The Seven Daughters of Eve (25 page)

Compared to the hardships and uncertainties of the lives of the first six women we have encountered, Jasmine had a much easier time. For one thing, she lived in a permanent settlement, one of the first villages. But the accommodation could not be called luxurious by any stretch of the imagination. She lived in a circular hut, dug partly into the soil, with wooden stakes supporting a thatched roof made of reeds. These huts were tiny and cramped; but they were home. The village had a population of about three hundred people, very much larger than any of the temporary hunting camps which were home to the other six women. The village was about a mile from the River Euphrates in what is now Syria. The Euphrates carried the rain and melted snow from the mountains of Anatolia in the north through wide grassy plains to join the River Tigris on its journey to the Persian Gulf.

The Great Ice Age was at an end. The ice caps and glaciers had been melting fast for the past four thousand years as global temperatures climbed erratically toward present-day levels. The water that had been trapped in these great reservoirs of ice now flowed into the ocean basins, so that sea levels were rising around the globe. The low-lying plain that lay between Arabia and Iran was flooded as seawater seeped inland past the Straits of Hormuz to create the Persian Gulf. The Adriatic pushed the shoreline further and further north towards its present position in the lagoon of Venice. Seawater rushed through the Bosphorus and poured into the Black Sea. Britain and Ireland began to lose their connections to the European mainland and to each other as water flowed into what are now the North Sea, the Irish Sea and the English Channel. On the other side of the world Australia and New Guinea, which had been joined together as Sahulland, were separated as the Torres Straits filled with water. The flat plains of Sundaland that once connected Malaysia, Sumatra, Java and Borneo into a single land mass were now seabed. The crucial land bridge that connected Asia and the Americas finally sank beneath the cold waters of the Bering Straits.

All these lands were inhabited, and had to be evacuated as the sea level rose. This was not the gradual process once imagined, with imperceptible advances measured in fractions of a millimetre per year. It now appears that the sea rose in a series of rapid stages, by several metres over only a few decades as water was suddenly released from the melting continental ice caps that had become vast freshwater lakes, their outlets to the sea blocked only by frozen tongues of ice. One such tongue lay across the opening of what is now the Hudson Bay, holding back an enormous inland lake that covered most of Canada. When this ice barrier was finally breached and the water gushed out into the ocean, the sea level rose around the world by half a metre overnight. Sea-level rises of this magnitude today would not only drown millions of square miles of low-lying land but would inundate many of our coastal and estuarine cities. If this version of events is accurate, then the sudden end of the Ice Age brought tragedy to the inhabitants of the coastal plains. Many would have drowned or seen their livelihoods destroyed. Great flood myths permeate many mythologies. Perhaps this is their foundation.

Jasmine's village was safely above the encroaching waters of the Persian Gulf. It had grown up to take advantage of another seasonal migration – not of the bison and reindeer of the tundra, but of the Persian gazelle. The village lay close to the route of their annual spring migration from the hot deserts of Arabia to the grasslands of the hills that encircled this gentle land. The meat they provided could be dried and kept for several months, but would not last out for the whole year.

Jasmine collected acorns and pistachio nuts from the woods nearby, but her main occupation was looking after what she called her experimental plot. For many years now, when the young men followed the gazelle up into the hills, they had kept themselves going by munching the seeds of the wild grass that grew there. Though they needed a lot of chewing, to the young men they had one over-riding advantage: unlike gazelle, they couldn't run away. Jasmine's man was not a good hunter. She had known him as a child and watched, helpless with laughter, as he tried to throw a stone at a pretend gazelle. He was hopeless. The only time he ever hit the target was when he threw the stone underarm. ‘Nobody throws spears underarm,' his father would shout. He got a bit better as he got older, but it would be a miracle if he ever got close to killing a gazelle. And he didn't. He never managed to bring down a single one. No-one, certainly not Jasmine, was to know that he had a hereditary weakness in his shoulder which meant he could never improve. But what Jasmine liked about him was his curiosity and intelligence and his kindness. He had a gentle temperament which she found appealing, and although she was concerned that he might not become an extravagant provider for their family – Jasmine wanted lots of children – she somehow believed they would get through.

While she was nursing their first baby, he followed the other men into the hills after the gazelle and wild sheep. He took his spear with him but had no illusions about killing anything; it was just to look the part. His real intention was to collect and bring back to the village as many wild grass seeds as he could. He had taken with him two large sacks made of stitched gazelle skin. He found a hillside where the grass was thick on the ground and the seed heads were already ripe. With one hand he gathered up a bunch of grasses, held them in the mouth of the sack and shook them hard. Most of the seeds fell off the heads and into the bag. It only took him an hour to fill both sacks, and he walked back to the village while his companions were still trying to kill their first gazelle.

When he got home his first job was to try to break off the brittle hairs that were still attached to the seeds. He did this with the grain still in the sack, rolling a large stone round and round on top of it. Then he poured the contents out on to the ground. The hairs blew away in the breeze and left a good pile of largely hairless seeds. He soaked these in water for a few hours, then handed Jasmine a handful. They were hardly delicious, but they were all right – though the husks still stuck in her teeth. He tried grinding the dried seeds between two stones, and this did crack off at least some of the hard outer skins which, like the hairs, dispersed in the wind. But he saved his best piece of ingenuity till last.

He had kept back a few handfuls of seeds to see if he could grow them near to the village. He already knew that the grains germinated into new seedlings. People had been bringing back pouches of wild grain for years, though not on the same scale, and he had noticed how seeds dropped accidentally on a damp patch of ground would soon produce a small green shoot which in time became a new plant with its own seed head. But he was going to try to grow wild grass systematically. With Jasmine at his side he walked down towards the river and found a piece of level land a few hundred yards from the near bank. It had a light covering of weeds and he set them alight to clear the ground. Then he took a stone scraper and scored a line in the soil. He put in a row of seeds and kicked over the topsoil to cover them up; he already knew that the village sparrows had developed a taste for grain. He planted ten rows before he had exhausted his supply of seeds and they headed back to the village.

Next day they returned to the plot. It was exactly as they had left it. It rained for the next few days and still nothing happened. Then, a week later, Jasmine took her baby down to the plot – and there, struggling out of the ground, were ten rows of tiny green shoots. She rushed back to tell her man, but he had not yet returned from another fruitless hunting trip. From that day on, Jasmine and her family spent as much time as possible by the plot. Together they cleared some more land and planted more seeds from the hills. They planted whatever could be eaten. Wild varieties of chickpea and lentil joined the original wild wheat. They showed off their plantings to the rest of the village, who expressed a range of views from the enthusiastic to the downright hostile. They didn't claim that it would replace the gazelle or the pistachio as their staple diet, only that it would supplement it and make them less dependent on one food source. There was no denying that the grain growing on the plot could be eaten. Grinding it between large stones and separating the husks made the resultant mash far more palatable.

Jasmine and her man had also noticed that some of their plants produced seeds that stayed attached to the stem. This was after a fierce wind had stripped the seeds from most of the plants and severely reduced the yield. But a few plants had withstood this battering. On these plants, the seeds were stuck to the stem with less brittle attachments. When these seeds were planted, they wondered, would they grow into similar plants? So they tried it. And it worked. Little by little, year by year, they selected the plants with the attached seeds, the plumper grains, the stouter stems and took their seeds for planting. Within only a few years, the wheat in their plot no longer looked exactly like the wild varieties. It had been artificially selected for the most desirable properties.

By now most of the sceptics in the village had changed their minds, especially after the year when the gazelle failed to appear. A few other enthusiasts had taken to planting out their own plots using seeds given to them by Jasmine. Visitors from nearby villages were equally impressed, and begged Jasmine to let them take a few seeds back with them. The idea quickly spread around the region. By now Jasmine's man had given up pretending to hunt altogether. He was enjoying the sedentary life. They had five children, rather too many for his liking, but what could he do about it? Jasmine just kept getting pregnant. Even before her first child was completely weaned she conceived again. At least there was now sufficient food coming off the plots, which they had enlarged many times since they had started.

They heard that someone from another village, six days away to the north, had found a way of keeping wild goats. Apparently they had captured two kids on a hunt and taken them back as pets for the children. When they grew too big to play with, instead of killing and eating them, which had been their original intention, they tied them to a wooden stick to prevent them escaping and let them browse on whatever vegetation they could reach. A year later one of them produced a kid. Now they had a dozen goats of various ages. When they needed meat, they killed a goat. It was a lot easier than hunting them. The idea of growing your own food was definitely catching on.

Things were going very well for Jasmine and her family. They had a large plot by the river and took on some of the other women and children of the village to help them, rewarding them with a share of the produce. More and more people took up this new way of life. It had great appeal. Anyone could join in – children, mothers with children, grannies. There was always some job to be done, whether it was getting rid of weeds, doing a bit of watering or cleaning a new piece of land. You didn't have to depend entirely on the harvest because the oak and pistachio trees were still there. The gazelle could still be hunted. It was a perfect combination.

As Jasmine sat looking at their field with the wheat ready for the harvest, little did she realize that she and others like her had started a revolution that would change the world for ever. Within only a few generations after her, villages throughout the region had switched their way of life from one of hunting and gathering to one of herding goats, sheep and then cattle, and to growing domesticated crops. Selective breeding had transformed the plants and animals from their wild state to the service of humans within a remarkably short space of time. Sheep grew longer, woolly coats, which could be spun into garments. Goats provided a regular supply of milk. Cattle, domesticated from the ferocious wild aurochs, became docile suppliers of meat, milk and traction.

With food production and now the landscape increasingly under human control, the population increased relentlessly. This was partly due to a more consistent source of nutrition, but also because the new cereals, high in carbohydrates, removed the hormonal check on ovulation during lactation that had ensured a long gap between children. The increasing population was not all good news. It led to overcrowding and the arrival of epidemics of infectious disease which had never had a chance to take hold in the widely spaced bands of the hunter–gatherers. The close association of humans and animals after domestication enabled animal viruses, harmless to their hosts, to spread into the human population. Measles, tuberculosis and smallpox were caught from cattle, influenza and whooping cough from domesticated pigs and ducks. Judging from the signs of disease retained in their bones, the health of the early farmers suffered a sharp decline compared to their hunter–gatherer antecedents. Moreover, as people eventually abandoned hunting altogether and came to depend exclusively on a few crops and animals, they were vulnerable to famines when plants or animals failed due to drought or disease. But still the population grew. Nothing could stop the spread of farming. A thousand years after Jasmine, the unstoppable agricultural economy had crossed the Aegean from Anatolia and arrived in the plains of Thessaly in northern Greece. From the scarcity of hunter–gatherer archaeological sites of the same date in the region it looks as if this part of Europe was empty of humans at the time, until the farmers settled in. But elsewhere in Europe the hunter–gatherers were still doing well.

As the Great Ice Age ended, the southern edge of the tundra slowly receded. The rich game went with it, followed by the humans. The descendants of Ursula, Xenia, Helena, Velda, Tara and Katrine moved north to reclaim the great European plain. Behind them, the warmer climate encouraged the growth of trees and the landscape became one of thick deciduous forests with pines growing on the hills and mountains. Though not so productive as the tundra, these lands were still fully occupied by humans who looked increasingly to marine resources, fish and shellfish, to complement the reduced availability of game.