A History of the World (6 page)

In this, the people living in the Near East were especially fortunate. There are fifty-six edible grasses growing wild in the world – cereals like wheat, barley, corn and rice. Of those, no fewer than thirty-two grew on the hills and plains of the Fertile Crescent of today’s southern Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel and Iraq, compared with just four varieties apiece in Africa and America, and only one native variety, oats, in Western Europe. Furthermore, the peoples living in the Fertile Crescent had access to the wild originals of emmer wheat, barley, chickpeas, peas, lentils and flax, as well as more animals suitable for domestication. Over the course of later history, invaded by everyone from Egyptians and Persians to Arabs and Crusaders, this has not been a blessed slice of the world; but it began very lucky indeed.

The Americans had llamas, the Chinese, pigs. But these people of the Fertile Crescent had at their disposal a disproportionate number of the thirteen large animals that can be domesticated. They had not only pigs and nearby wild horses, but also cows, goats and sheep, plus those thirty-two grasses. Jared Diamond has pointed out that, by contrast, the most benign part of Chile had only two of the fifty-six prized grasses, ‘California and southern Africa just one each, and south-western Australia none at all. That fact alone goes a long way toward explaining the course of human history.’
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So in the Fertile Crescent, people called Natufians were gathering grain around thirteen thousand years ago; and early on – presumably in order to stay close to the precious grain – they settled down in villages rather than moving around as hunter-gatherers. They were not quite alone in this: at around the same time, it is now thought, groups of hunters living near the Yangtze River in China were also gathering and eating wild rice.

But then the climate changed again. The cooling was not as dramatic as during the ice ages proper, nor permanent, but it was dramatic enough. This brief period is known, after a plant whose advance and retreat are used to measure it, as the ‘Younger Dryas’. The Natufians found the grain they had been enjoying began to die
out in the colder, drier plains. Higher ground attracts more water and keeps more species alive in hard times, so it was growing in the hills, but they had to go further to find and collect it. Elk and mammoth disappeared at the same time.
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Something similar must have happened in China too. Never underestimate the power of laziness: under this pressure people seem to have made the next logical step. Instead of going to the bother of migrating and building new villages, following the changing patterns of the wild grains, they started to collect surplus grains, carry them home and plant them. It seems an almost insignificant shift, a labour-saving way of avoiding long walks. But it was a huge one for humanity. In the Fertile Crescent, and in China, where a similar shift happened with rice and millet, agriculture had begun.

This may also explain why the first villages appeared where they did. There is most biodiversity in the hills and mountains, but people prefer to live in sheltered valleys. It was here that they found ‘just right’ places, not too exposed to wind, but near enough to the wild plants that they could gather and try to grow – from the corn, beans, squash, avocados and tomatoes of the Mexican mountains to the scores of grasses and beans in the Atlas mountains. No doubt plants were regularly brought down and tried out, and only the most promising were kept – those that were most nourishing, those that were hardiest and those that changed pleasingly fast into fatter versions of themselves when selected. To start with, and for a long time, this planting of crops and tethering or tending of animals was accompanied by hunting. The antelope would be culled as they migrated; deer and fish would be brought home.

But farming humanity had walked into a trap. Not for the last time, we had taken a decisive step whose consequences could never have been imagined, and from which there was no pulling back.

The trap was that settled farming communities swiftly produced bigger populations. Even with Late Stone Age technology, each acre of farmed land could support more than ten times as many people as each acre of hunted land. It was not simply about food, either. As we have seen, hunting tribes, always on the move, have to carry their children. That limits how many babies a woman can have. Once people settled down, the birth rate could rise, and it did. Larger families mean more mouths to feed, which means that farming and herding become
ever more important. Once broken, the fields can never be safely abandoned. The herds can never be untethered and returned to the wild. The farming men and women may be shorter in stature, more prone to disease – because parasites and pests settle down as well – and they may die earlier. Their days may be longer and their worries greater. They may have lost the freedom to roam through the wild and magical places. But they are feeding more children – nephews, nieces, even grandchildren.

They cannot stop. Before, they were shaping and taming the plants and animals; now the plants and animals are shaping and taming them, too.

They also had to develop other skills. They had to grind and sift their grain, and store it. Their precious domesticated animals, which had to be protected from wild beasts and allowed to wander for food – but not too far – must be exploited in every possible way. Wool could be sheared and carded and woven. Blood could be drawn off and used to enrich meal. Some farmers developed the odd habit of drinking the milk of lactating goats and cows – and most of their European descendants remain lactose-tolerant to this day. The preparation of hides, the weaving of ropes to help with ploughing, and making baskets and pottery for storing or cooking grain – a whole new world of domestic jobs and skills emerged.

Farming was the most important human revolution of all. It produced not only an immense political change, as hierarchies grew from the sweat and success of farmers, but also less easily tracked changes in human consciousness. Presumably, the settled communities lost touch with the wider geography that their hunting forebears had known; and, with the ‘other’, the unknown, surrounding them. Villagers turned a little in on themselves and away from the lands of the wild beasts and passing hunter groups. Farming would eventually allow food surpluses for leaders and full-time priests; people able to live without actually ploughing or herding themselves.

But the arrival of farming also meant the emergence of the home, or homeland. And as the archaeology shows, settling down produced people who could pay in grain or hides for ‘luxury’ materials such as salt, sharp cutting stones, pretty shells and herbs. So quite early on, traders must have been carrying their packs along newly worn tracks.
It turned out to be a rather more complex bargain than the first handful of fatter seeds might have suggested.

The rise of farming does indeed shape all of later history. The relative paucity of animals to domesticate, and the later start at farming that was the fate of the people who had arrived in Mesoamerica, meant that the civilizations established there were about three thousand years behind those of Europe and Asia and so would be very vulnerable to conquest. The degradation of the soil in the Mesopotamian delta led to the fall of the Sumerian civilization, and the overuse of agricultural land in the classical world led eventually to the desertification of North Africa. Both of these farming failures created political vacuums – relatively thinly populated stretches of land – which in due course would accelerate the spread of Islam.

Thin soil propelled both Vikings and Mongols. But first came towns.

Gentle Anarchists

One day, Tokyo and London, LA and Moscow, will be gone and forgotten. One day far in the future – let us hope – undulating mounds of stone, weirdly shaped green cover and buried walls, motorways and metal objects, will lie quietly, as planetary scars. If this is hard to imagine, reflect that the first towns are already long gone. Some are buried deep below today’s towns. Long before the walls of Jericho fell to Joshua’s priests’ trumpets, it had been an ancient settlement, one of the oldest in the world, with a fresh spring, mud-brick dwellings and even a wall and a tower, though these are thought to have been to protect its people against floods rather than attackers.

North of Jericho, on the Anatolian plains of today’s Turkey, are scores of odd-looking mounds, roughly symmetrical hills, gently rising above the modern fields of wheat, barley and maize. Quite probably, most of them are the remains of Neolithic towns, each once home to thousands of people: a lost, noisy world of early farmers and their families who had settled down and worked together for many centuries, worshipping leopard-gods, saving up for goods from far away, making jokes, marrying and burying their dead.

All this is a reasonable guess because one of these mounds has
been opened up, initially by British archaeologists. It has proved to be a revelation, a treasure trove of knowledge about what happened after the shift to agriculture. Today Catalhoyuk is a small area of excavated earth under metal canopies, with a modest collection of archaeologists’ housing near by. It looks a little like a film director’s set for a movie set in the trenches. It is rather less well known than Rome or Angkor Wat, but in human history it is almost as significant.

Its buildings were lived in from around 9,500 to 7,700 years ago. It has no defensive walls. Nor does it have any buildings much grander than the others, or standing apart. There are no signs of rulers, priests, warrior quarters, lesser workers’ huts – it is just one egalitarian hive. In some ways the homes feel remarkably modern. With a hearth and a living room, a pantry close by, and other rooms which seem to have been bedrooms, the typical home was kept scrupulously clean with regular whitewashing of the walls and floor. When you walk around, the strangeness vanishes and these dwellings, about the size of a modern city apartment or a cottage, feel familiar – modest, but big enough.

Yet the sense of familiarity is only skin-deep. This is not a town as we know towns. Catalhoyuk had no streets, no squares or public buildings. Its people entered their honeycomb of homes through door-openings in the roofs, with ladders leading down, almost as if they were entering man-made caves. They socialized, we must assume, on the roofs which, connected together, would have made a large, safe, flat space for craft work or gathering and talking, and probably had canopies to keep off the sun. (In this area of Turkey, with its broiling summers, people still often sit out on the rooftop under a shade, and sleep overnight there too.)

The houses were renovated or rebuilt by partially knocking down the original, then building upwards on the ruins, so that they grew almost like a human coral, structure on structure. In places, there are eighteen separate layers of homes. Rooms were ornately decorated with plastered bulls’ heads, paintings of leopards and of hunts, and with stone and clay figures of women and animals. Unlike Jericho and other early urban centres, here everything seems to happen in the home. The current lead archaeologist for the site, Ian Hodder of Stanford University, says: ‘In a modern town we would expect to identify different functional areas and buildings such as the industrial and residential zones, the church or mosque or temple, and the cemetery. At
Catalhoyuk all these separate functions occur in one place, in the house.’
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In these houses people stored their food, enough for a single family, in large carved wooden containers, and wove baskets and mats; they made daggers and belt buckles from flint and bone, polished obsidian mirrors, created bracelets and other jewellery; made curious stamp-seals, perhaps for marking property or their own skin; and they cooked and cleaned. All about was excellent farming land, streams and ponds with fish and birds; and the population grew to around seven thousand, perhaps ten thousand – which made it one of the largest human settlements on earth at the time. From the rubbish tips outside the town we can tell they lived well, on wild pigs, ducks, geese, sheep, fish, barley and oats.

The most striking thing about Catalhoyuk is where the bodies were buried. The dead were carefully curled up – ‘lovingly’ seems a reasonable description – and then interred under the floors of the houses, under the stoves, or under the platforms where the living slept. Some think they were first exposed to be picked clean by vultures; the current view is that this was not so, and people simply got used to the smell of decomposition. Some of the dead had their heads removed after death, and these were then plastered and painted and kept. Presumably they were the heads of significant people, perhaps the one-time heads of households. They seem to have been dug up, replastered and buried again, a kind of family memento that would be recycled through generations. One house had more than sixty corpses in it.

There are more mysteries in Catalhoyuk: in the houses, the bulls’ heads and paintings of leopards suggest a worship of natural power and aggression in the world outside. The inhabitants did not need David Attenborough to bring a sense of the danger of the sunlit outside world into the dark, cave-like womb of the home. But the practice of building home after home on the same site, and burying family members there and preserving heads, all point to ancestor worship, common throughout China and Japan, and indeed in the Mediterranean world up to Roman times.

These are people living in nuclear families, or at least nuclear homes, and identifying themselves with their parents, grandparents and back through the generations. They are saying, ‘We
are
this
ground, this place, this footprint on the soil; a strong assertion of settlement after the thousands of years of nomadic roving. Does that sound odd? If so, it is only because most of us are now real city-dwellers who have lost any direct connection with a specific patch of earth, one that belonged to our ancestors. But for most of human history this identification of lineage and land was normal (even if burying granny under the stove was not).

The second part of the Catalhoyuk message is about equality. As time goes on, and layers grow upon layers, there are some houses that are larger, more decorated and with more burials than others – which suggests the slow emergence of dominant or more powerful families. But there is still nothing like a ruling or priestly class. Catalhoyuk offers a glimpse of an alternative society before the rise of class divisions, the warriors, chiefs and kings of later towns. It is a more peaceful society, poised somewhere between the early farming villages and the fighting empires ahead. Catalhoyuk enthusiasts see it as an egalitarian Eden, where women were venerated, there was no war, and families with only small amounts of personal property lived peaceably and cooperatively together.