The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [60]
One of the reasons that farming spreads so rapidly once it starts is that the first few crops are both more productive and more easily grown than later crops, so farmers are always happy to move on to virgin land. If you burn down a forest, you are left with a soft, friable soil seasoned with fertilising ash. All you need do is poke a digging stick into the ground and plant a seed and sit back and wait for it to grow. After a few years, however, the soil is compacted and needs breaking up with a hoe, and weeds have proliferated. If you now leave the ground fallow to allow the fertility to build up again, the tough roots of grasses need to be broken up and buried to make a good seedbed – and for that you need a plough and an ox to pull it. But the ox needs feeding, so you need pasture as well as arable land. No wonder that shifting agriculture – slash and burn – remains so much more popular with many tribal people in forests to this day. In Neolithic Europe, the smoke of fires must have hung heavy in the air as the expanding front of farming spread west. The carbon dioxide released by the fires may even have helped to warm the climate to its 6,000-years-ago balmy maximum, when the Arctic ice retreated from Greenland’s northern coast in summer. This is because early farming used probably nine times as much land per head of population as farming does today, so the small populations of the day generated lots of carbon dioxide per head.
Capital and metal
Wherever they went, the farmers also brought their habits: not just sowing, reaping and threshing, but baking, fermenting, hoarding and owning. Hunter-gatherers have to travel light; even if they are not seasonally nomadic, they must be ready to move at any time. Farmers, by contrast, have to store grain or protect herds or guard fields before they are harvested. The first person to plant a wheat field must have faced the dilemma of how to say ‘This is mine; only I may harvest it.’ The first signs of private property are the stamp seals of the Halaf people, 8,000 years ago on the borders of Syria and Turkey: similar seals were later used for denoting ownership. This land rush presumably left the remaining hunters baffled spectators as their game lands were carved up, possibly by ‘poorer’, more desperate people. Perhaps Cain was a farmer; Abel a hunter.
Meanwhile, as farming replaced gathering, so herding replaced hunting. The Neolithic settlements of the Middle East probably grew up as markets where shepherds from the hills could meet cereal farmers from the plains and exchange their surpluses. The hunter-gatherer market now became the herderfarmer market. Haim Ofek writes: ‘On the human level, nothing could be more handy at the onset of agriculture than a well-established propensity to exchange, for nothing could better reconcile the need for specialisation in food production with the need for diversification in food consumption.’
Copper smelting was a practice that makes no sense for an individual trying to meet his own needs, or even for a self-sufficient tribe. It requires a stupendous effort to mine the ore and then by virtue of elaborate bellows to smelt it in a charcoal fire at more than 1,083°C, just to produce a few ingots of a metal that is strong and malleable, but not very hard. Imagine: you have to cut wood and make charcoal from it, make ceramic crucibles for the smelting, dig and crush the ore, then mould and hammer the copper. Only by consuming the stored labour of others – by living off capital – could you even finish the job. Then, even if you can sell copper axes to other hunter-gatherers, the market is likely to be too small to make it worth your while setting up a smelting operation. But once agriculture has provided the capital, increased the density of people, and given them a good reason for chop ping down trees, then there might