hedge against fam-
ine. But this made rulers even more powerful, able to withhold food
or determine who received it and who did not. Administrative centers
grew from towns into cities built by those released from agriculture, con-
taining many more who did not work on the land but made their liv-
ing from those who did. The next leap was to stigmatize those who did
the farming – and such social stratifi cation soon began to dictate what
could be eaten and drunk and by whom. Skeletal evidence indicates the
tremendous nutritional disparities that existed between elite minorities
and the common people from the beginning of agriculture onward, with
the elite minorities often supplementing their already plentiful meals at
royal banquets that lasted for days and featured gargantuan quantities
of food – a symbol of the ruler’s status. A good example was the ten day
party thrown by Assurnasirpal II (883–859
BC
) to inaugurate his new
palace. It was not lost on the guests (numbering some 70,000) that their
host commanded tributes of food and drink from the remotest corners

of the Assyrian empire, nor that he was fi rmly allied with the greatest of
the aristocratic families.
3
Women seem to have been the biggest losers in this dawn-of-civilization
stratifi cation process – so much so that by the time the mists obscuring the
Neolithic began to dissipate, almost all power was in the hands of males
who controlled both religion and government. Although earlier foraging
societies were not completely egalitarian and the woman’s work of gather-
ing was not as prestigious as the hunting done by males, women became far
less equal as their status as gatherers changed to that of planters, tenders,
Consequences of the Neolithic
63
and harvesters of crops, as well as caretakers of the home and caregivers to
the children.
4
Men, previously hunters, were now often herdsmen, providing more
in the way of leisure time to engage in the sorts of pursuits, civic and
otherwise, that further enhanced their power over women.
5
Such power
increased as communities prospered to the point where they had to be
defended against tribesmen on their borders, giving rise to a permanent
warrior class, along with a permanent bureaucracy; and those defeated in
battle were no longer killed but put to work as slaves – often to build big-
ger and better defenses.
6
More important than slave labor, however, was the animal power
increasingly substituted for that of humans. Sometime after 3000
BCE
,

horses (domesticated on the grasslands of the Ukraine about 1,000 years
earlier) reached Eastern Europe, the Trans-Caucasus, Anatolia, and the
Mediterranean to pull plows – a task to which oxen were also assigned.
It was also around 3000
BCE
, at the beginning of the Bronze Age, that
human society emerged into the light of recorded history – having accom-
plished the domestication of most of the vegetables, fruits, and animals
that continue to nourish us today. These included such Middle Eastern
staple crops as wheat, rye, barley, millet, chickpeas, broad beans, and len-
tils. In addition, in East and Southeast Asia there were taro, rice, yams, and
bananas; in Africa, south of the Sahara, there were other yams and another
kind of rice; and in the Americas, maize, manioc, squash, sweet and white
potatoes, tomatoes, chilli peppers and most of the world’s beans were
under cultivation. And with domestication came “mutualism,” meaning
that in many cases plant and animal domesticates could no longer compete
for habitat with wild relatives. In short, they became just as dependent on
humans as humans were on them.
Food globalization accelerated after 3000
BCE
as the cereals and sheep
domesticated in and around the Fertile Crescent spread north throughout
Europe (where the westward-moving Celts introduced dairy cattle) and
south to the Mediterranean shores of North Africa. Millet, important in
China, spread to India, Africa, and into southern Europe, and Asian yams
may have reached East Africa to begin a millennium-long journey across
the continent. Rice (perhaps from Southeast Asia) had long before entered
cultivation in southern China and at the time was being introduced to
Indonesia, and southern India. And fi nally the chicken – that jungle fowl
domesticated in Southeast Asia – began to reach the Middle East, although

64
A Movable Feast
until Roman times its most important use was probably for sacrifi ce and
for cockfi ghting. One suspects, however, that chicken eggs were welcomed
by peoples whose chief egg-producers had heretofore been pigeons.
ECOLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES
Hunter-gatherers harvested plant and animal foods alike without attempt-
ing to control the life cycles of those foods. But clearing the land for the
cultivation of grasses and tubers and the herding of animals brought a
whole train of ecological consequences to the planet. Plant and animal spe-
cies were drastically reduced as complex ecosystems were simplifi ed. Bare
earth encouraged the grown of perennial weedy plants in fi elds that were
planted with annuals. Grazing animals also created bald spots in the earth,
and many of the weeds that rushed in to cover the soil became favorites
of the grazers who moved weed seeds about in their bowels and on their
coats. Weeds do help to prevent soil erosion, but much topsoil blows away
before weeds grow large and tough enough to be effective, and pollutants –
especially carbon – began their accumulation in the atmosphere. Problems
of water pollution started as manure and later chemical fertilizers drained
off into rivers and streams to join other animal and human wastes.
7
HEALTH AND DEMOGRAPHIC CONSEQUENCES
With the switch from foraging to farming, human populations grew larger
and denser. Hunter-gatherers, often on the move, had carried everything
they owned, which limited the number of children they could have. So did
the gathering duties of even semi-settled women.
8
In fact, all primates
have tended to produce relatively few infants – but infants who received
considerable parental attention, including nursing on demand. These fre-

quent snacks of mother’s milk, rich in protein and sugars, ensured the sur-
vival of a high percentage into adulthood.
9
Contrast this scenario with that of the fi rst farmers. With a dependable
food supply they stayed put and could have lots of children – to provide
hands for the fi elds and security in old age.
10
Yet the food supply for these
Neolithic baby-boomers was low in fats and short on whole protein, short-
ages that were hard on mothers as well as their children.
11
Because women
were needed in the fi elds, they had little time for nursing, which meant
that infants often had to get along on a starchy pap instead.
12
Consequences of the Neolithic
65
Unquestionably, the fi rst farmers had lots of children. It has been estimated
that, on the eve of the earliest of the Neolithic Revolutions, “Our Kind” num-
bered between 3 and 5 million. But after many more such revolutions and
7,000 years of farming those numbers had increased to 100 million – hardly a
spectacular increase in view of the enormous time span involved, but impres-
sive nonetheless in light of the horrendous infant mortality occasioned by the
decline in pediatric care. Losses of fi fty percent or more of those born, as well
as high child-mortality levels, often meant that it took a considerable number
of births for a couple to reproduce just themselves.
Malnutrition gets much of the blame. The varied hunter-gatherer diet
based on 100 to 200 plant species was replaced by one that tended to
center on a single crop that grew best in an area – wheat in one place, rye
in another, and barley in yet another – in much of Eurasia (along with rice

in East, South, and Southeast Asia and maize in the Americas). The breads
and gruels made from such grains became dietary mainstays, supplement-
ed as the season and customs might allow – with meat appearing in meals
only on special occasions – a signifi cant departure from millennia of heavy
meat consumption.
13
These cereals are sometimes called “super foods,” which they are in the
sense that they have fed billions – but they are far from “super” in their
delivery of the chief nutrients and especially good quality protein.
14
None-
theless, they constituted the bulk of the diet for everyone including, unfor-
tunately, the very young who require protein to survive, let alone thrive.
The pap given to infants in place of breast milk along with the meatless
gruels fed to children would invariably have led to protein-energy malnu-
trition and, thus, much infant and child mortality.
15
One estimate places
average life expectancy in 3000
BCE
at less than 18 years, which implies a
barely viable population.
Another reason for the deteriorating health of sedentary agricultural-
ists was that, unlike their hunter-gatherer forebears, they had numerous
pathogens to contend with. Foragers necessarily operated in small bands
so as not to clean out the fl ora and fauna of an area too quickly. Nor did
they linger long enough in one place for their wastes to pile up to attract
rodents and insects and to foul their water supply. In short, small groups
of highly mobile people were probably little troubled by infectious
diseases – and certainly not by the contagious illnesses produced by mic-

roparasites, such as measles or infl uenza, that require large numbers of
people to host them.
16