The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [57]
In the conventional account it was agriculture that made capital possible by generating stored surpluses and stored surpluses could be used in trade. Before farming, nobody could hoard a surplus. There is some truth in this, but to some degree it gets the story the wrong way round. Agriculture was possible because of trade. Trade provided the incentive to specialise in farmed goods and to generate surplus food.
Agriculture started to appear independently in the Near East, the Andes, Mexico, China, the highlands of New Guinea, the Brazilian rainforest and the African Sahel – all within a few thousand years. Something made it inevitable, almost compulsory around this time: however much it eventually resulted in misery, disease and despotism in the long run, it clearly gave its first practitioners competitive advantage. Yet farming was not an overnight transition. It was the culmination of a long, slow intensification of human diet that took tens of thousands of years. In search of extra calories people gradually ‘moved down the trophic pyramid’ – i.e., became more vegetarian. By 23,000 years ago the people of what is now Israel and Syria had become dependent on acorns, pulses and even grass seeds, as well as fish and birds, garnished with the occasional gazelle – perhaps supplied by other hunting tribes through trade. At one remarkable site, Ohalo II, now submerged except in dry years by Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee), direct evidence has emerged of the eating of wild grains long before farming. In the remains of one of six brushwood huts, there is a flat stone apparently used for grinding seeds, and on it, preserved for 23,000 years by lake sediments, are microscopic starch grains from wild barley seeds. Nearby is what appears to be a stone oven for baking. By grinding grain to flour and baking it, the users would have nearly doubled the energy they could get from it.
So bread is far older than farming. It would be an astonishing 12,000 years after Ohalo II before anybody started planting and reaping cereals such as rye, wheat and barley, and 4,000 years after that before modern, genetically hexaploid wheat, with its heavy, free-threshing seeds, was invented – and began its long career as humankind’s biggest and most widespread source of calories. The inescapable conclusion is that the people of the Near East were no fools. They captured the benefits of cereals – milled and baked starch – long before they took on the hard graft of farming them. Why spend months tending your own field of corn, when you can spend hours harvesting a wild one? One study notes an ‘extreme reluctance to shift to domestic foods’.
By 13,000 years ago the people of the Near East, known now as the Natufian culture, were using stone sickle blades to harvest the heads of the grasses, rather than beating the seeds into baskets. They lived in settlements that were sufficiently stable to be plagued by house mice. They were as close to farming as you can get without genetic domestication of crops. Yet, at this moment, on the brink of making history, they regressed. They abandoned their settlements, returned to nomadism and broadened their diet again. The same happened in Egypt about the same time – a retreat from grinding grain to hunting and fishing (except in Egypt’s case it was much longer before the proto-farming experiment resumed). The probable cause of this hiatus was a cold snap, over a thousand years long, known as the ‘Younger Dryas’. The probable cause of the cold snap was the North Atlantic suddenly cooling either from the bursting of a series of vast ice dams on the North American continent, or from the sudden outflow of water from the Arctic ocean. Once the cold snap had begun, not only