Author: * Marie Siduri
Date: Dec 8, 2002 - 18:45

MORE ABOUT THE BEGINNING

Anthropologists tell us that hunter-gatherer peoples such as the !Kung Bushmen of Kalaharia desert can make their living working about 15-20 hours a week. The rest of the time is spent socializing, telling stories and such. One anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins, even described hunter-gather society as the "original affluent society," because food can be gotten easily enough and the people have plenty of leisure time. Material possessions are few, but few are needed. Compared with the usual 40-hour work week most of us put in, and it's enough to make me, at least, feel a little less like getting up in the morning and going to work.

But compared that to the experience the Santal workers described by Sarah C. White in her book, Arguing with the Crocodile, both we 40-hour workers and the hunter-gathers have it easy. The Santal are a distinct ethnic group living in India and Bangladesh with their own culture, religion and language, including their own script. They are often among the poorest people, and adults are often engaged as migrant agricultural workers. White claims that outside of the lean season just before the harvest when there is often little work to be had, Santals outside the village she studied are rarely in their own house during the daylight hours. Unlike most Bangladeshi women, who do not work in the fields because of restrictions on women's movement in both Muslim and Hindu traditions, Santal women do work in fields (in addition to their domestic work) without social reproach.

White quotes one young Santal man named Bolai:

"I tell you, if it weren't for the night times, the poor would have no happiness at all. You with your reading and writing, you can work on all night. But us, they can't make us work after daylight. That is our only comfort." (p. 48)

Because hunter-gatherer groups must be small and mobile, they have few personal possessions. There are often a strong traditions against hoarding and traditions promoting food sharing so that these societies, apart from a universal division of labor between the sexes, tend to be egalitarian. Settled agriculturists, by contrast, are often on the bottle of a stratified society.

So why did so many of our ancestors give up the good life for a the very difficult life of the settled agriculturist?

Obviously, their good life is much more susceptible to disaster with a changing environment, but this hardly suffices as an answer. Contemporary hunter-gathers may also plant crop or keep livestock from time to time as it suits them.

Colin Tudge in his book, The Time Before History has a an elegant, poignant chapter on the issue called, "The End of Eden: Farming." He states that there is a growing amount of evidence that the early days of farming was "ghastly," in particular, bent and thinned bones suggesting "disorders of privation from rickets to tuberculosis" among the earliest farming populations. He also sites a study by Theyer Molleson on early Egyptian skeletons that show arthritically deformed toes and lower back bones which she attributed to the use saddle querns.

Tudge puts forth the argument that planting favored crops--fruit trees or cereal grains, for example--had probably been going on sporadically perhaps has early as 30,000 years ago. It was a back-up method of subsistence, and when not needed, not used. This, he says, solved the mystery of why evidence of cultivation seems to crop up independently in many different areas about 10,000 years ago. People had been doing it for as many as 20,000 years, but only when pressed by circumstances to do so. It then became economically advantageous 10,000 years ago in ways that it had not been before. People who cultivate part-time have an advantage over people who don't in that with a more reliable food supply, they are more likely to survive hard times. They are also more likely to increase in number, and thus put more stress on the environment which would leave fewer resources for hunting and gathering. Tudge sees this as a positive feedback loop--the more you cultivate, the more you have to in order to deal with the changes you cultivation has brought about.

Yet, there is a need for a more specific reason--a global one--for people to take up the drudgery of full time agriculture, and Tudge suggests, in the case of the Middle East, a climate change in the form of the end of the last Ice Age was the nail in the coffin of hunter-gathering way of life. The melting ice raised water levels world wide. In the Persian Gulf, land was now being lost to the rising water and the people who lived there were forced further inland. "Then the cultivation skills that they had indulged in as a bonus had to be deployed as a matter of urgency. Thus, they were embarked on the rising vortex of agriculture and population from which, ever since, there has been no escape." (p. 277)

As the population grew, there emerged a leisure class, who, like the gods in Atrahasis, decided that hard work should be done by someone else as much as possible.

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Haviland, William A.; Cultural Anthropology
Tudge, Colin; The Time Before History
White, Sarah C.; Arguing with the Crocodile: Gender and Class in Bangladesh

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On the use of saddle querns at Abu Huyreya

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Next week: Ninurta tells the Sumerians how to farm