Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [99]
What If There Had Been No Agricultural Revolution?
Let’s now jump back into our own time line where Neanderthals went extinct and we flourished. Between 35,000 and 13,000 years BP, tool kits became much more complex and varied, clothing covered near-naked bodies, sophisticated representational art adorned caves, bones and wood formed the structure of living abodes, language produced symbolic communication, and anatomically modern humans began to wrap themselves in a blanket of crude but effective technology. They spread to nearly every region of the globe and all lived in a condition of hunting, fishing, and gathering (HFG). Some were nomadic, while others stayed in one place. Small bands grew into larger tribes, and with this shift possessions became valuable, rules of conduct grew more complex, and population numbers crept steadily upward. Then, at the end of the last Ice Age, roughly 13,000 years ago, population pressures in numerous places around the globe grew too intense for the HFG lifestyle to support. The result was the Neolithic Revolution, where the domestication of grains and large mammals produced the necessary calories to support the larger populations.33
Figure 10.3. What if Homo sapiens had gone extinct and Neanderthals had survived? That counterfactual may hinge on a very specific question: What if Homo sapiens had never developed symbolic language? Without that there would have been no advance of complex tools, no art and music, no science and technology, no sophisticated culture, no towns and cities, no socially global dominant species.
But, counterfactually, what if those grains and mammals had not been available for exploitation? What if, by some quirk of biological evolution, of the tens of millions of species then living just fourteen mammals and a couple hundred plants had been erased from the biological record? What if we replayed the time line without those species critical for agriculture? What would our world look like today?
Such counterfactual questions, in fact, have been asked by Jared Diamond in his remarkable book Guns, Germs, and Steel, in which he explains the differential rates of development between civilizations around the globe over the past thirteen thousand years.34 Why, Diamond asks, did Europeans colonize the Americas and Australia, rather than Native Americans and Australian Aborigines colonize Europe? Diamond rejects the theory that inherited differences in abilities between the races precluded some groups from developing as fast as others. Instead he proposes a biogeographical theory having to do with the availability of domesticated grains and animals to trigger the development of farming, metallurgy, writing, non-food-producing specialists, large populations, military and government bureaucracies, and other components that gave rise to Western cultures. Without these plants and animals, and a concatenation of other factors, none of these characteristics of our culture could exist. (See figure 10.4.)
How do we test this counterfactual argument? Through the comparative method. Compare, for example, Australia and Europe. Australian Aborigines could not strap a plow to or mount the back of a kangaroo, as Europeans did the ox and horse. Indigenous wild grains that could be domesticated were few in number and located only in certain regions of the globe—those regions that saw the rise of the first civilizations. The East-West-oriented axis of the Eurasian continent lent itself to diffusion of domesticated grains and animals as well as knowledge and ideas, so Europe was able to benefit much earlier from the domestication process.35 By comparison, the North-South-oriented axis of the Americas, Africa, and the Asia-Malaysia-Australia corridor did not lend itself to such fluid transportation, and thus those