The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [58]
Then, around 11,500 years ago the temperature of the Greenland ice cap shot up by ten degrees (centigrade) in half a century; throughout the world conditions became dramatically warmer, wetter and more predictable. In the Levant intensification of cereal use could resume, the Natufians could return to settled homes and soon something prompted some body to start deliberately saving seed to plant. Chickpeas may have been the first crop, then rye and einkorn wheat, though figs had probably been cultivated and dogs domesticated some millennia before. Can there be any doubt that it was woman, the diligent gatherer, rather than man, the dilettante hunter, who first had the idea of sowing grain? A well planted crop, sown into riverbank mud or some other bare land, then carefully weeded and guarded from birds, would have meant new and harder work, but would have brought rewards in yield to the family of the woman who tried it. It would have brought a surplus of flour that could be exchanged with hunters for meat, so it would have kept not only the field’s owner and her children alive, but perhaps a couple of other hunting families too. The exchange of grain for meat effectively subsidised hunting, or raised the ‘price’ of meat, putting more pressure on the hares and gazelles and so gradually making the entire settlement more dependent on the farm – and bringing a new incentive to the first man who thought of raising an orphaned goat kid rather than eating it. Farming would have become a necessity for all the people living there, and the hunter-gatherer way of life would have gradually atrophied. It was undoubtedly a long and slow process: farmers supplemented their diet with hunted ‘bushmeat’ for many millennia after they first started cultivating the land. In most of North America, the natives combined crops with seasonal hunts. In parts of Africa, many still do.
The Fertile Crescent was probably the place where agriculture first took hold, and from there the habit gradually spread south to Egypt, west into Asia Minor and east to India, but farming was quickly invented in at least six other places in a short time, driven by the same ratchet of trade, population growth, stable climate and increasingly vegetarian intensification. Squashes and then peanuts were cultivated in Peru by 9,200 years ago, millet and rice in China by 8,400 years ago, maize in Mexico by 7,300 years ago, taro and bananas in New Guinea by 6,900 years ago, sunflowers in North America by 6,000 years ago, and sorghum in Africa by around the same time. This phenomenal coincidence, as bizarre as finding that an aborigine, an Inuit, a Polynesian and a Scotsman all invented steam engines in the same decade of the eighteenth century without contact of any kind, is explained by the stabilising climate after the ice age ended. In the words of a recent paper, ‘agriculture was impossible during the last glacial, but compulsory in the Holocene’. It is no accident that modern Australia, with its unpredictable years of drought followed by years of wet, still looks a bit like that volatile glacial world. Australians were probably quite capable of farming: they knew how to grind grass seeds, burn the bush to improve kangaroo grazing and encourage favoured plants; and they certainly knew how to alter the flow of rivers to encourage and harvest eels. But they also knew, or found out the hard way, that farming does not work in a highly volatile climate.
No farming without trade
One of the intriguing things about the first farming settlements is that they also seem to be trading towns. From 14,000 years ago, much-valued obsidian (volcanic glass) from the Cappadocian volcanoes in Anatolia was being transported south