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HeavenlyPossum

Thread: the spread of agriculture and the rise of the state.

You have probably heard some variation of this argument:

“Humans are bad in some way—violent, rapacious, hierarchical, etc—because bad social structures outcompete good social structures.”

Violent societies outfight and conquer peaceful societies. Agricultural societies outbreed and swamp non-agricultural societies. Hierarchical societies mobilize more labor and resources and bludgeon egalitarian societies. It’s a sort of folk-Game Theory argument that’s quite popular in certain misanthropic circles, especially among people who enjoy feeling holier-than-thou without explicitly resorting to racist myths or social Darwinism.

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28 July at 13:20 | Open on kolektiva.social
12 comments
HeavenlyPossum

Consider in particular Jared Diamond’s argument that agriculture was “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”

“As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It's not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their lifestyle, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn't want.”

A variation on this is Stephen Hawkings’ warning about meeting alien species: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

discovermagazine.com/planet-ea

2/12

Consider in particular Jared Diamond’s argument that agriculture was “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”

“As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught...

28 July at 13:20 | Open on kolektiva.social
HeavenlyPossum

In response to this claim, let’s take a look back to the spread of agriculture into Europe starting about 9,000 years ago. Most of Western Europe was, at that time, populated by a community that geneticists have creatively dubbed “Western Hunter Gatherers.” These people—dark skinned and light-eyed—hunted and fished and foraged, preferring woodlands and the edges of wetlands and bodies of water.

Archeologists wondered for a long time if agriculture spread by adoption—if these foragers took up farming. But, thanks to genetic studies, we now know that agriculture spread into Europe mostly by migration as early farmers from Anatolia migrated first into what is now Greece and then into the rest of the continent.

These Neolithic farmers brought with them cereal crops, like wheat, and domesticated animals, like cattle, that had originated in the ancient Near East. They resembled modern Sardinians, the modern community with the highest percentage of these Neolithic farmers among their ancestors.

(Basically, if you have ancestors from Europe, your ancestors almost certainly included people from both of these foragers and these farmers.)

These two communities, rather than clashing, co-existed with each other throughout Europe for thousands of years. They sometimes interbred, but for the most part they left each other alone, each preferring very different environments.

nationalgeographic.com/history

3/12

In response to this claim, let’s take a look back to the spread of agriculture into Europe starting about 9,000 years ago. Most of Western Europe was, at that time, populated by a community that geneticists have creatively dubbed “Western Hunter Gatherers.” These people—dark skinned and light-eyed—hunted and fished and foraged, preferring woodlands and the edges of wetlands and bodies of water.

28 July at 13:20 | Open on kolektiva.social
HeavenlyPossum

At the Blätterhöhle cave in what is now Germany, researchers found the remains of three different ancient communities.

The first were hunter-gatherers, based on both their genomes and the stable isotopes in their teeth and bones, which revealed a diet of wild game. The second group also belonged to the same genetic population as the first, but ate a diet heavy in freshwater fish. And the third were agriculturalists, descended primarily from those Anatolian farmers but with some hunter-gatherer ancestors as well. This last group ate a diet heavy in domesticated animals.

So three very different communities, with different but overlapping ancestries and very different ways of life, lived side-by-side, sometimes intermarrying, and using the same cave to bury their dead. And, based on radiocarbon dating, they continued to do so for 2,000 years after the arrival of agriculture.

It’s hard to square 2,000 years of co-existence with Diamond’s Just So story about the inexorable and mechanical expansion of farming at the expense of hunter-gatherers.

researchgate.net/publication/2

4/12

At the Blätterhöhle cave in what is now Germany, researchers found the remains of three different ancient communities.

The first were hunter-gatherers, based on both their genomes and the stable isotopes in their teeth and bones, which revealed a diet of wild game. The second group also belonged to the same genetic population as the first, but ate a diet heavy in freshwater fish. And the third were agriculturalists, descended primarily from those Anatolian farmers but with some hunter-gatherer ancestors...

28 July at 13:20 | Open on kolektiva.social
HeavenlyPossum

In Britain, agriculture arrived about 6,000 years ago with those Neolithic farmers. As at Blätterhöhle, they intermarried with the local hunter-gatherers, eventually absorbing that community.

But, several centuries after agriculture arrived, the evidence for farming starts to drop off in the archeological record and doesn’t reappear for almost another thousand years. Chris Stevens and Dorian Fuller argued in the journal Antiquity in 2012 (sorry, no full text link) that “cereal cultivation was abandoned throughout many parts of the British Isles in favour of increased reliance on pastoralism and wild resources during the Middle to Late Neolithic.”

People seem to have abandoned the growing of crops like wheat in favor of gathering wild hazelnuts, the shells of which show up in large quantities at sites throughout this period, and herding domesticated animals. Stevens and Fuller note that this period also coincides with population decline, which they suggest was driven by a worsening climate but which I wonder might not have been a product of the plague (genetic evidence for which shows up all across Europe around this time).

But the authors also note that this is the period during which monumental stone architecture, like Stonehenge, was constructed. So clearly the people of Britain were still able to coordinate and mobilize for massively complex undertakings, even if they had abandoned agriculture for a long while. It’s hard to square a thousand-year abandonment of agriculture by a sophisticated and energetic society with a teleological story about agriculture’s inevitable advance and structural advantages over foraging.

cambridge.org/core/journals/an

5/12

In Britain, agriculture arrived about 6,000 years ago with those Neolithic farmers. As at Blätterhöhle, they intermarried with the local hunter-gatherers, eventually absorbing that community.

But, several centuries after agriculture arrived, the evidence for farming starts to drop off in the archeological record and doesn’t reappear for almost another thousand years. Chris Stevens and Dorian Fuller argued in the journal Antiquity in 2012 (sorry, no full text link) that “cereal cultivation was abandoned...

28 July at 13:20 | Open on kolektiva.social
HeavenlyPossum

Stevens and Fuller note a host of other examples in which societies abandoned agriculture but still mobilized labor and resources for monumental projects:

“…the shift away from settled agriculture towards mobile pastoralism, characterising much of peninsular India from the end of the Chalcolithic (1200–900 BC)…”

“In the Gansu region of north-west China, the Dadiwan Neolithic pursued low-level millet cultivation for five centuries or more during the sixth millennium BC, before apparently fading away, with a hiatus of more than five centuries prior to the influx of more permanent millet-pig agriculture associated with the immigrant Yangshao tradition.”

“A further case is seen in the shift from sedentary agriculturalists to nomadic-pastoralism in Late Bronze Age Mongolia, associated both with the appearance of stone monuments and possible climatic change.”

In other words, this was a phenomenon that happened not just in Britain but all over the world. People sometimes adopted agriculture, and then their descendants abandoned it, only for their descendants to pick it back up again. Some farmers lived alongside foragers for *thousands of years* without swamping the foragers.

6/12

Stevens and Fuller note a host of other examples in which societies abandoned agriculture but still mobilized labor and resources for monumental projects:

“…the shift away from settled agriculture towards mobile pastoralism, characterising much of peninsular India from the end of the Chalcolithic (1200–900 BC)…”

28 July at 13:20 | Open on kolektiva.social
HeavenlyPossum

Something ELSE really interesting happened in Britain after the abandonment of farming. About 4,500 years ago, a new community began migrating into ancient Britain, bringing with them the Bell Beaker Phenomenon.

The Bell Beaker Phenomenon was a sort of archeological package—distinct artifacts, like the bell-shaped cups that give this phenomenon its name, as well as new burial practices. Stevens and Fuller also note that the time period of their arrival also coincides with the re-emergence of agriculture in Britain.

Archeologists debated for years as to whether this represented a population movement from continental Europe or merely the adoption of a new material culture by Britain’s Neolithic population. We now know from genetic studies that there was indeed a migration into Britain, and that it resulted in a near-total population turnover—some 90% of the subsequent ancestry in Britain derived from these Bronze Age newcomers, rather than the indigenous Neolithic community.

cambridge.org/core/journals/ca

7/12

Something ELSE really interesting happened in Britain after the abandonment of farming. About 4,500 years ago, a new community began migrating into ancient Britain, bringing with them the Bell Beaker Phenomenon.

The Bell Beaker Phenomenon was a sort of archeological package—distinct artifacts, like the bell-shaped cups that give this phenomenon its name, as well as new burial practices. Stevens and Fuller also note that the time period of their arrival also coincides with the re-emergence of agriculture in Britain.

28 July at 13:20 | Open on kolektiva.social
HeavenlyPossum

Ah-ha! Perhaps here is our evidence for Diamond’s thesis! Newcomers (re)introducing agriculture and overwhelming the non-farmers with their vastly and implacably larger numbers.

Except that, strangely, there’s no evidence for a violent take-over. No mass graves, no battle sites. The skeletal remains found during this period show no increase in injuries that would indicate interpersonal violence. The newcomers intermarried with the indigenous population. The newcomers began using and maintaining the same sacred sites as the indigenous community, including Stonehenge.

Whatever happened during this period, it seems like it was a lot more complicated than Diamond’s conquest story.

cambridge.org/core/journals/an

8/12

Ah-ha! Perhaps here is our evidence for Diamond’s thesis! Newcomers (re)introducing agriculture and overwhelming the non-farmers with their vastly and implacably larger numbers.

Except that, strangely, there’s no evidence for a violent take-over. No mass graves, no battle sites. The skeletal remains found during this period show no increase in injuries that would indicate interpersonal violence. The newcomers intermarried with the indigenous population. The newcomers began using and maintaining the...

28 July at 13:20 | Open on kolektiva.social
HeavenlyPossum

These historical and archeological examples point to a much more flexible, dynamic process than Diamond claimed. There was no one-way process of expansion and conquest. They were not trapped; they did not inevitably conflict with each other because of structural imperatives. People could and did make choices.

So why do we live in a world now in which virtually everyone is fed by agriculture, descended from a global society in which virtually everyone was a farmer?

If we reject Diamond’s teleological argument—that this world of ours was *inevitable*—then I would point a theme from the works of recently-deceased James Scott as a tentative alternative: the state’s obsession with order, predictability, and legibility.

From the earliest states to the present, states have tried to settle foragers and convert them to agriculturalists. Foragers tend to move around, resist authority, and create diverse surpluses. They are, in short, hard to rule, hard to count, hard to conscript, and hard to tax.

But farmers are the opposite: they tend to stay in one spot, close to their crops. They can be associated with fixed locations and discrete units of territory. And they tend to produce—or can be coerced into—regular and uniform surpluses.

theanarchistlibrary.org/librar

9/12

These historical and archeological examples point to a much more flexible, dynamic process than Diamond claimed. There was no one-way process of expansion and conquest. They were not trapped; they did not inevitably conflict with each other because of structural imperatives. People could and did make choices.

28 July at 13:20 | Open on kolektiva.social
HeavenlyPossum

In particular, Scott blamed cereal grain agriculture for the rise of states, because cereal grains are uniquely suited for taxation: “visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and 'rationable.'”

“The fact that cereal grains grow above ground and ripen at roughly the same time makes the job of any would-be taxman that much easier. If the army or the tax officials arrive at the right time, they can cut, thresh, and confiscate the entire harvest in one operation. For a hostile army, cereal grains make a scorched-earth policy that much simpler; they can burn the harvest-ready grain fields and reduce the cultivators to flight or starvation. Better yet, a tax collector or enemy can simply wait until the crop has been threshed and stored and confiscate the entire contents of the granary…”

“The 'aboveground' simultaneous ripening of cereal grains has the inestimable advantage of being legible and assessable by the state tax collectors. These characteristics are what make wheat, barley, rice, millet, and maize the premier political crops. A tax assessor typically classifies fields in terms of soil quality and, knowing the average yield of a particular grain from such soil, is able to estimate a tax. If a year-to-year adjustment is required, fields can be surveyed and crop cuttings taken from a representative patch just before harvest to arrive at an estimated yield for that particular crop year. As we shall see, state officials tried to raise crop yields and taxes in kind by mandating techniques of cultivation…The point is that with cereal grains and soil preparation, the planting, the condition of the crop, and the ultimate yield were more visible and assessable.”

Not only are the products of cereal agriculture suited for taxation, but the farming itself is too. A farmer who works the same plot year year has a fixed “address.” The state knows where they live, what their name is, how much their land should produce each year, and how much it can extract as taxes.

10/12

In particular, Scott blamed cereal grain agriculture for the rise of states, because cereal grains are uniquely suited for taxation: “visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and 'rationable.'”

“The fact that cereal grains grow above ground and ripen at roughly the same time makes the job of any would-be taxman that much easier. If the army or the tax officials arrive at the right time, they can cut, thresh, and confiscate the entire harvest in one operation. For a hostile army, cereal...

28 July at 13:20 | Open on kolektiva.social
HeavenlyPossum

So I would conclude by proposing this: that the spread and ultimate dominance of agriculture was not some function of agriculture itself, but rather of intentional state violence. Coercing people into being settled, taxable, conscriptable, and *controllable* farmers would also have produced the added benefit of creating a population entirely dependent on a single, easily controlled food supply, rendering us even more docile.

This would explain the transition from agriculture as a flexible option that people sometimes adopted, abandoned, or lived alongside without transforming themselves, into what we live with today—industrial agriculture as the sole source of food for the vast majority of people alive.

This is just a hunch, but one that feels intuitively true. From the Assyrian and Incan Empires to the indigenous reserves of the modern US and Australia, states have always and everywhere been obsessed with settling nomads and transforming foragers into farmers.

11/

So I would conclude by proposing this: that the spread and ultimate dominance of agriculture was not some function of agriculture itself, but rather of intentional state violence. Coercing people into being settled, taxable, conscriptable, and *controllable* farmers would also have produced the added benefit of creating a population entirely dependent on a single, easily controlled food supply, rendering us even more docile.
28 July at 13:20 | Open on kolektiva.social
HeavenlyPossum replied to HeavenlyPossum

If you’ve made it this far and enjoyed this thread, please consider supporting my writing by buying me a coffee at the link below.

This is if and only if you are in a comfortable position to spend any unnecessary money and you don’t have mutual aid requests you were thinking about funding.

(Yes, I realize this thread would probably be easier to read as a long form essay. I’m planning to replace my now-defunct laptop but, until then, all of these will be here on Fedi and typed out with my awkward thumbs.)

buymeacoffee.com/heavenlypossu

12/12

If you’ve made it this far and enjoyed this thread, please consider supporting my writing by buying me a coffee at the link below.

This is if and only if you are in a comfortable position to spend any unnecessary money and you don’t have mutual aid requests you were thinking about funding.

(Yes, I realize this thread would probably be easier to read as a long form essay. I’m planning to replace my now-defunct laptop but, until then, all of these will be here on Fedi and typed out with my awkward thumbs.)

28 July at 13:20 | Open on kolektiva.social
Joe Dohm (he/him) replied to HeavenlyPossum

@HeavenlyPossum OK, but haven't you just shifted the Darwinian argument to States vs non-states?
Also, the argument that there were natural forces that drove us to this current situation, and therefore this is "good" is obviously idiotic.

28 July at 14:30 | Open on a2mi.social
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