IFP100 Week 1:Grain, Sedentarism, The Beginning of Time

Matt Price

Today's Main Points

  • Step back to very longtime scale
  • Agriculture is recent
  • Agriculture is not obvious
  • Grain changes the world fundamentally

Humans Are Pretty Old

Figure 2: (Nielsen, 2011)

Human Population

1920px-Population_curve.svg.png

"Niche Construction"

  • life changes its environement
    • consider a yeast culture
  • many mammals actively transform their surroundings
  • "niche construction" changes conditions for other species as well
    • for humans:
      • fire → hunting grounds
      • fishng weirs → Δ fish species
      • agriculture → landscape and sedentarism
    • "Anthropocene": human construction of global ecosystem

Origins of Agriculture

  • gathering & modification of plant & animal life is fairly old
  • agriculture as we now it is very recent: maybe10,000-12,00 years old
  • first arises in Mesopotamia, then not long after in the Indus Valley, in China, and a number ofo the places
Vavilov-centers_updated.jpg
Terrace_field_yunnan_china.jpg
1280px-Maler_der_Grabkammer_des_Sennudem_001.jpg

Domestication

All images (Boivin et al., 2016)

Why Agriculture? The Progress Tradition

  • Social Theory as we know it comes from Agricultural Societies!
  • With these comes the idea of "Progress"
    • agriculture brings surplus
    • surplus brings comfort
    • everyone wants to be a farmer! so farming spreads
    • relief from "the state of Nature" (Hobbes)
    • natural progression
  • With these theories comes a certain snobbishness
    • cf. John Locke ("doctrine of discovery"), Adam Smith (towns vs hihglands), Herbert Spencer (Social Darwinism)

Problems for the Theory

  • Actually, farming is hard!
  • Evidence suggests very few people want to do it
    • slavery comes from agriculture
  • So why does it arise at all?

Grains and the State

  • "grains" are domesticated grasses with small, hard seeds that can be ground and are edible when cooked and softened
  • they make a losuy food for an individual, much worse than tubers
  • but they are excellent for a state
    • harvested all at once
    • can't be hidden
    • requires sedentary life
1024px-Wheat_close-up.JPG

Grains and the State

  • Once "captured" by the state, populations grow and habits change
  • health and lifespan actually diminish in early agriculture
  • complex hierarchical societies become possible & necessary
    • empires grow and take hold of power, unwilling to let it go!
  • to call this "progress" is too simplistic!

The Food We Love

  • Sushi, pizza, sandwiches: none are possible without grains!
  • They are tied to the complexity of this story – injustice, oppression, but also religion, harvest festivals, celebration
  • even the simplest things are very complicated!

Glossary

sedentarism
staying in one place
niche
role of a species in an ecological system; or, environment in which a species can survive and thrive
domestication
directed evolutionary change to make a species more compatible with human lifestyles
(no term)
::

Sources

Boivin, N. L., Zeder, M. A., Fuller, D. Q., Crowther, A., Larson, G., Erlandson, J. M., Denham, T., & Petraglia, M. D. (2016). Ecological consequences of human niche construction: Examining long-term anthropogenic shaping of global species distributions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(23), 6388–6396.
Niche construction. (2021). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Niche_construction&oldid=1032325972
Nielsen, M. (2011). Imitation, pretend play, and childhood: Essential elements in the evolution of human culture? Journal of Comparative Psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983), 126, 170–181.
Scott, J. C. (2017). Against the grain: a deep history of the earliest states. Yale University Press. https://www-degruyter-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/document/doi/10.12987/9780300231687/html
The Dawn of Homo Sapiens: Our Family Tree Grows Messier Still. (2012). In Science in the News. https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2012/issue132a/
Why is human niche construction reshaping planet Earth? – Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. https://extendedevolutionarysynthesis.com/why-is-human-niche-construction-reshaping-planet-earth/