When academics describe the development of any technology, they tend to portray it as some “lightbulb” moment, whereby Mr Ug suddenly has a brainwave and thinks: “if I planted this thing I could farm it”.
But farming wasn’t some great innovation, instead, it was a skill developed when we were still hunter gatherers able to wonder around the “garden of Eden”, which later became a necessity as population levels rose so that it was no longer possible to rely on unprotected widely distributed food resources and we were forced to settle down and work the soil.
Developmental Pathways
As I said above, the prevailing concept in describing the development of technology is one of “breakthrough”, or what I term “spontaneous development”. It is the idea, that ideas come from no-where. They development because of one individual, at one time with one “great idea”. And it is remarkable convenient for academics – because if technology “spontaneous develops” – there is no need to explain how or why except to invoke some random chance.
Thus to use a simple example: “fire” is seen as having developed once and only once and the academics espousing this philosophy imagine that if only we had a time machine, we could go to a single time, place and person and locate the “discovery of fire”.
In reality, having watched people create fire in a workshop as they drilled too vigorously into wood – the likely reaction of anyone who produced fire would have been to jump back in fear as the stinging hot flame came to life. Indeed, more than likely the first human to create fire didn’t even know, but (like many other species) merely by chance dislodged a stone which hit another and caused a spark that set the dry vegetation on fire – and the human (like every other chance creation of fire) was none the wiser.
Thus a much safer bet for the “first creation of fire” – was that it came about be accident. And almost certainly, rather than standing back in awe, this “first” fire was seen as an accident. So likely it engendered the same feelings as a chip-pan fire does today: panic, desperate attempts to “deal with it” – sometimes making it worse (like throwing water on a flaming chip-pan) and afterwards extremely cross words by all concerned with an agreement: “to make sure that never happens again”. So, rather than some great awe inspiring moment, fire would initially have been either ignored or seen as a great threat.
Thus humans may have created fire hundreds, thousands, even given the slow change of technology and if it were by regular activity, we may have made fire millions of times before anyone did anything other than try to put it out.
“Spontaneous development”
The “spontaneous development” concept of technology development relies on one idiosyncratic individual who by chance is the “spark” of development. In other words your quintessential eccentric academic! It is therefore, portraying world history as being filled by “people like us” and also extremely unlikely that before historical records that we will have evidence for this event. Thus it is extremely convenient: because it requires no evidence, no scrutiny and cannot ever be proved wrong. In short, completely unscientific.
Developmental pathway
A developmental pathway, on the other hand, says that technology develops not once, but numerous times, that it does so as a consequence of the previous state of technology, and that the development is taken up, not by some “bright spark”, but because it provides direct and immediate benefits, not once to someone who has a “bright idea” – but to many. So, the new state of technology is available, many times, to many people, with obvious advantages that even a complete luddite would recognise and eventually by shear repeated exposure to the new technology, tend to pick up and use.
A developmental pathway does not seemingly come out of no-where, instead it is like a river flowing downhill to the sea, and like a river it creates its own channel thereby forcing the water to use this channel. It is not some vague idea that is “taken up”, instead it is something that can easily be resisted. It is economically beneficial, many are repeatedly exposed to it, and (with the skill set necessary for the preceding state of technology) it does not take a lot of intelligence to obtain benefits.
Thus because it requires economic benefit, because the beneficial change must be obvious or forced, the concept of developmental pathways can be scientifically tests.
However, whilst a developmental pathway is a sequence of technological states which would naturally flow from one to the other due to economic pressures for “improvement” and thus even a Luddite society would eventually be propelled along the course, this does not mean occasionally some bright spark could not have jumped a “meander” in the path – or even have jumped into a completely new pathway. So a developmental pathway does not exclude the possibility of “spontaneous development” – but as an explanation they are untestable, and as such concept should be invoked only as a last desperate measure.
Development of Farming
Like the development of fire, the development of farming has long fascinated archaeologists, but due to the prevailing “spontaneous development” philosophy in UK and US Universities, the prevailing ideas revolve around some bright spark, at some point in time, suddenly realising that growing crops was a “good idea”. However, that fails to explain how humans managed to selectively grow certain food species: to have intervened over a great period of time so as to have created what is effectively a new species.
Because anyone who has ever looked at the wild ancestors of human food species cannot help but notice they aren’t worth farming. Grass seeds are extremely fiddly & hard to collect. Wild plants tend to have small & tough tubers. But most importantly: why waste time growing plants – when they grow for free? Why farm when you can just dig up plants that grew naturally?
So, how can we explain the huge labour that must have gone into nurturing & selectively breeding food crops before they were worth farming?
The answer is that humans cannot have suddenly changed from being hunter gatherers to being farmers.
Instead, we started by gathering (like Chimpanzees and similarly closely related species) – and simply through that process tended to help certain plants (by trampling down others and spreading the seed through faeces – e.g. blackberries). For some reason (possibly chance genetic mutation and change of behaviour), that morphed into more habitual “clearing” of unwanted species, which would eventually, for example in Britain, have produced acres of hazelnut trees.
These managed areas would not initially have been farming in the sense of “nurturing” desired species, but instead it was more the inverse: humans would cut down for fire-wood and for timber the less desirable species – which over time would leave only the desirable species. And our debris – ash from the fire, remains of other foods and faeces – would all have helped plants close to our habitual campsites.
Eventually this simple behaviour would have developed into simple “farming” – but only initially in the sense of intentionally transplanting species from one area to another to create a new area of “managed wilderness” or to help grow the size of present areas. But again this would initially have happened by chance as we took food plants with us to eat – except that when we found better foods we’d dump the old tubers, or parts of tubers or seeds perhaps leaving them lying on piles of other rubbish to grow/germinate. Habitually visiting the same prime areas, over time, our ancestors would see how randomly dropped plants would start grow (even during our stay) and by the time we returned, have turned into productive areas growing around our “rubbish piles”. As in “look at that patch of xxxxs…. where Granny dropped the basket last year”.
Not so much a chance event – that someone once dropped a seed. Instead, that we habitually took plants with us, and couldn’t help but notice that they regrew.
Wild Yams are still grown in some parts of the world using a form of “managed wilderness”. Competing plants are merely cut down and yam sticks are push into the ground where they grow just as they would in the wild being left entirely alone until the group comes back to the area. Thus it counts to keep these areas secret!
This low intervention approach, would gradually morph our environment into a “managed wilderness”: increasing numbers and areas of highly beneficial plants that would sustain (or perhaps more accurate “flourish”) wondering groups of humans throughout the year. This is likely the reason humans began to inhabit northern Europe – our behaviour naturally created managed landscapes of beneficial plants, thus turning inhospitable landscapes into ones beneficial to us. (This is why modern humans cannot hope to survive in the “wilderness” like our “ancestors” – because the ancient “wilderness” was in fact a “managed wilderness” – and because any productive areas of wilderness were long ago turned over to farming)
But as human populations grew, it would become more and more necessary to protect these managed areas against other groups. This period of development of embryonic “farming” was probably one of intense inter-group rivalry where the growing population meant that several groups would descend on a patch of anciently “managed wilderness”. And the biggest/fiercest group (or perhaps just the first) would get the resources so that the rest had travelled many miles for nothing. It was likely increasing population that meant that we could no longer rely on wondering around the landscape from one”randomly” placed area of beneficial plants to another.
Thus increasingly population, meant increasing chances of “managed” areas being harvested by other groups. This forced humans to become more geographically nucleated concentrating more and more on plants that could be nurtured in smaller areas closer to our home locality where these increasingly valuable resources could be defended against other groups.
And as populations grew, the home areas reduced in size, that in turn, meant more and more concentration on plants that could be grown in smaller denser patches.
But that created a vicious cycle pushing us toward farming. Because paradoxically, even though the home territories got smaller – the resulting intensification of land use meant that (some) groups flourished as they focussed on more and more intense management leading to “farming” of crops. Which because it was so successful, then further increased populations of these farming groups – which then increased competition for land made more and more intensive farming/management of food crops – which eventually meant that it was no longer possible to be a hunter gatherer in these farming areas.
So farming wasn’t some great innovation, instead, it was a skill developed when we were still hunter gatherers able to wonder around the “garden of Eden”, which later became a necessity as population levels rose so that it was no longer possible to rely on unprotected widely distributed food resources and we were forced to settle down and work the soil.
Just read ‘Sapiens’ a Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. In the part about development of agriculture this ‘managed wilderness’ idea would explain the process which I think he skips somewhat.
This book is an astonishingly good read however.
Stephanie, thanks. For years, I’ve been interested in gathering wild food in Britain but whilst I read wildly on the subject I could never find enough wild food to survive even in Autumn – let alone over winter. So was wildly keen to see the program “10,000BC” and see what people actually could find to live on. My expectation, was that with dedication they’d find those mysterious plants I had heard about that humans could live on which I had never been able to find.
But instead of finding out what people could eat, all I saw was a few fruit bushes that looked suspiciously like they had been part of an old house and otherwise they literally starved. They STARVED in the Autumn – when fruit should have been plenty, and this would a group in good health and without children.
But this is in sharp contrast to the evidence from the Neolithic that shows our ancestors in Britain eating huge quantities of Hazelnuts. So, somehow the landscape inhabited by our ancestors was very different from that in 10,000BC. In other words, there must have been far more fruits and berries and various root plants than today. That can only be partly explained by the take-over of land for farming – because in the past much of that farming land would be dense forest.
They’ve described something similar to your theory for the distribution of fruiting trees in the South American rain forest. As you say, the early accidental planting would have been on middens. Areas only capable of supporting nomadic communities became rich enough to feed people for longer. They may have started planting things closer to regularly used camps, just to shorten the distance between food sources or to avoid conflict with another group of people. Much of mankind’s invention has been to make life easier. More food crops also attracted more animals which in turn became regular food.
Early UK inhabitants were mostly nomadic, moving from coast to inland at different seasons. Meat, eggs and fish were fairly plentiful. It might be interesting to find out how early they farmed pigeons for their eggs as they will lay for most of the year and possible did when it was warmer (Holocene Optimum).
Our relationship with fire would have started by hunting for carrion after a natural fire and noticing how it cleared the land without much effort. We probably used it for that before we used it for heat or deliberate cooking. Smoked food might have also been an attraction.
Mankind has often learnt quite quickly from each other so while the discoveries might have been sporadic, once people saw something good they went about copying. At the same time we often took steps backward. It’s amazing how we lost so many skills once the Romans left and had to rediscover them in later years. Almost 12 months ago I was watching a program about American tribes who remained relatively unsophisticated because their land was so fruitful. They almost didn’t need to try. Being the BBC they tried to make out that their lives were nobler because they didn’t evolve farming but it was simply because they didn’t need to.
It has been demonstrated that other animals, such as elephants, selectively grow plants that suit them and modify their environment. Perhaps there was once a genius elephant who persuaded all his pals to push over the trees.
I think the last comment is most relevant – basically people are lazy and we tend to avoid doing anything that makes more work. And the problem with a lot of technological innovation from fire to smelting, is that it involves a lot of work for no obvious benefit (at least until you’ve managed to make a fire, or smelt metal).
So the whole principle of a developmental pathway, is to work out a series of steps whereby even a lazy person (i.e. most of us) would have chosen to change the way they do things so that little by little they go down the developmental pathway until the technology has changed enough to be called an “invention”.
So, for fire, we need an initial means of creating a fire. Most likely I think this was someone trying to drill a bit of wood for some other purpose. If this were done enough by the same person, in a place with dry scraps of burnable material – they would regularly create fire.
However, it’s then difficult to conceive why anyone would do anything but try to put out the fire. It’s possible to come up with all kinds of possible scenarios to explain why humans nourished the first fires, but why dream up ideas when it’s possible to carry out an experiment – by finding a group of chimpanzees and giving them 24/7 access to a source of fire and monitor what they do with it and how they behave.
My whole theory of: How “killer” rabbits on grass annihilated the dinosaurs is based on exactly this concept of preferentially gardening certain species. In this one, it is that environments like grass and animals LIKE rabbits, competed against environments consisting of ferns and peg-teethed dinosaurs. And thus the reason dinosaurs died out, was because “rabbits” can eat both grass and ferns – but only the grass would survive, but dinosaurs could only eat ferns.