Why was the shift from hunting and gathering societies to horticultural societies important?

Causes and Consequences of Horticulture

....the development of agriculture set humanity on a new course where the foundations of the modern world were cast and where nothing that came afterward—classical Greece, the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, the Atomic Age, the Internet—has yet matched the significance of this profound event. From After 10,000 Years of Agriculture, Whither Agronomy? by Fred P. Miller Published online 11 January 2008
Published in Agronomy Journal 100:22-34 (2008)

As the last lesson in Unit 1 stated, human existence on earth can be viewed as a constant struggle to maintain existing standards of living against the threat posed by rising population size. Modern Homo sapiens evolved in Africa some 200,000 years ago, as foragers. By 12,000 years ago, these foragers had migrated throughout the world, with the exception of many of the Pacific Islands, Greenland, and the continent of Antarctica. By that time, in many locations, humans had run out of room to easily migrate. While early foragers had a high infant mortality rate, population still continued to grow. In response, foragers intensified production and improved the efficiency of their tools; this helped them support their populations, but led to local depletion of resources and a new threat to the standard of living. (This scenario as a cause of cultural change was detailed in the previous unit.)

By 12,000 years ago, after enough cycles of intensification and technological change, some humans in fortunate areas were forced into horticulture. These societies did so no doubt because they could see some immediate benefits (more food) and like most humans could not see, or couldn't afford to worry about, the long term consequences of their actions.

A brief list of consequences (from The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, last unit) goes like this.

• Society became increasingly less egalitarian, and ultimately developed class stratification.
• Differences in prestige between males and females increased, with males increasingly dominating in almost all cultures.
• Production was intensified, meaning people had to work longer and harder.
• At least for the first several thousand or so years, people were less well nourished and suffered from frequent food shortages and famine (and in some areas of the world, this is still the case).
• Contagious diseases began to plague humans.
• Human activities increasingly had long-term negative effects on the environment.

That does not mean there weren't advantages, or at least consequences, of food production. These advantages included:

• Domestication meant that there were more calories available to feed more people. Most wild plants growing on a given area of land are not ones humans can consume. By planting only useful plants (to humans) on that same given area of land, humans obtained many many more usable calories, and population size could grow.
• If large domesticated animals were available, they could not only increase calories available (by providing milk and/or meat, particularly if they did not compete with humans for food) but could potentially provide manure for fertilizer and their energy to intensify production (by pulling plows, for example). Animal-drawn plows enabled farmers to exploit heavy soils and areas covered with tough sod.
• Large domesticated animals can also become a form of transport.
• A sedentary life style encouraged large families, as small children would not have to be carried as in the more mobile life style of foragers. Plus, in most horticultural societies even young children could be economically useful.
• Horticulture often produced a stored surplus, which ultimately permitted the development of full-time specialists in other areas besides food production. Specialists can include political specialists, craft specialists, and a full time military.
• Domesticated plants and animal can also be an important source of non-food products, such as the plant fibers of cotton, flax, and hemp, and animal fibers such as wool and silk.

"Fortunate" Areas

In order to domesticate either plants or animals, foragers needed to be hunting and gathering potential domesticates. While almost all domesticated plants and animals are found today all over the world, that was not true 12,000 years ago. Plants particularly, and to a lesser extent animals, were specialized to relatively narrow habitats at the end of the Pleistocene, and not all plants and animals can be, or are worth, domesticating. The world today still lives on a small handful of plants and animals domesticated early in the Neolithic. For plants the list includes: wheat, barley,lentils, rice, millet, corn or maize, beans, squash, potatoes (white and sweet), manioc or cassava, yams, taro and breadfruit. For animals, the list of domesticates regularly eaten as food is even shorter: cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys.

There are of course other domesticated plants, but it is hard to give up foraging to become dependent on eating oranges, tomatoes, or lettuce, since they lack so many vital nutrients. Such plants remain interesting supplements. Animals are even more complicated. The North American bison or buffalo, and the many varieties of deer and antelope throughout the world, have never been successfully domesticated. They do not breed normally in the confined proximity of humans. Horses and dogs are examples of domesticates which can, and certainly have been, eaten, but most cultures who have them found them too valuable for other purposes to regularly consume them.

If we look at the world 12,000 years ago, lots of foragers were not in the right habitats to be hunting and gathering any of our short list of animals and plants. Those who were inhabiting the native or indigenous areas for these plants and animals were in what are sometimes called nuclear areas, or as I have already noted, "fortunate" areas. Not coincidentally, these areas became the centers for early farming villages. Look closely at the chart and following map, below, to see where these plants and animals were first domesticated (with approximate dates), which is for the most part where they were living wild 12,000 years ago. The plants and animals from southern Europe represent a movement of people from southwest Asia; maize spread from MesoAmerica into South and eventually North America.

Time Line of Domesticates (from Michael Park Introducing Anthropology, 4th ed. 2008, p.236) Note: this same chart is found on page 201 of your Text.

The map below illustrates the same complex of crops.

Map of Early Domesticate Hearths (from Michael Park Introducing Anthropology, 4th ed. 2008, p.237)

Chance, Power and History

Horticulture began in only a few areas of the world. While foragers were found almost everywhere 12,000 years ago, not all areas had sufficient water and a long enough growing season for people to domesticate plants. In addition, as note above, not all areas had plants that, nutritionally, were really worth domesticating. Not all areas had animals that could be domesticated. In most of those areas that did have, horticulture did develop early: in Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Syria and Turkey; in northern and central China; in Thailand; in Mexico, and in Columbia/Peru. These modern countries have some of the oldest Neolithic sites, and considerable archaeological evidence indicates that horticulture spread from these centers often via actual migration of people into the territory of their foraging neighbors. It also appears to be the case that neighbors who were foragers often adopted domesticating plants (and animals) as the plants particularly became genetically modified to flourish in slightly different environments.

The areas where the specific plants and animals were living wild at the end of the Pleistocene were also the primary centers of domestication: the places where the individual species were first domesticated. Archaeologists often also refer to secondary centers of domestication, a term which refers to areas that received plants and animals from primary centers, and/or areas where local plants/animals were domesticated, but never spread beyond the local area. (Also see the text, pp. 201-204)

As we shall see, horticulturists soon found themselves with the same problem as foragers had: increasing population size threatened the standard of living. The most popular option to solve this dilemma was migration. Since the neighbors of early horticulturists were all foragers, this option was easy. Horticulturist societies had more people, definable leaders, and seasonal surplus food supplies. All of this meant that they could easily displace foraging neighbors.

When horticulturists invaded areas inhabited by foragers, the foragers really had only three choices:

1. move to another area if possible, preferably one the farmers didn't want;
2. be destroyed as a culture by joining the invaders and changing from foraging to farming (an option often made possible by the genetic modification of the plants) or
3. resist and probably be destroyed as a people as well as a culture.

No doubt all three things happened in individual cases as horticulturists swept across the world in the next few thousand years. Ultimately the horticultural adaptive strategy took over every area where there was enough water and growing season for the plants that they brought with them. I would point out that if you were a foraging culture being invaded and destroyed or forced to radically change by horticulturists, you might not have thought the development of farming represented progress!

Between diffusion of the idea (along with the plants and animals), and actual migration, the spread of horticulture was so rapid that by 3,000 years ago, almost all the world was occupied by horticulturists. Only semi-deserts like the Kalahari, some of the dense rainforests, the high mountains, and the northern latitudes with their short growing seasons continued to be occupied by foragers. In the dry grasslands of Africa and Asia, areas unsuited to the techniques of horticulture, the availability of domesticated cattle, sheep, goats (and in some areas camels) led some foragers to develop pastoralism (herding) as an alternative adaptive strategy more suitable for the environment.

Of Animals and Disease

Pastoralism never developed in the Americas, though horticulture had developed in many areas before 5,000 B.C. Why? The answer also explains why the intensive agriculture states of Europe were able to successfully destroy the intensive agriculture states of the Americas: almost no animal suitable for domestication was native to the Americas prior to Columbus.

When foragers first migrated into the Americas some 20,000 years (or more) ago, they apparently brought with them the domesticated dog. [The dog was domesticated at least 20,000 years ago, in central Asia, by foragers. They did not give up foraging, and the domesticated dog spread or was carried into all areas occupied by foragers by the end of the Pleistocene.] While the American foragers found plenty of animals to hunt, almost none of them were good candidates for domestication. It is worth remembering that up to 80% of the large fauna of the Americas became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene, perhaps with some assistance from the PaleoIndian foragers. The Americas had no cattle, no pigs, no sheep or goats, no chickens, and no horses. While horses and cattle would do fine on the plains of both North and South America when the Europeans introduced them (and pigs did fine in the forests), the indigenous fauna (like the American bison or buffalo, deer, and antelope) were not good potential domesticates. Horticulture developed in the Americas almost entirely without domesticated animals, other than in limited areas the turkey, the llama and alpaca, the Muscovy duck, and the guinea pig. Of these species, two are birds, one is a rodent, and the llama and alpaca are members of the camel family specialized to the Andes mountains. Only one, the turkey, has been found in North American horticultural sites. None of these species were found in the grassland areas of North and South America.

As a result, pastoralism did not develop as a mode of production in the Americas. In addition, American horticulturists were almost certainly free of many infectious and contagious diseases which affected farmers in Asia, Africa and Europe. Many diseases that originated in animals made the transition to humans when people domesticated animals. The list includes measles (from cattle), smallpox (from cattle and other livestock), and influenza (from pigs and ducks). Measles and smallpox evolved to become exclusively human diseases. All these diseases were absent in the Americas until introduced there by Europeans after 1492. The many generations of human evolution from the time people first started living in close proximity to animals caused Europeans, Asians and Africans to evolve some immunity to the diseases. When introduced into the Americas, death rates of 50-90% were not unusual. Europe conquered the Americas due to the "chance" distribution of potentially domesticable animals.

The role of animals on human diseases, and the consequences of the lack of domesticated animals in the Americas subsequent to 1500, is covered in the next lesson, The Arrow of Disease, by Jared Diamond.

What is the difference between hunting

What brought about the development of horticultural society?

What are the difference between the three the horticultural hunting

What is the main difference between horticultural societies and agricultural societies?