Why the West Rules--For Now (18 page)

Early farmers tamed the landscape, breaking it into concentric circles—at the center was home; then came the neighbors; then the cultivated fields; then the pastures, where shepherds and flocks trekked between summer and winter grazing; and beyond them the wild, an unregulated world of scary animals, savages who hunted, and who knew what monsters. A few excavations have found stone slabs incised with lines that, at least to the eye of the believer, look a bit like maps of fields divided by tiny paths; and around 9000
BCE
villagers in Jerf al-Ahmar and some of the neighboring sites now under Lake Assad seem to have been experimenting with a kind of protowriting, scratching images of snakes, birds, farm animals, and abstract signs on little stone tokens.

By imposing such mental structures on their world, Hilly Flankers were, we might say, domesticating themselves. They even remade what love meant. The love between husband and wife or parent and child is natural, bred into us over millions of years, but farming injected new forces into these relationships. Foragers had always shared their knowledge with their young, teaching them to find ripe plants, wild game, and safe caves, but farmers had something more concrete to pass down. To do well, people now needed property—a house, fields, and flocks, not to mention investments like wells, walls, and tools. The first farmers were apparently quite communal, sharing food and perhaps cooking collectively, but by 8000
BCE
they were building bigger, more complicated houses, each with its own storerooms and kitchens, and perhaps dividing the land into privately owned fields. Life increasingly focused on small family groups, probably the basic unit for transmitting property between generations. Children needed this material
inheritance, because the alternative was poverty. Transmitting property became a matter of life and death.

There are signs of what can only be called an obsession with ancestors. We perhaps see it as early as 10,000
BCE
, with the jawless skulls of Qermez Dere, but as farming developed, it escalated. Burying multiple generations of the dead under house floors became common, mingling bodies in ways that seem to express very physically the link between property and descent. Some people went further, disinterring bodies after the flesh decayed, removing the skulls, and reburying the headless corpses. Using plaster, they modeled faces on the skulls, sticking shells in the eye sockets and painting in details like hair.

Dame Kathleen Kenyon, a formidable woman in the man’s world of 1950s archaeology, was the first to document this horror-movie custom in her excavations at the famous site of Jericho on the West Bank, but plastered skulls have now been found in dozens of settlements. What people did with the skulls is less clear, since we only find ones that have been reburied. Most were placed in pits, though at Çatalhöyük one young woman was buried around 7000
BCE
hugging to her breast a skull that had been replastered and painted red no fewer than three times.

Such intimacy with corpses makes most of us squeamish but clearly mattered a lot to early farmers in the Hilly Flanks. Most archaeologists think it shows that ancestors were the most important supernatural beings. The ancestors had passed on property, without which the living would starve; in return the living honored them. Possibly ancestral rituals clothed the transmission of property in a holy aura, justifying why some people owned more than others. People may also have used skulls for necromancy, summoning ancestors to ask when to plant, where to hunt, and whether to raid neighbors.

Ancestor cults flourished all over the Hilly Flanks. At Çatalhöyük almost every house had bodies under the floor and ancestral skulls plastered into the surfaces and walls. At ‘Ain Ghazal two pits were found containing life-size statues and busts made from bundles of reeds coated with plaster. Some had twin heads; most were painted with giant, staring eyes. Most striking of all, around 8000
BCE
people at Çayönü in southeast Turkey built what its excavators labeled a “House of the Dead,” with sixty-six skulls and more than four hundred skeletons stashed behind an altar. Chemists identified deposits on the altar as
hemoglobin crystals from human and animal blood. More human blood was caked on clay bowls, and two other buildings also had bloodstained altars, one with the image of a human head carved on it. The mind fairly boggles. It sounds like a slasher movie—struggling victims tied to altars, priests tearing their jugulars open with razor-sharp flint blades and sawing off their heads for storage, worshippers drinking their blood …

Or maybe not. Nothing archaeologists dig up can prove or disprove such flights of fancy. Still, the statues and the House of the Dead seem to imply the emergence of religious specialists who somehow persuaded everyone that they had privileged access to the supernatural. Perhaps they could fall into trances or fits; perhaps they could just describe their visions better. Whatever the reason, priests may have been the first people to enjoy institutionalized authority. Here, perhaps, we see the beginnings of entrenched hierarchy.

Whether that is true or not, hierarchy developed fastest
within
households. I have already observed that men and women had had different roles in foraging societies, the former more active in hunting and the latter in gathering, but studies of contemporary groups suggest that domestication sharpens the sexual division of labor, tying women to the home. The high mortality/high fertility regime required most women to spend most of their lives pregnant and/or minding small children, and changes in agriculture—changes that women themselves probably pioneered—reinforced this. Domesticated cereals need more processing than most wild foods, and since threshing, grinding, and baking can be done in the home while supervising infants, these logically became women’s work.

When land is abundant but labor is scarce (as in the earliest days of cultivation), people normally cultivate large areas lightly, with men and women hoeing and weeding together. If population increases but the supply of farmland does not, as happened in the Hilly Flanks after 8000
BCE
, it makes sense to work the land more intensively, squeezing more from each acre by manuring, plowing, and even irrigating. All these tasks require upper-body strength. Plenty of women are as strong as men, but men do increasingly dominate outdoor work and women indoor work as agriculture intensifies. Grown men work the fields; boys tend the flocks; and women and girls manage the ever more sharply defined domestic sphere. A study of 162 skeletons dating around
7000
BCE
from Abu Hureyra revealed striking gender distinctions. Both men and women had enlarged vertebrae in their upper backs, probably from carrying heavy loads on their heads, but only women had a distinctive arthritic toe condition caused by spending long periods kneeling, using their toes as a base to apply force while grinding grain.

Weeding, clearing stones, manuring, watering, and plowing all increased yields, and inheriting a well-tended field, rather than just any bit of land, made all the difference to a household’s fortunes. The way religion developed after 9600
BCE
suggests that people worried about ancestors and inheritance, and we should probably assume that it was at this point that they began reinforcing their rituals with other institutions. With so much at stake, men in modern peasant cultures want to be sure they really are the fathers of the children who will inherit their property. Foragers’ rather casual attitudes about sex yield to obsessive concern with daughters’ premarital virginity and wives’ extramarital activities. Men in traditional agricultural societies typically marry around the age of thirty, after they have come into their inheritance, while women generally marry around fifteen, before they have had much time to stray. While we cannot be sure that these patterns originated at the dawn of farming, it does seem rather likely. By, say, 7500
BCE
a girl would typically grow up under the authority of her father, then, as a teenager, exchange it for the authority of a husband old enough to be her father. Marriage would become a source of wealth as those who already had good lands and flocks would marry others in the same happy situation, consolidating holdings. The rich got richer.

Having things worth inheriting meant having things worth stealing, and it is surely no coincidence that evidence for fortifications and organized warfare mushrooms in the Hilly Flanks after 9600
BCE
. Modern hunter-gatherer life is famously violent; with no real hierarchy to keep their passions in check, young hunters often treat homicide as a reasonable way to settle disagreements. In many bands, it is the leading cause of death. But to live together in villages, people had to learn to manage interpersonal violence. Those that did so would have flourished—and have been able to harness violence to take things from other communities.

The most remarkable evidence comes from Jericho, famous for the biblical story of the walls that tumbled down when Joshua blew his
trumpet. When Kathleen Kenyon dug there fifty years ago, she did find walls—but not Joshua’s. Joshua lived around 1200
BCE
, but Kenyon uncovered what looked like fortifications eight thousand years older. She interpreted these as a defensive bastion, twelve feet high and five feet thick, dating to around 9300
BCE
. New studies in the 1980s showed that she was probably mistaken, and that her “fortification” actually consisted of several small walls built at different times, perhaps to hold back a stream; but her second great find, a stone tower twenty-five feet tall, probably really was defensive. In a world where the most advanced weapon was a stick with a pointed stone tied to the end, this was a mighty bulwark indeed.

Nowhere outside the Hilly Flanks did people have so much to defend. Even in 7000
BCE
, almost everyone outside this region was a forager, shifting seasonally, and even where they had begun to settle down in villages, such as Mehrgarh in modern Pakistan or Shangshan in the Yangzi Delta, these were simple places by the standards of Jericho. If hunter-gatherers from any other place on earth had been airlifted to Çayönü or Çatalhöyük they would not, I suspect, have known what hit them. Gone would be their caves or little clusters of huts, replaced by bustling towns with sturdy houses, great stores of food, powerful art, and religious monuments. They would find themselves working hard, dying young, and hosting an unpleasant array of microbes. They would rub shoulders with rich and poor, and chafe under or rejoice in men’s authority over women and parents’ over children. They might even discover that some people had the right to murder them in rituals. And they might well wonder why people had inflicted all this on themselves.

GOING FORTH AND MULTIPLYING

Fast-forward ten thousand years from the origins of hierarchy and drudgery in the prehistoric Hilly Flanks to Paris in 1967.

To the middle-aged men who administered the University of Paris campus in the dreary suburb of Nanterre—the heirs of traditions of patriarchy stretching back to Çatalhöyük—it seemed obvious that the young ladies in their charge should not be allowed to entertain young gentlemen in their dorm rooms (or vice versa). Such rules have probably
never seemed obvious to the young, but for three hundred generations teenagers had had to live with them. But not anymore. As winter closed in, students challenged their elders’ right to dictate their love lives. In January 1968 Daniel Cohn-Bendit, nowadays a respected Green Party member of the European Parliament but then a student activist known as “Danny the Red,” compared the minister for youth’s attitudes to the Hitler Youth’s. In May students took on armed police in running street-fights, paralyzing downtown Paris with barricades and burning cars. President De Gaulle met secretly with his generals to find out whether—if it came to a new Bastille Day—the army would stand by him.

Enter Marshall Sahlins, a youngish anthropology professor from the University of Michigan. Sahlins had made his name with a series of brilliant essays on social evolution and by criticizing the Vietnam War; now he forsook Ann Arbor (“
a small university city
made up exclusively of side streets,” he unkindly but not unfairly called it) to spend two years at the Collège de France, the Mecca of both anthropological theory and student radicalism. As the crisis deepened, Sahlins sent a manuscript to the journal
Les temps modernes
, required reading for everyone who was anyone on the French intellectual scene. It was to become one of the most influential anthropological essays ever written.

“
Open the gates
of nurseries, universities, and other prisons,” student radicals had scrawled on a wall at Nanterre. “Thanks to teachers and exams competitiveness starts at six.” Sahlins’s manuscript offered something to the students: not an answer, which the anarchists probably did not want (“Be a realist, demand the impossible” went one of their slogans), but at least some encouragement. The central issue, Sahlins argued, was that bourgeois society had “
erected a shrine
to the Unattainable:
Infinite Needs
.” We submit to capitalist discipline and compete to earn money so we can chase Infinite Needs by buying things we don’t really want. We could learn something, Sahlins suggested, from hunter-gatherers. “The world’s most primitive people,” he explained, “have few possessions
but they are not poor
.” This only sounded like a paradox: Sahlins argued that foragers typically worked just twenty-one to thirty-five hours per week—less than Paris’s industrial laborers or even, I suspect, its students. Hunter-gatherers did not have cars or TVs, but they did not know they were supposed to want them. Their means were few but their needs were fewer, making them, Sahlins concluded, “the original affluent society.”

Sahlins had a point: Why, he asked, did farming ever replace foraging if the rewards were work, inequality, and war? Yet replace foraging it clearly did. By 7000
BCE
farming completely dominated the Hilly Flanks. Already by 8500
BCE
cultivated cereals had spread to Cyprus and by 8000 had reached central Turkey. By 7000 fully domesticated plants had reached all these areas and spread eastward to (or, perhaps, developed independently in) Pakistan. They had reached Greece, southern Iraq, and central Asia by 6000, Egypt and central Europe by 5000, and the shores of the Atlantic by 4000 (
Figure 2.4
).