Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began (Darwinism Today series)

Colin Tudge wrote Neanderthals, Bandits, & Farmers, a book that presents his theories on the dawn of progress and perpetual growth, focusing on how agriculture really began. At the time, he was employed by the London School of Economics, an institution focused on capitalism, not ecological sustainability.The book vibrates with cognitive dissonance. Tudge has been studying agriculture for many years. On one hand, it was a magnificent achievement that threw open the door to the wonders of modernity. On the other hand, modernity has become a victim of its own success, with seven billion humans dangerously rocking the boat. As Pandora once discovered, some magnificent achievements are best left in the box.For most of the human journey, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, whom Tudge likens to bandits. They lived by their wits, snatched what the ecosystem had to offer, and had plenty of leisure time in their lives. The prudent path was to live within the carrying capacity of their ecosystem. If they had been ambitious and hard working, they would have wiped out their prey and starved.Farmers were ambitious, hard working control freaks. They manipulated the ecosystem to increase its carrying capacity, temporarily, via soil mining. More work produced more rewards, and more food could feed more people. Wild critters frequently molested their precious crops, so farmers responded with pest control — overhunting. Eventually, the human mob got large, wildlife became scarce, wild land became cropland, and returning to hunting was no longer an option.Agriculture emerged independently in at least six widely scattered locations. It was not invented in Uruk by a demented genius. It began maybe 10,000 years ago in the Middle East. Tudge suggests that it developed gradually, as proto-farming, starting maybe 40,000 years ago. Even primitive yokels could see that plants grew from seeds, and that clearing other vegetation away from food plants promoted their growth. Proto-farming was done on a small scale, a pleasant hobby that left behind no enduring evidence for scientists to discover thousands of years later.In Europe, Neanderthals had been big game hunters for hundreds of thousands of years. While surviving a roller coaster of climate shifts, they lived within carrying capacity and did not wipe out the game. Cro-Magnons were the Homo sapiens that later migrated into Europe, maybe 45,000 years ago. Tudge theorizes that these foreign immigrants were proto-farmers. Because they could produce their own food, they were less vulnerable to the consequences of overhunting. Big game species began blinking out. This eliminated the food supply for the Neanderthals, who were forced off the stage into oblivion.By and by, proto-farming metastasized into a more virulent form, agriculture. The economists leap to their feet with enthusiastic applause and cheering. Civilization, here we come! Whee! The fuse was lit for a joyride of skyrocketing growth — onward to ten billion! Well, this is the schoolbook version that everyone knows, and most believe.Now, the plot thickens. A growing number of scholars have been poking holes in the glorious myth of growth and progress. Farming was miserable backbreaking work. While hunter-gatherers benefitted from a diverse and highly nutritious diet, the farmer’s diet was the opposite, majoring in a few staple foods. Farmers were shorter and less healthy. In their remains, we find that “the toes and knees are bent and arthritic and the lower back is deformed.”Tudge acknowledges the revisionists. “People did not invent agriculture and shout for joy; they drifted or were forced into it, protesting all the way.” Here’s my favorite line in the book: “The real problem, then, is not to explain why some people were slow to adapt agriculture but why anyone took it up at all when it was obviously so beastly.”He believes that overhunting was the sole cause of the megafauna extinctions. Native Americans had little self-restraint when it came to hunting mammoths and mastodons. There is no evidence that climate change played any role in the die-off, he says. But, at the end of the ice age, as the land warmed up, large areas of tundra were gradually replaced with dense forests. This put the squeeze on species adapted to living on the tundra.Did scruffy rednecks with homemade spears really hunt the speedy horses of North America to extinction — but not the bison, elk, and deer? We’ll never know the full story, but I would be wary of dismissing the impact of radical climate swings, or the importation of Old World pathogens for which the American fauna had zero immunity.Anyway, agriculture took root, because it worked more often than it failed. Population gradually grew, which required more and more cropland and pasture. Each expansion raised carrying capacity a bit, while soil depletion reduced it. The growing mob had to work harder, and grow more. In the cult of economists, “growth” is the god word. Unfortunately, perpetual growth becomes a vicious spiral. Tudge winces at the paradox. “To condemn all of humankind to a life of full-time farming, and in particular arable farming, was a curse indeed.”Animal domestication, on the other hand, greatly benefitted the critters we enslaved, says Tudge. For example, wild wolves are vanishing, but domesticated dogs have zoomed past a half billion. Similarly, domesticated sheep can breed far more when well fed and defended. If the population of a critter explodes, this is called biological success. Dogs are a great success story, but their luckless wolf relatives keep smacking into bullets, stepping in traps, and eating poisoned bait. Oddly, neither dogs nor sheep could survive in the wild, apart from humans.It’s a great tragedy of history that the wild folks who adapted to their ecosystem, and lived within its carrying capacity, have been unable to withstand the constant pressure from growing mobs of farmers. When Tudge wrote, we were approaching six billion. The spectacular success of growth and progress was beginning to look like a Pyrrhic victory. We might actually have real limits!Clouds of doubt swirled in his head. “Our earliest hunting ancestors must have been lazy, as lions are. Perhaps we should learn from them.” It’s touching and illuminating to watch the poor lad struggle with the conflict between powerful cultural myths and his growing awareness of reality. This struggle is a necessary challenge on the path to growth and healing. We must stand against the strong current.The book is just 53 pages, and easy to read. It would be a good text for courses in eco-psychology, environmental ethics, and critical thinking.Postscript. In a recent YouTube video, “How We Can Get Good Food For Everyone,” Tudge reveals his grand solution, Enlightened Agriculture — small organic family farms raising a wide variety of crops. By 2050, 9.5 to 10 billion will be coming to dinner. Can we feed them? “The answer is a resounding yes!” We can feed them for decades, maybe indefinitely. Profit-driven, energy-guzzling monoculture agriculture is fantastically unsustainable. All we need is simply a total revolution in how we live, think, breed, and produce food — as soon as possible, please.

There are two ways of looking at life; the liberal is optimistic and tends to consider happiness as a prime motivation, while the conservative is pessimistic and views hardship or challenge as the key to success and greatness. This book definitely offers the conservative viewpoint. Tudge argues, and presents a mass of hard data to back his theory, that "domestic agriculture" began in response to environmental crisis and an impending food shortage. Interesting, if true. In all likelihood, we will never know for sure. But, this book isn't valuable for its conclusion; it's worth reading because he examines an issue archaeologists overlook or ignore -- the "why" of human progress. After all, why farm if your ancestors have lived for several million years merely by hunting and gathering for the few hours per week needed to be comfortable. Tudge asserts, "They did it because they were forced into it when their paradise was taken from them and they were shoved together into hills that just turned out to be especially hospitable. Arable farming is seasonal, but in the season it is hell . . ." This book, quite brief at 50 pages consisting mainly of background material, suggests why people may have given up the carefree lifestyle of hunting and gathering and become dreary farmers. He cites apparent evidence for the beginnings of agriculture as far back as 40,000 years ago, not the merely 10,000 or so years as now thought. When he is on solid material like this, Tudge has compiled a real service. Personally, using the exact same data, it's realistic to argue that people began farming for fun, because it made life more pleasurable. It probably started 100,000 or so years ago, when people added flowers to their burials. Flowers serve no practical purpose, but are an expression of beauty and respect for the dead. It wouldn't take long for people to discover that a flower brought home for its beauty, after it is died and discarded, produces a new flower from the seeds of the old. As the sense of personal happiness grows, the motivation would have been all the greater. Aha!! We can have flowers at our doorstep, not just in the distant fields. It's like a magpie, with its love of brightly colored objects. It's a pure pleasure principle. The same goes for the first domestic animals -- anyone who has tasted wild and domestic animals knows the finer taste of domestic brands. Baby pigs were brought back and raised, instead of being killed with the sow, and when they became adults the meat far much tender, juicier and tasty. Grain, and grapes, are wonderful. There is ample speculation the first grain was not used for bread, but was mixed with water to make beer. Grape juice will ferment on its own. Both produce fun results; drink them, instead of from the flowing stream, and a person feels happy. This book offers all the fundamentals to sustain my argument, and obviously all the basics to support Judge's thesis. It's too bad he couldn't have added a "choose your own ending" element by adding another five or six pages. Because of what his idea tells us about ourselves, it would be all the more valuable. Do we motivate people today, based on centuries of experience, with hardship and disaster? Or do we use happiness as a motivator, as in the idea "it feels great to have a vigorous physical workout." When you review the basics, as succinctly offered in this book, it puts modern reality in perspective. The book is really about ourselves. Are we noble savages, as Tudge and John Jacques Rousseau suggest, motivated only by fear and punishment? Or are we pleasure seekers, eager to do anything that sounds like fun? This book offers one answer, clear and concise. It is superb for that reason, and well worth reading. Optimists won't have their viewpoint refuted, and will likely learn much just the same. All in all, an excellent book.

Even though only a short essay about the development of agriculture, it captures some key points important for the understanding of early human development. Well written.