Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

Another thinky post. This one has been brewing for a while. Unless otherwise indicated, links are open access/not paywalled. (ETA: see comments for some interesting things/extra thoughts that didn't fit in this monster of a post)

I started googling articles about the origins of cities and agriculture due to my disaffection with the opening parts of Karen Armstrong's "Fields of Blood," where she assumes that military violence and structural inequality are necessary ingredients to creating a civilization, and links "civilization" (ie, inequality and warfare) to the invention of agriculture. That didn't sit well with my memory of Catal Huyuk, one of the earliest known cities, 6,000-ish people living in a town on the south coast of Turkey about 9000 years ago. Catal Huyuk had no city wall or other signs of military defences. It also had no temples or palaces, with minimal signs of social inequality. Just a community of thousands of people living in peace, trading obsidian tools for luxury goods from distant communities.

And then more recently I read an article about Gobekli Tepe, the oldest megalithic site yet found. It's a large worship complex in Turkey near the border with Syria that was built starting 11,500 years ago, by people who did not yet have domesticated plants or animals. And that turns the conventional model of the history of cities on its head.

The traditional model of prehistory, which Armstrong hews to, holds that hunter gatherers had extremely low population densities, with bands of 40-ish people occupying a large home range. In places like the fertile crescent, wild precursors to crops provided them with enough food that they could settle down and begin the process of inventing agriculture. That process is supposed to have begun around the end of the ice age, when human-influenced mass extinction of megafauna made big game hunting no longer a viable survival strategy, and when the climate became warmer, wetter, more stable, and generally congenial to the invention of gardening. Farming started out in small communities, and only over time as the total food surplus increased and trade fostered more specialized crafts did hamlets become villages, towns, and cities. But Gobekli Tepe was a fair sized community of (technically) hunter-gatherers existing before plant or animal domestication.

Which made me go pull Jane Jacobs' Economy of Cities off the shelf. Jacobs's book is a pro-urbanist argument that cities are central and primary to the economy of the surrounding lands, contrary to the tendency of urban planners, architects, economists, and other thinkers from the 19th and early 20th century to regard cities as a bad thing, an aberration of capitalist development that should be done away with when creating planned communities. But Jacobs starts the book by arguing that cities existed before agriculture, that it was urban living that created the necessary conditions for the development of agriculture - on the one hand, providing the necessary gathering of minds needed to spur intellectual ferment and technological progress, and on the other, creating a logistical problem of feeding an ever-growing urban population, to which animal husbandry and agriculture were the solutions.

Archaeologists dismissed that part of her book, and urbanists that praise the rest of it tend to glide in embarrassment over the first section. But now we have Gobekli Tepe. A community of hundreds (judging by how much work was required to build the megalithic temples) of settled, non-nomadic people who didn't have domesticated crops or animals.

Exactly how large the community was isn't yet clear - until very recently no houses had been found, and it was thought that people didn't live there full time, but just came together from the surrounding lands to build shrines, worship, and then dispersed to nomadic hunter-gathering again once a shrine was completed. Which makes little sense, of course, but archaeologists are very good at swallowing camels and straining at gnats when those camels and gnats are inconvenient to their preconceived ideas about what early people did and did not do. A few years ago, in the process of constructing a visitor's centre at the site, including a big permanent tent to shelter the excavated megaliths, they finally dug deeply enough to find houses, and the picture changed from a collection of temples in the wilderness to a more sensible one of a town of people who devoted a lot of resources to building worship spaces.

A town, but not really a town of hunter-gatherers, except technically. They didn't have domesticated animals and the bones of animals found in their kitchen waste show they hunted extensively, but Gobekli Tepe is in the middle of the part of the fertile crescent where agriculture was invented, and it flourished in the immediate pre-agricultural era, when people were perfecting their skills at raising and harvesting edible wild plants.

But first we need to backtrack. The myth of "man the hunter" refuses to die. Early people were not hunter gatherers but gatherer hunters - if they are anything at all like modern non-agricultural peoples, meat from hunting was only 20% of their diet. But because bones don't decay like plants, archaeologists see the evidence of hunting first, and evidence of plant gathering second and only if they use microscopes to examine the dirt adhering to stone tools and containers for tiny fragments of seeds. 19th and early 20th century archaeologists washed their finds, which eliminated the clues needed to verify what plants the people who used those tools had been processing. Archaeological techniques have advanced, and an article from 2010 reports that unwashed grinding stones from diverse sites in Europe showed signs that the owners has used them to process grass seeds and cattail roots, as far back as 30,000 years ago. That's deep in the depths of the last ice age.

We also know that ice age humans were harvesting the wild ancestors of modern domesticated crops. At Ohalo II, a cluster of 23,000 year old huts and hearths on the shore of what is now the Sea of Galilee (back then a single body of water encompassing the Dead Sea, Jordan River, and Sea of Galilee called Lake Lisan), stone sickles were found, as well as remains of wild wheat, barley, and other grains (the site burned, then quickly afterward flooded when the level of the sea rose. Charring followed by anaerobic conditions led to excellent preservation of organic material like plant parts. The site was discovered when a drought temporarily lowered the lake level several meters in the late 80's). Furthermore, a genetic analysis of plant parts found in archaeological sites across the Fertile Crescent indicated that humans had started to select against the genes controlling seed dispersal (genes dealing with the shattering of ripe ears of grain) up to 25,000 years ago for emmer wheat and 32,000 years ago for einkorn wheat.

Which throws the entire "agriculture happened when it did because the ice age was over" meme in the trash heap. Contemporaries of the people hunting mammoths were practising agriculture in the wetter fringes of the harsh desert that filled the middle east during the last glacial maximum. During the LGM, roughly between 31,000 and 16,000 years ago, the entire planet was much colder and much dryer than today (check out the vegetation map, and note that "Extreme desert" means less than 2% plant cover - basically like the dry parts of the Sahara desert today).

But, and a big but: that map is rather coarse grained and doesn't allow for rivers or microclimates. The Nile still existed, at a reduced rate of flow, and the upper Nile backed up behind sand dunes to create lakes in the desert where people lived and fished on the shore. The Tigris and Euphrates also still existed. Lower sea levels meant the Persian Gulf was a dry river valley surrounded by harsh desert. While the homes of the people who lived there are now underwater, the sudden appearance of people (paywalled) to either side of the gulf immediately after the sea level rose suggests that humans made their homes in the bottom of the gulf, then were forced to migrate into the less hospitable surrounding deserts when it became flooded. And in Palestine, the shores of Lake Lisan were fertile enough to support humans despite the entire area being "extreme desert" according to the map.

So, agriculture (in the sense of humans planting and harvesting grains like wheat) got its start not in the fertile Holocene after the ice had melted and the planet warmed up, but during the worst, most brutal parts of the last ice age. Forests were a lot sparser and more limited in extent during the ice age, but I don't doubt that where there were forests, humans were creating forest gardens back then as well.

And at this point we're starting to get far enough back in time to tangle with another mental block archaeologists have, and another extremely racist myth that I was peeved to see Karen Armstrong perpetuating: that "cognitively modern humans" got their start much more recently than anatomically modern humans. Something was lacking, the myth says, in Homo Sapiens before 40-50,000 years ago (Armstrong says 20,000, which is even more ridiculous, since we do have widely accepted and extremely well dated examples of "modern" tools, art, etc from well before then), something mental that suddenly changed, "coincidentally" around the time they started spreading out from Africa. Believers in the myth point to the seeming explosion in the diversity of human tools and artefacts around that time. Sceptics patiently dig up examples of "modern" tools from much older sites, and defend their reality as artefacts, their dating, and their interpretation against vehement attack. Eventually, one hopes, the mental block will be discarded for the racist claptrap that it is, the refusal to see early, mostly African humans as qualified to be counted as "human" in the same way as their descendants who left Africa.

This is related to the mental block archaeologists have against admitting that early humans could produce art, such that any obvious examples of art found that date before a certain time frame get ignored, attacked as not actually made by humans, or attacked as not actually as old as proponents think. Which brings me to another book (last one, I promise!), "Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age" in which Richard Rudgley doesn't address the myth of cognitive modernity directly, but attacks it by attacking the refusal to give legitimacy to artefacts and art that are deemed "too old to actually be art/advanced technology."

So, when did agriculture get its start? It's very hard to say, especially since many of the best sites for gardening during the ice age are now under the ocean. But clearly, it wasn't 12,000 years ago, and it wasn't in response to the extinction of megafauna or the moderating of climate as the glaciers melted.

Even if we restrict ourselves to people who had domesticated plants (the last 12,000 years), at least half of the age of agriculture happened before humans invented inequality, wealth hoarding, and empire building, the violence that Armstrong sees as inseparable from civilization. If we include the long period of gardening plants as they gradually became domesticated (and Gobekli Tepe shows that such gardening was productive enough to support towns of at least a few hundred people engaged in major construction projects), then the age of inequality and brutality that Armstrong equates to civilization has been around for only a quarter of the time in which humans had the ability to build towns and have food surpluses.

Inequality isn't inextricable from civilization, it's just one approach that has violently exterminated all the other approaches it came in contact with throughout history.