Why do we farm?

(the conclusion of the farming series, http://shkrobius.livejournal.com/tag/farming)

Social Darwinism may explain the critical advantage of farming vs. hunting/gathering (by means of increasing one’s fitness through the ability to shorten inter-birth intervals) but, of course, people did not begin farming for this arcane reason. This line of thought shows why farming is preordained by human nature, it does not explain in what sense it was ordained to appear only when and where it appeared.

Most of the theories for the origin of agriculture are absurdly materialistic; some overriding, visible gain is postulated as if this gain (that is obvious only retrospectively) was transparent to the early farmers. That’s because the perspective is twisted. The modern age urbanites do not make the choice (imposed on the farmers during the periodic crop failures) between the lives of their own children and keeping the seed for the next season’s planting. Only people who made such choices know what subsistence farming really was. Evolutionary ideas (like Blurton-Jones’ feedback or Rindos’ coevolution hypothesis) do not aspire to explain how could anyone make the choice in favor of plants over one’s own dying children. The unbreakable bond to the land comes first; farming comes second. Farming is simply the way of staying on YOUR land. There is something one cannot walk away from, no matter the cost – except for the unimaginable duress.

We still have this bond to our ancestral lands, we still have this notion that these lands may be worth dying for regardless of the possible material gain to ourselves and our children. This bond is getting weaker, but it is still there. This is not a matter of economics, it is a matter of belief. Farming is the consequence of developing beliefs that completely change the relation between a man and the land. It is the material end of religion. The Neolithic Revolution was less a revolution in the material culture than the spiritual domain. The first farmers were the elect rather than selected.

This is the view of evolutionary biologist and etnobotanist Charles Heiser, who came to it after almost 50 years of disappointment with our mumbo-jumbo “scientific” theories (like the dump-heap hypothesis postulating that agriculture started near the dung and garbage heaps). Similar ideas were developed bu Jacques Cauvin, the archaeologist who for many decades excavated preagricultural Late Natufian sites in Syria. They both started with the purely materialistic view of plant domestication. They both rejected this view in the end. It is pointless to look for ecological, biological, and material. It might explain how and where. It does not begin to explain why.

Heiser was one of the co-discoverers of EN American “weed agriculture.” The Hopewellian tradition of large settlements based on this agriculture is characterized by gigantic earth mounds with unknown ceremonial function:

…at the typesite of Hopewell, a mound complex near Chillicothe, Ohio, 38 mounds lie within a rectangular enclosure covering 110 acres. Many other mound groups are equally as impressive. At Seip Mound State Memorial, Bainbridge, Ohio, at least thirty is 30 mounds once stood, both within and near a large geometric earthwork. The great central mound is 250 ft. long, 150 ft wide, and 30 ft. high. The average size of Ohio mounds is about 30 feet high and some 100 feet across, with a volume of about one-half million cubic feet, which translates into about 200,000 person-hours of earthmoving using the simplest of equipment including stone-bladed tools and baskets. http://www.cabrillo.edu/~crsmith/hopewell.html

In Collinsville, IL (near St Louis), there is huge Cahokia mound; the Mississippian culture is all about such platform mounds built on the flatlands, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_mound
These mounds are thought to represent the cosmological beliefs; the large mounds are surrounded by burial mounds housing the dead. I’ve seen these mounds myself. The size of the structures is astonishing, but it is not even close to the Caral pyramids in Norte Chico complex, the oldest center of susbsistence farming in South America. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norte_Chico_civilization
These pyramids are even larger than the ones built in Egypt. You do not built such structures to walk away from what you built. Conversely, there is no way of building such structures other than settled life on the surrounding plains. YOUR land is the land where you have your dead buried; where generation after generation patiently and through great sacrifice built something that they believe in, something which is greater than any immediate concern of the living. You can walk away from your empty granary, but you cannot walk away from who you are.

What kind of belief underlies this bond to one’s land? I do not think the particulars matter as long as this bond is established. Heiser believes that in the Fertile Crescent the belief was in the Mother Earth, as her figurines suddenly appear everywhere right at the end of the late Paleolithic. How the Mother Earth was worshipped no one knows, but this belief juxtaposes fertility of the land and a woman. Sowing seed into the land is a sexual rite involving this deity. Agriculture began as this rite, or a food offering, or a burial practice, and in all probability it involved the priests – the very first priests and the very first agriculturalists.

These agriculturalists were not inventive. Their specialized tools: the sickle, the grinders and pounders, even their hoes have all been found in the Late Natufian sites; these tools have already been employed by the gatherers. There is no demarkation line of material nature. Sedentism is also known to happen thousands of years before the Neolithic. What is not seen is the advanced symbolic thinking:

…For Cauvin, the ‘revolution in symbols’ is a key to the collective psychology of the first farmers. In particular the female figurines show a goddess, the universal mother, while the bull signifies a brute force that is tamed and converted into the virile essence of the male. He sees both as divine, thus representing the moment in human history when – through the invention of the gods – a chasm was formed between gods and humanity. This first realisation of the limitations of human existence prompted the desire in the earliest farmers to change their state through progress. The farmers have developed alienated sense of self necessary for agriculture. Humans began to see themselves as agents separate from nature, who could plan, control and transform the plants and animals around them for their own purpose. This was the beginning of the “domination and exploitation of the environment,” the very foundations of our culture and mentality.

Cauvin’s disciple, Trevor Watkins puts it more explicitly (Cauvin is prone to vagueness)

…at a certain stage in the evolution of the modern human mind, it became possible for people to formulate and articulate a ‘world-view’ in which people could situate themselves in relation to each other, to their place in the world, and imagine a universe that extends beyond the world of the physical senses, including supernatural beings. That stage was reached in south-west Asia at the beginning of the neolithic period, about 12,000 years ago1. Only then, people developed the ability to think in terms of abstract concepts, and to relate those concepts to one another into a systematic universe. They could communicate them in language, ritual, symbolic actions, but also in the creation of physical symbols. This was the birth of the modern human mind in terms of its ability to create, communicate and share a rich symbolic culture, present both in the minds of individuals, and signified symbolically in material things. In the new social circumstances of the beginning of the neolithic, such a ‘world-view’, involving religious ideas, an ideology, a cosmology and some infectious physical symbolic representations developed rapidly and spread contagiously.

…at the beginning of the neolithic, there seems to be an explosion of symbolic activity and the use of symbols. People needed to relate to quite large numbers of other people, among whom they lived all the time, for the whole of their lives. The size of the early permanent village settlements suggests population levels that were at or beyond the ‘natural’ limit of the human mind to manage. Bear in mind that as the group size doubles, the number of social relationships amongst all those people increases by the square. Sedentary societies recognise concepts of private and public space, and differentiate the spaces in their settlements according to those principles. Whether in terms of the need to cope with exponentially increasing permutations of social relationships, or in discriminating between private and public space within the settlement, or differentiating the (artificial) settlement from the surrounding natural world, or distinguishing the immediate territory which was extensively exploited and ‘owned’ from the wider environment, people at the end of the epi-palaeolithic and the beginning of the neolithic were living in a different environment from their hunter-gatherer predecessors, and environment that emphasised the difference between the near / the artificial / the controlled and the further away / the natural / the uncontrolled.

…Just as they began to systematise their physical and human environment, the buildings, the settlement, the groups within the community, their territory, their relations with neighbouring communities and the wider world, so perhaps they also began to use their relatively novel abilities to signify ideas and concepts in terms of physical symbols. Previously they had employed vague and rather unspecific ideas about a spirit-world, the kind of animistic world that palaeolithic specialists are now attributing to upper palaeolithic people in south-west France. In the epi-palaeolithic and earliest neolithic societies of southwest Asia, it was useful to formulate things much more clearly, and to use the oppositions that were part of everyday life as the basis for further, symbolic oppositions, oppositions between our temporal world and a supernatural world, between us everyday humans and supernatural beings, oppositions between the events and processes of our everyday world and the properties of the supernatural world.

…For some tens of thousands of years, they had possessed modern-type languages, among whose characteristics were immensely complex and strictly formalised relations between many levels of symbolic reference. And at the beginning of the neolithic they found the way to systematise their non-language powers of symbolic reference. What made these ideas powerful, easy to remember and easy to transmit was people’s ability to signify abstract and even supernatural concepts in terms of physical symbols. They turned the building of houses into symbolic architecture. They structured the layout of their settlements to signify ideas about how life should be lived within their village communities. They treated the bodies, and particularly the heads, of their dead in ways that symbolised relationships between the world of the living and those who had gone.

…Finally and most importantly, they symbolised their ideas about the supernatural world and its population in terms of physical embodiments of supernatural beings and forces. The anthropologist Pascal Boyer has discussed the universals of human religious experience, and our willingness to anthropomorphize and symbolise supernatural beings. Perhaps this capacity began to develop in the minds of H. sapiens in the upper palaeolithic, but it arguably achieved new levels of power for expression at the beginning of the neolithic. The great advantage of all this symbolic reference through physical artefacts was that, unlike speech, dance or ritual enactment, which is transient, the physical symbolism with which they surrounded themselves was always there, always reminding them, teaching their children. They had learned what the psychologist Merlin Donald has called ‘external symbolic storage’, a mode of telecommunication. Above all, these ideas about their world were systematic, categorical, discriminating, ordered. Such a systematic and symbolically rich world-view was
ideal for providing the cultural underpinning that could be shared by all those in the community. They, like us, understood and expressed something of their humanity.

Click to access humanity_paper.pdf

I have started this series with the observation that the descendants of the first farmers have higher IQ than the others. This is why. It has little to do with farming, it has everything to do with this revolution in reasoning and expression. Farming was the consequence of this change rather than its cause. The level of abstract thinking necessary for such developments as agriculture was originally achieved in a small number of people that paid the highest price for this discovery. They did bite from the fruit from the tree of knowledge; once you do that, there is no way back. You can return to hunting and gathering, but you cannot return to the thinking of paleolithic hunters and gatherers.

Farming is a symbolic union of a man and the land that he fertilizes, first with the seed of the fruits of the earth and then with his own dead body. This union is the meaning of farmer’s life and the meaning of his children’s lives. This is why a farmer watches his children to die of hunger and then sows the saved seed into the soil; because such is the order of things. Before you farm, you first need to put things in that order.

Why do we farm?

PS: CB Heiser, “On plants and people” Ch. XIII
J Cauvin “The birth of the Gods and the origin of agriculture”