There is a tendency to assume that human evolution has
been characterized by an inexorable improvement in humanity’s capabilities and
in the societies it develops. When
humans were at the mercy of the elements and could exercise little control over
their environments, natural selection would favor characteristics that favored
survivability in whatever current environment existed. That produces change but it does not
necessarily introduce what one might consider, in retrospect, as progress. As time went on humans became more adept at
influencing their own environments and creating new selection trends. About 10,000 BCE humans began to experience
and try to manage a number of changing conditions, probably driven mostly by
increases in population and the ever-changing climate. A species that had spent most of its
existence as hunter-gatherers would gradually transition into farmers, herders and
craftspeople. Small groups would be
replaced by larger communities that would ultimately evolve to states organized
on the basis of an agricultural economy.
This is often viewed as a period of great progress on the part of
humanity. Humans filled the earth and to
a great extend molded it to suit their needs.
However, in changing the earth they also changed the factors operative
in natural selection. By changing their
environment, humans also changed themselves.
It was certainly a period of great change, but can it all
be viewed as progress?
James C. Scott is a political scientist at Yale
University with an interest in the characteristics of the earliest formed
states. He was impressed by the amount
of new information that had been produced by archeological and anthropological
studies and was moved to present his interpretation of this fresh data in his
book Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. His focus is on
events in a region that is now roughly equivalent to modern Iran. What Scott’s analysis makes clear is that the
precursors of the modern state were entities driven by elites whose goals had
little to do with any universal benefits to humanity. Rather, these early political constructs
seemed more akin to modern corporations—but ones with horrible human resource
policies.
Scott introduces his final
chapter with this warning:
“The
history of the peasants is written by the townsmen
The
history of the nomads is written by the settled
The
history of the hunter-gatherers is written by the farmers
The
history of the nonstate peoples is written by the court scribes
All
may be found in the archives catalogued under ‘Barbarian Histories’”
The immediately accessible
record of the distant past is generally self-serving documentation produced by
a small element of the population. In
effect, any person who was not controlled by a state was considered a “barbarian.” The term had nothing to do with the quality
of life or the viability of the society in which these nonstate peoples lived. In fact, Scott claims that one could make the
argument that it would only be around 1,600CE that the majority of humans would
have transitioned from “barbarism” to state domination. That last statement carries a scent of
cynicism. That type of attitude is
difficult to avoid after reading Scott who seems to enjoy indicating the
conflicts of interest that exist between state rulers and state subjects. For example, the most important task of the
early states was to prevent the accumulated laborers under state control from
escaping and regaining the safer and more comfortable life available under
“barbarism.”
Scott provides a brief
chronology of the period of interest.
“Homo
sapiens appeared as a subspecies about 200,000 years ago and is found outside
of Africa and the Levant no more than 60,000 years ago. The first evidence of cultivated plants and
of sedentary communities appears roughly 12,000 years ago. Until then—that is to say for ninety-five
percent of the human experience on earth—we lived in small, mobile, dispersed,
relatively egalitarian, hunting-and-gathering bands. Still more remarkable, for those interested
in the state form, is the fact that the first small, stratified, tax-collecting,
walled states pop up in the Tigres and Euphrates Valley only around 3,100 BCE,
more than four millennia after the
first crop domestications and sedentism.
This massive lag is a problem for those theorists who would naturalize
the state form and assume that once crops and sedentism, the technological and
demographic requirements, respectively, for state formation were established,
states/empires would immediately arise as the logical and most efficient units
of public order.”
Here is his summary of our conventional wisdom as to our
history.
“Historical humankind has been
mesmerized by the narrative of progress and civilization as codified by the first
great agrarian kingdoms….In its essentials, it was an ‘ascent of man’
story. Agriculture, it held, replaced
the savage, wild, primitive, lawless, and violent world of hunter-gatherers and
nomads. Fixed-field crops, on the other
hand, were the origin and the guarantor of the settled life, of formal
religion, of society, and of government by laws. Those who refused to take up agriculture did
so out of ignorance or a refusal to adapt.
In virtually all early agricultural settings the superiority of farming
was underwritten by an elaborate mythology recounting how a powerful god or goddess
entrusted the sacred grain to a chosen people.”
“No one, once shown the
techniques of agriculture, would dream of remaining a nomad or forager. Each step is presumed to represent an
epoch-making leap in mankind’s well-being: more leisure, better nutrition,
longer life expectancy, and, at long last, a settled life that promoted the
household arts and the development of civilization.”
What actually happened was that these barbarians had
already developed all the technology needed to implement an agricultural
economy based on a few dominant crops and animals yet they decided against it. They had very good reasons for not following
that path, resisting such a move for over 4,000 years. The region in which they lived, the Tigres
and Euphrates Valley, was, at the time, rather lush with many wetland areas
that provided an abundant and diverse assortment of food sources. Acquiring one’s daily nutrition was a part-time
occupation, and if conditions changed it was relatively simple to move on to a
new location.
“Having already domesticated
some cereals and legumes, as well as goats and sheep, the people of the Mesopotamian
alluvium were already agriculturalists and pastoralists as well as
hunter-gatherers. It’s just that so long
as there were abundant stands of wild foods they could gather and annual
migrations of waterfowl and gazelles they could hunt, there was no earthly
reason why they would risk relying mainly, let alone exclusively, on
labor-intensive farming and livestock rearing.”
What was driving the development of the agricultural
economy based on state control was not the desire to advance civilization, but
the desire to earn a profit for the few from the labor of many. There were many sources of food available, but
grain was chosen to be the main crop because it provided critical industrial and
fiscal advantages. It was important
because it could be traded, making it the equivalent of money. It would require a great amount of labor to
produce that wealth. It would require
much more effort than that involved in hunting and gathering. Therefore, a degree of coercion was required
to obtain laborers. Either environmental
conditions made hunting and gathering no longer competitive, or physical
coercion was required. What records
remain of these early states indicate great concern about maintaining the
workforce by preventing escape or replacing those who escaped by raiding other
sites and enslaving captives. So much
for advances in civilization.
“The key to the nexus between
grains and states lies, I believe, in the fact that only the cereal grains can
serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable,
transportable, and ‘rationable.’ Other
crops—legumes, tubers, and starch plants—have some of these desirable
state-adapted qualities, but none has all of these advantages.”
“The fact that cereal grains
grow above the ground and ripen at roughly the same time makes the job of any
would-be taxman that much easier. If the
army or tax officials arrive at the right time, they can cut, thresh, and
confiscate the entire harvest in one operation.”
These early states were to be kingdoms, not
democracies. The people, other than a
class of elites, were subjects, not citizens.
Wild animals were domesticated by controlling reproduction to produce
desired characteristics. It would take
only a few generations of controlled breeding to produce a more docile species
better acclimated to life in the agricultural economy. Something similar must have also occurred
with humans as they were extracted from the more intellectually challenging and
nutritionally superior life of the hunter-gatherer and subjected to generations
of simple but strenuous labor.
“’Domiciled’ sheep, for example,
are generally smaller than their wild ancestors; they bear telltale signs of
domesticate life: bone pathologies typical of crowding and a narrow diet with
distinctive deficiencies. The bones of ‘domiciled’
Homo sapiens compared with those of hunter-gatherers are also distinctive: they
are smaller; the bones and teeth often bear the signature of nutritional
distress, in particular, an iron-deficiency anemia marked above all in women of
reproductive age whose diets consist increasingly of grains.”
“Evidence for the relative
restriction and impoverishment of early farmers’ diets comes largely from
comparisons of skeletal remains of farmers with those of hunter-gatherers living
nearby at the same time. The
hunter-gatherers were several inches taller on average. This presumably reflected their more varied
and abundant diet.”
Animal species that have been domesticated all undergo
physiological changes and suffer a loss of brain mass relative to their wild
counterparts. It is not clear exactly
what that loss can be attributed to, but it seems foolish to assume that humans
could not have been similarly affected.
In fact, physical anthropologists tell us that human brain size has been decreasing for the past 20,000
years. Could it be that civilization
places less demands on us and allows smaller brains to prove adequate?
“It is no exaggeration to say
that hunting and foraging are, in terms of complexity, as different from cereal
grain farming as cereal grain farming is, in turn, removed from repetitive work
on a modern assembly line.”
The enshrinement of the agricultural economy, and the
increase in population density of both humans and other animals, contributed
yet another new feature to civilization: the creation of modern infectious
diseases. A virus or microbe that can
thrive within an animal host requires a mechanism for transfer to another host
and the availability of another host if it is to survive. There will then be a minimum population size required
for a disease agent to propagate and thrive.
That value will differ according to the characteristics of the given
agent. The critical point is that
larger, higher-density populations invite new disease agents to move in and
take hold.
“The importance of sedentism and
the crowding it allowed can hardly be overestimated. It means that virtually all the infectious
diseases due to microorganisms specifically adapted to Homo sapiens came into existence
only in the past ten thousand years, many of them perhaps only in the past five
thousand. They were, in the strong
sense, a ‘civilizational effect.’ These
historically novel diseases—cholera, smallpox, mumps, measles, influenza,
chicken pox, and perhaps malaria—arose only as a result of the beginnings of
urbanism and, as we shall see, agriculture.
Until very recently they collectively represented the major overall
cause of human mortality.”
Agriculture’s specific contribution to the misery of
humankind is the close association between herds of humans and the herds of
other animals that ensued. This provided
infectious agents from humans the opportunity to attack other species
(anthroponosis), and, more importantly to us, the opportunity for infectious
agents carried by animals to infect humans (zoonosis).
“Estimates vary, but of the
fourteen hundred known human pathogenic organisms, between eight hundred and
nine hundred are zoonotic diseases,
originating in nonhuman hosts.”
“In an outdated list, now surely
even longer, we humans share twenty-six diseases with poultry, thirty-two with
rats and mice, thirty-five with horses, forty-two with pigs, forty-six with
sheep and goats, fifty with cattle, and sixty-five with our much studied and
oldest domesticate, the dog.”
The zoonosis process continues. HIV and Ebola are more recent zoonotic
diseases. As humans continue to increase
in population and wander into unexplored ecosystems where new sources of
pathogens exist, some have suggested that the rate of zoonosis is increasing.
Over the millennia, these new diseases had devastating
effects on human populations, contributing to the rise and fall of states and
severely limiting population growth—at least for a while. Since survivors of a given disease acquire
immunity, populations would eventually stabilize while allowing the disease to
lurk in the background and survive—if there was a sufficient flux of new
potential hosts. The disease became
endemic within that population, ready to leap out and devastate any group of
humans without acquired immunity that it might encounter. One legacy of the human civilization project
is the burden of living under the continuous threat of new and even more
dangerous epidemics.
We know, of course, that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle
lost out in the long run as formalized, hierarchical states became
dominant. It seems some combination of
population pressure and climate change probably forced people to accept the
less desirable roll of state-controlled laborers. Can this be considered progress? Many view this transition as the source of
the tale of humans being driven out of the Garden of Eden and being forced to
live a life of suffering and toil.
Tales of paradise lost are probably extreme, but it is
clear that this transition was quite painful and not without unforeseen consequences. Scott is cautious in hypothesizing about what
effect the state-dominated regime, with its economic demands, might have had on
humans. He believes not enough generations
have passed for genetic consequences to be readily apparent. He may be wrong.
Consider that we began with a picture of humans living in
small bands where wealth was not accumulated and individuals were more or less
equal in status. The dynamic of a small
band demands that members look out for each other and share their individual bounties
when appropriate. Would anyone use those
same words to describe current societies?
What the “expulsion from Eden” did was create a hierarchical society
where class mattered, and there were always elites who accumulated wealth
through their control of society. We
went from living in a world of relative equality to one of rampant inequality. We went from a society in which cooperation
was demanded to one in which competition is required. We started in a place where wealth was barely
even a concept to one in which it is worth breaking all societal rules in order
to acquire it.
Living in such an environment for a few hundred
generations is plenty of time for natural selection to have carried us off in
some different direction. We are not who
we were, and we do not know who we will become.
There are at least two rapidly approaching crises with
which humans will have to deal. One is
climate change; the other is the growth of automation and artificial
intelligence. It is likely that both will
require a considerable retreat from the inequality and individual
competitiveness we have grown accustomed to if we are to survive intact. The question is: Can we discard the lessons
of a hundred generations worth of natural selection in the next one or two
generations?
I fear not.
The interested reader might find the following articles
informative:
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