Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

Homo sapiens
gathering mushrooms and nuts and hunting deer and
rabbit did not all of a sudden settle in a permanent village, ploughing elds,
sowing wheat and carrying water from the river. The change proceeded by stages,
each of which involved just a small alteration in daily life.
Homo sapiens
reached the Middle East around 70,000 years ago. For the next
50,000 years our ancestors ourished there without agriculture. The natural
resources of the area were enough to support its human population. In times of
plenty people had a few more children, and in times of need a few less. Humans,
like many mammals, have hormonal and genetic mechanisms that help control
procreation. In good times females reach puberty earlier, and their chances of
getting pregnant are a bit higher. In bad times puberty is late and fertility
decreases.
To these natural population controls were added cultural mechanisms. Babies
and small children, who move slowly and demand much attention, were a burden
on nomadic foragers. People tried to space their children three to four years apart.
Women did so by nursing their children around the clock and until a late age
(around-the-clock suckling signi cantly decreases the chances of getting
pregnant). Other methods included full or partial sexual abstinence (backed
perhaps by cultural taboos), abortions and occasionally infanticide.
4
During these long millennia people occasionally ate wheat grain, but this was a
marginal part of their diet. About 18,000 years ago, the last ice age gave way to a
period of global warming. As temperatures rose, so did rainfall. The new climate
was ideal for Middle Eastern wheat and other cereals, which multiplied and
spread. People began eating more wheat, and in exchange they inadvertently
spread its growth. Since it was impossible to eat wild grains without rst
winnowing, grinding and cooking them, people who gathered these grains carried
them back to their temporary campsites for processing. Wheat grains are small
and numerous, so some of them inevitably fell on the way to the campsite and
were lost. Over time, more and more wheat grew along favourite human trails
and near campsites.
When humans burned down forests and thickets, this also helped wheat. Fire
cleared away trees and shrubs, allowing wheat and other grasses to monopolise
the sunlight, water and nutrients. Where wheat became particularly abundant,
and game and other food sources were also plentiful, human bands could
gradually give up their nomadic lifestyle and settle down in seasonal and even
permanent camps.
At rst they might have camped for four weeks during the harvest. A generation

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later, as wheat plants multiplied and spread, the harvest camp might have lasted
for ve weeks, then six, and nally it became a permanent village. Evidence of
such settlements has been discovered throughout the Middle East, particularly in
the Levant, where the Natu an culture ourished from 12,500 
BC
to 9500 
BC
. The
Natu ans were hunter-gatherers who subsisted on dozens of wild species, but they
lived in permanent villages and devoted much of their time to the intensive
gathering and processing of wild cereals. They built stone houses and granaries.
They stored grain for times of need. They invented new tools such as stone scythes
for harvesting wild wheat, and stone pestles and mortars to grind it.
In the years following 9500 
BC
, the descendants of the Natu ans continued to
gather and process cereals, but they also began to cultivate them in more and
more elaborate ways. When gathering wild grains, they took care to lay aside part
of the harvest to sow the elds next season. They discovered that they could
achieve much better results by sowing the grains deep in the ground rather than
haphazardly scattering them on the surface. So they began to hoe and plough.
Gradually they also started to weed the elds, to guard them against parasites,
and to water and fertilise them. As more e ort was directed towards cereal
cultivation, there was less time to gather and hunt wild species. The foragers
became farmers.
No single step separated the woman gathering wild wheat from the woman
farming domesticated wheat, so it’s hard to say exactly when the decisive
transition to agriculture took place. But, by 8500 
BC
, the Middle East was peppered
with permanent villages such as Jericho, whose inhabitants spent most of their
time cultivating a few domesticated species.
With the move to permanent villages and the increase in food supply, the
population began to grow. Giving up the nomadic lifestyle enabled women to
have a child every year. Babies were weaned at an earlier age – they could be fed
on porridge and gruel. The extra hands were sorely needed in the elds. But the
extra mouths quickly wiped out the food surpluses, so even more elds had to be
planted. As people began living in disease-ridden settlements, as children fed
more on cereals and less on mother’s milk, and as each child competed for his or
her porridge with more and more siblings, child mortality soared. In most
agricultural societies at least one out of every three children died before reaching
twenty.
5
 Yet the increase in births still outpaced the increase in deaths; humans
kept having larger numbers of children.
With time, the ‘wheat bargain’ became more and more burdensome. Children
died in droves, and adults ate bread by the sweat of their brows. The average
person in Jericho of 8500 
BC
lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho
of 9500 
BC
or 13,000 
BC
. But nobody realised what was happening. Every

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generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small
improvements here and there in the way things were done. Paradoxically, a series
of ‘improvements’, each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a
millstone around the necks of these farmers.
Why did people make such a fateful miscalculation? For the same reason that
people throughout history have miscalculated. People were unable to fathom the
full consequences of their decisions. Whenever they decided to do a bit of extra
work – say, to hoe the elds instead of scattering seeds on the surface – people
thought, ‘Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful!
We won’t have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to
sleep hungry.’ It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life.
That was the plan.
The rst part of the plan went smoothly. People indeed worked harder. But
people did not foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that
the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children. Neither did the
early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast
milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would
be hotbeds for infectious diseases. They did not foresee that by increasing their
dependence on a single source of food, they were actually exposing themselves
even more to the depredations of drought. Nor did the farmers foresee that in
good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies, compelling
them to start building walls and doing guard duty.
Then why didn’t humans abandon farming when the plan back red? Partly
because it took generations for the small changes to accumulate and transform
society and, by then, nobody remembered that they had ever lived differently. And