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.