The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [64]
Wherever archaeologists look, they find evidence that early farmers fought each other incessantly and with deadly effect. The early inhabitants of Jericho dug a defensive ditch thirty feet deep and ten feet wide into solid rock without metal tools. In the Merzbach valley in Germany, the arrival of agriculture brought five centuries of peaceful population growth followed by the building of defensive earthworks, the dumping of corpses in pits and the abandonment of the whole valley. At Talheim around 4900 BC, an entire community of thirty-four people was massacred by blows to the head and arrows in the back, apart from the adult women who are missing – presumably abducted as sexual prizes. The killers were doing no more than Moses later ordered his followers in the Bible. After a successful battle against the Midianites and a massacre of the adult males, he told them to finish the job by raping the virgins: ‘Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.’ (Numbers 31)
Likewise, wherever anthropologists look, from New Guinea to the Amazon and Easter Island, they find chronic warfare among today’s subsistence farmers. Pre-emptively raiding your neighbours lest they raid you is routine human behaviour. As Paul Seabright has written: ‘Where there are no institutional restraints on such behaviour, systematic killing of unrelated individuals is so common among human beings that, awful though it is, it cannot be described as exceptional, pathological or disturbed.’
Nor can it be denied that such violence was habitually accompanied by cruelty to a degree that turns the modern stomach. When Samuel Champlain accompanied (and assisted with his arquebus) a successful Huron raid upon the Mohawks in 1609, he had to watch as his allies sacrificed a captive by branding his torso with glowing sticks from the fire, periodically reviving him with buckets of water if he passed out, from dusk till dawn. Only when the sun rose were they permitted by their tradition to disembowel and then eat the unfortunate victim, during which procedure he gradually died.
The fertiliser revolution
The Neolithic Revolution provided posterity with almost limitless calories. There would be famines aplenty in the millennia to come, but they would never again reduce human population density to the hunter-gatherer level. Inch by inch, trick by trick and crop by crop, people would find a way to coax food from even the poorest soils, and calories from even the poorest foods and would crystallise insights of almost miraculous perspicacity as to how to do so. Fast-forward from the Neolithic a few thousand years to the industrial revolution, when population began to explode rather than expand and stand amazed that you and your ancestors came through that explosion better fed, not starving. In 1798 Robert Malthus famously predicted in his Essay on Population that food supply could not keep pace with population growth because of the finite productivity of land. He was wrong, but it was no easy matter; in the nineteenth century it was at times touch-and-go. Even though steamships, railways, the Erie Canal, refrigeration and the binder-and-reaper enabled the Americas to send vast amounts of wheat back east to feed the industrial masses of Europe, directly and in the form of beef and pork, famine was never far away.
It would have been worse but for a strange windfall discovered in about 1830. On dry bird islands off the South American and South African coasts, where no rain leached away the cormorant, penguin