LAND AND LABOURMarxism, Ecology and Human History

Martin Empson

In memory of Richard Empson1943-2013

LAND AND LABOUR

Marxism, Ecology and Human History

Martin Empson

Land and Labour: Marxism, Ecology and Human HistoryMartin Empson

Published 2014 by Bookmarks Publicationsc/o 1 Bloomsbury Street, London wc1b 3qe

Copyright Bookmarks PublicationsTypeset by Bookmarks Publications

Cover design by Tim SandersPrinted by Halstan Printing Ltd

ISBN print edition: 978 1 909026 52 0Kindle: 978 1 909026 53 7ePub: 978 1 909026 54 4PDF: 978 1 909026 55 1

Contents

Introduction1 Humans and nature2 Early human history3 Hunter-gatherers4 Early agriculture, class society and crisis5 Maya collapse6 The Americas: a fatal impact7 The rise of the peasant and the shaping of the modern landscape8 Historical change9 The development of modern agriculture10 Agriculture in the 20th century11 Capitalism and nature12 Urbanisation13 Climate change14 The future sustainable society

Bibliography Notes Index

Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the help of many people. I would like to thank JosephChoonara, Andy Cunningham, Mark Krantz, Paul McGarr, Jonathan Neale, John Parrington, MattRead and Anna Roik. Their suggestions and help proved invaluable.

Thanks to Mary Phillips, Peter Robinson and Tim Sanders for their work in producing the finalbook. I am particularly grateful to Sally Campbell for turning my original manuscript into the finishedproduct.

Finally I would like to thank Sarah Ensor for her encouragement and support at every stage.

Introduction

The next few decades will determine whether the human species will continue to be able to surviveon planet Earth. The threat from global warming, explained in a thousand scientific papers, hundredsof books, films and articles, is unquestionable. Without fundamental change the impact that we havebeen making on the environment since the dawn of the industrial age will culminate in catastrophicclimate change. No scientist can predict when that might happen. But every year we delay in reducinggreenhouse gas emissions makes environmental disaster more likely.

Scientists have known about global warming for decades. A few politicians have been aware ofthe problem for almost as long. Campaigners have been trying to get action for many years. Todayunderstanding of the threat from climate change is higher than it has ever been. Yet emissions continueto rise.

Even the United Nations meetings designed to assess progress on climate change have provedimpotent. Economic differences bound up with differing national interests often turn the conferencesinto political battlegrounds. At Copenhagen in 2009 US President Barack Obama, together with theleaders of China, Brazil, India and South Africa, scuppered the negotiating process that would lead toagreement on emissions reductions.1

During the writing of this book I travelled to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to take part in protests andcounter-conferences outside the 2012 United Nations Summit on Sustainable Development. The utterfailure by international politicians to agree meaningful action in Rio was a further tragicdemonstration of an all too common theme.2

The problem is not that politicians do not understand climate change, nor is it necessarily that theydo not care. Neither is it a question of technology. As we shall see, the solutions that woulddrastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions already exist. Rather the problem is rooted in capitalism.

In order to understand why capitalism is so unable to deal with environmental crisis we need tounderstand the wider dynamics of the relationship between human society and nature.

Humans have always changed nature. Our earliest ancestors picked fruit and hunted animals, madetools, cut down trees and planted crops. Whole ecologies were altered as humans learnt to farm. Thespread of agriculture led to enormous amounts of deforestation across the world.

Capitalism, the system that we live in today, is relatively new. In only a few hundred years it hasspread globally, fundamentally reshaping ourselves as well as the planet. But capitalism alsorepresents an enormous growth in the productive forces and hence our ability to transform nature nowthreatens global ecological and environmental systems. Capitalism is a system geared towards theinterests of the few at the top of society, rather than the majority. But this is not what makes it unusualwhen compared to how we lived in the past. There have been many different hierarchical societies,organised in the interest of a tiny elite at the expense of the majority. What makes capitalism unique ishow production is organised. The drive to accumulate wealth for the sake of further accumulation isat the core of this system. It is this drive which makes capitalism so destructive and so unable to dealwith the threat of environmental disaster.

For most of human history we organised our lives in very different ways. Before human societywas divided into classes, our communities were more egalitarian, more communal and less violentthan today. The relationship between those societies and the natural world surrounding them was verydifferent too. That changing relationship is the subject of this book.

Dealing with climate change means dealing with the question of capitalism. If we are to solve theenvironmental crisis we will have to radically challenge the priorities of the system. The possibilityof change can seem remote. Yet throughout our history we have constantly revolutionised how weorganise ourselves.

History is not a gradual process. Indeed the archaeological record is littered with examples ofsocieties and civilisations that were unable to develop or adjust to changing circumstances.

Nature itself has a history. Animals and plants have evolved, some have gone extinct and arelatively small number have been domesticated. The planet has seen repeated ice ages, as well aswarmer periods. It has experienced gradual changes in temperature as well as sudden climate change.These variations have also played a role in the human story. At crucial moments in our past thenatural world has had devastating effects on societies or has helped to prompt a new stage in ourhistory.

At every moment in human history our ancestors have simultaneously relied on and altered thenatural world around them. The ways in which they have done this demonstrate our resourcefulnessand intelligence. The ways in which those societies have organised, why some failed and somedeveloped further, contain lessons for us today as we face our greatest environmental threat.

This book begins by exploring the importance of the relationship between humans and nature. Thisrelationship is dialectical: the changes we make to nature impact back upon us.

In chapters 2 and 3 I look at the earliest human history, the evolution of our species and how itspread around the globe and the way that climate change played a role in this. I also examine theradically different ways that humans organised their societies in the distant past, to demonstrate thathuman nature is not fixed, but has changed throughout history.

The production of food has been the fundamental way that we have altered nature. Agriculture isthus one of the central themes of this book. Farming has changed the natural world in dramatic ways,but it has also played a central role in shaping our own societiesfor instance, it was only with thedevelopment of agriculture that class society became possible.

In chapter 4 I look at the early history of agriculture and the way that it is closely linked with thedevelopment of class society. The Neolithic agricultural revolution marked the beginning of the endfor the egalitarian societies of early human history. From this point onwards human history wasdominated by class society. In this chapter I explore the early history of Egypt, to show howagriculture was closely associated with the development of a centralised state. This chapter and thenext also examine the way ancient society related to environmental crisis.

A number of writers, most notably the American academic Jared Diamond, have explored the waythat historical environmental crisis and collapse can be a warning for the world today. In chapter 5 Iexplore this further by focusing on the specific experience of the Maya.

I have not attempted to write a complete human history. Instead I have looked at periods thatilluminate the fundamental relationship between us and the natural world and moments of changebetween different historical periods. These might be the great historical transformations that tookplace when human society moved from one mode of production to another, whether the neolithic

revolution or the transition from feudalism to capitalism. But this also means exploring the changesthat take place when one form of society meets another. In chapter 6 I examine the impact of thearrival of Europeans in the Americas. This was a period when attitudes towards the natural worldwere completely reshaped, and in the process many indigenous societies were brutally forced into anew way of organising. Chapter 7 explores the development of early agriculture and European feudalsociety. This fundamentally reshaped the natural world and laid the basis for the beginnings ofmodern capitalism. Here I also explore the new ways of looking at the relationship between thenatural world and humans through some of the radical ideas of the English Revolution.

Karl Marxs theory of history, historical materialism, is rooted in the relationship between humansand nature. This makes it an ideal way to understand both historical change and its environmentalconsequences. In chapter 8 I look at Marxs ideas and what they mean for our ecological history.

In chapters 9 and 10 I examine the development of modern agriculture. This is inseparable fromthe rise of capitalism, and in particular I look at how rural society had to be forcibly transformed,through clearances, enclosures and the use of force against rural populations. I then look at the firstgreat crises of agriculture under capitalism and the development of the modern industrial agriculturalsystem that dominates todays world.

Chapter 11 explores the particular relationship between capitalism and nature. This meansunderstanding capitalism, how it works and what it does to people. It also means understanding therelationship between the system and the companies that dominate the economy.

The development of towns and cities fundamentally reshaped the ecology of the countryside, and inchapter 12 I examine the growth of urban areas.

Chapter 13 looks at the science of climate change. This is not complex but is often shrouded inconfusion. I explain what causes climate change and what it means. I also look at potential solutionsand try to explain the question posed at the beginning of this introduction, Why is nothing beingdone?

In the final chapter I explore what a sustainable world would look like. I argue that this must comeabout through the fundamental transformation of society, the replacement of capitalism with socialism.A socialist society is one based on a democratic planned economy, and I conclude this book with anexploration of why such an economy would be sustainable, by looking at some historical examples toshow how it could come about.

This book is written from an explicitly Marxist viewpoint. Marx and Engels did not know aboutglobal warming but throughout their lives they demonstrated a fascination with nature. Both of themfollowed with great interest the debates around evolutionary theory. Less than a month after CharlesDarwin published the Origin of Species, Marx described it as absolutely splendid in a letter toEngels.3 Both were excited by the growing understanding of early human history, in particular thework of Lewis Morgan whose 1877 book Ancient Society formed the basis for much of their ownfurther writings. In the late 1870s and early 1880s Marx read widely on diverse subjects such asprehistoric Europe, the history of India, Dutch colonialism, family and gender in Roman society andAmerican Indian societies.4 This wide interest reflects Marxs understanding of how humansocieties have developed and changed throughout history and how this has influenced the culturalattitudes that we have had throughout our history.

Today we have much more archaeological and anthropological evidence than was available toMarx and Engels. Some of their ideas were of their time and are no longer accepted by scientists. But

as a recent book argues, Engels writings on the transition from ape to man, for instance, havestood the test of time.5 Some of the details of their thoughts on early human history and evolutionmay be incorrect, but their approach teaches us many things.

The work of Marx and Engels is most useful in understanding how human society has changed andhow we can change it in future. If we are to survive the current environmental crisis, we need tocreate a sustainable world that puts the relationship between people and their planet at the heart of itspriorities; this I argue will require a radical break with our existing society. Such revolutionarychange may seem daunting, but it is necessary for the future of our planet and its people.

A note on dates and terminology

In this book Ive used CE (Common Era) and BCE (before Common Era) for describing dates. Whilethis mirrors the conventional AD and BC, it acknowledges that the most of the world does not follow aChristian calendar.

For more ancient dates, BP (before present) is used. This is a standard frequently used inarchaeological and historical writings. Here the present is designated as being the year 1950, areference point chosen because the 1950s were the decade in which radiocarbon dating first becamepractical and because it predates the regular testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, whichaltered the natural ratio of carbon isotopes, a sad example of human ability to change nature.

In discussing agriculture, land areas are very important. The hectare is 10,000 m2 which isapproximately the size of Trafalgar Square in London or one and a third soccer pitches; 100 hectaresis 1 km2. An older measurement of land area, the acre, is just over half the size of a modern soccerpitch. Hyde Park in London is 350 acres.

Chapter 1

Humans and nature

Like all living things humans depend upon the natural world. At the very least we need water to drinkand food to eat. If we are to survive the worlds varied climates we need shelter and clothing toprotect us.

All human societies are based on a productive process whose end result is the satisfaction of thesebasic needs. As Karl Marx put it, the first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfythese needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamentalcondition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilledmerely in order to sustain human life.6

This is not always obvious. Most inhabitants of the cities of Europe or North America do notengage in labour to grow their own food. Even those city dwellers who have a small allotment do notcut themselves off completely from the distant unseen work that goes towards the mass production offood. For those of us living in the developed world the labour that goes into providing drinking waterrarely crosses our minds. We simply turn on a tap. Later we will see how this separation betweenhumans and nature under capitalism brings its own problems, but without humans working on nature,all of us would starve.

Every other aspect of society depends on this relationship. Frederick Engels summed this up whenhe said that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursuepolitics, science, art and religion, etc.7 We change the environment in many different ways, but thenatural world influences us as well. The changes we make to the environment impact back upon us.Farmers cut down trees to create farmland, but this deforestation can also allow the fertile soil to bewashed away. Engels cautioned:

Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takesits revenge on us we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside naturebut that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the factthat we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.8

This ability has allowed us to spread across the whole globe, to live in environments as varied asthe arctic tundra or the rainforests of South America. We have developed tools and technologies toenable us to do this. It is true that some other animals also use toolsdifferent types of birds usesticks to get at insects hidden in tree bark, for instance. But there is a fundamental difference with theway that humans use and conceive of tools. Before the first proto-human could create a stone tool 2.6million years ago in Africa, he or she would have required hands capable of manipulating stones anda brain capable of imagining the final product of an operation before it had even been started aswell as the physical strength and dexterity to create the tool.9

As a species we lack speed, strength and sharp teeth or claws with which to protect ourselves.The development of tools for hunting and defence would have helped. The evolution of our brainsalso helped. A more complex brain allowed us to better judge situations, to out-think and outwit the

opposition, to predict its likely behaviour and the behaviour of your fellow hunters. 10 Someanimals also exhibit predictive behaviour when hunting, but this evolved behaviour in humansallowed far more complex social interactions to develop.

One theory, known as the Social Brain Hypothesis, suggests that our large brains have evolvednot just in response to human needs for things like foraging and hunting skills, tool-making andinvention, but also because of the complex societies in which we live.11 There is evidence that someanimals such as wild chimpanzees exhibit cultures: shared traditions of behaviour in gatheringfood, for instance. These are learnt as the chimp grows up. But as anthropologist Chris Stringer pointsout, these are a long way from the cultural repertoire of even the earliest humans in Africa twomillion years ago.12 Early humans needed tools to get food and protect themselves, but they alsoneeded social organisation, which in turn needed a more evolved brain. As the Marxist Chris Harmanexplains:

Over many millennia those creatures whose genes changed in such a way as to best enable them to learn from, to communicatewith and to care for each other would have an advantage when it came to surviving and reproducing. Natural selection would bringabout the evolutionof ever larger, denser and more complex neural networks, capable of directing and learning from intricatemotor functions of the hand and of using minute changes in gesture or voice to communicate.13

This in turn helped to encourage the further development of the ability to labour, sociability andcommunication. So the reason that early humans were able to develop new tools, technologies andlive in varied parts of the world is:

2 million years of cumulative evolution, with labour at each stage encouraging the adept hand, greater sociability and the largerbrain. And, at each stage, the adept hand, greater sociability and the larger brain made possible more advanced forms of labourSuch labour had enormous implications for the brain. Those best at co-operating with others in tool production and use would havebeen those whose brains underwent changes in structure and size that made them better at co-ordinating the motor functionscontrolling the hands with vision and hearing, while also becoming more responsive to the signals of others of their kind.14

So labour helped to stimulate the development of communication, culture and further tool use.Hundreds of thousands of years ago early humans were already using tools, not from instinct likesome animals, but because they could comprehend how they could help the user obtain food. As Marxput it:

A spider conducts operations which resemble those of a weaver, and a bee would put many human architects to shame by theconstruction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds thecell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already beenconceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally.15

Chris Stringer echoes this:We remain unique in the extent to which we modify the world we live in through the things we create. Beyond that, we also createimaginary worlds that are entirely virtual, made up of thoughts and ideasworlds that live in our minds, from stories and spiritualdomains through to theories and mathematical concepts.16

Over hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors developed more and more advanced stonetools. The first tools were little more than stones that had been broken to create a sharp edge.Excavations at sites such as Boxgrove quarry in England show that half a million years ago earlyhumans were making complicated flint hand axes and using them to skin and butcher animals. OtherEuropean sites have yielded hunting spears dating to between 300,000 and 400,000 years ago.

Technological developments throughout human history have played an important role in our abilityto change the world. We are familiar with how modern machines can destroy huge swathes of theworld todaythink of the phenomenal rate at which we can clear the rainforests using chainsaws and

bulldozers. But even during the earliest stages in our history our behaviour has changed the naturalworld, sometimes permanently.

At Klasies River Mouth, a site in modern South Africa, archaeological evidence from 75,000 to55,000 years ago shows that early humans were manipulating the landscape to improve their foodsources. The vegetation at Klasies River Mouth is a mixture of plants called fynbos, one of which is aflower called watsonia, which has an edible bulb. Early humans in the area understood that if theyburned the fynbos off, they could return the following year to find that watsonia had increased indensity by five to ten times. Archaeologists can see the evidence for this in burnt plants in thehistorical layer. This means that up to 75,000 years ago humans were exhibiting a delayed-returnstrategy, shaping the natural landscape in the interest of their future food supply.17

The analysis of pollen trapped in ancient mud and clay from the bottom of rivers and lakes tellsarchaeologists about ancient ecologies. Around 9000 BP a sudden spread of hazelnuts across Europecan be detected. Since these nuts are too heavy to be transported far by animals, but are extremelynutritious, the evidence indicates humans may have been spreading the nuts as they travelled. It ispossible that Mesolithic people may have deliberately planted and nurtured hazelnut bushes toprovide future food supplies. Thus early on in human history, our interaction with the natural worldbegan to shape it in permanent ways. As one author comments, humans consciously intervened in thegrowth of vegetation and began the process of transforming nature into a cultural landscape.18

Changes like these can have unexpected consequences which are not always positive for thepeople making them. The first people to arrive in North America found enormous numbers of largeanimals: mammoths, mastodons, wild horses, giant sloths, camels and lions. Unused to humans, theseproved easy hunting. Over the next 2,000 years as these first Americans spread across the continentthey were able to undermine the viability of the herds and help cause the extinction of the mega fauna.Thus their own success at hunting meant that they had to find alternate sources of food. Even smallnumbers of people with simple tools could fundamentally alter the natural world.19

As our societies have developed, the ability to change the world has also grown. In the past, if ourancestors over-hunted a herd of animals, it might mean that their tribe would starve. Today thechanges we make are global. Preventing this change being catastrophic will depend on our ability toboth understand our social relationship to nature and create a society that utilises the natural world ina sustainable way.

Chapter 2

Early human history

Global warming played an important part in the evolution of our earliest ancestors. Mammals have along history on planet Earth with the earliest fossil remains dating to 170 to 120 million years ago,but a key evolutionary moment took place around 55 million years ago when global temperatures rosesignificantly. For 100,000 years this warming caused the rapid expansion of forests across thenorthern hemisphere. This proved to be ideal for the early tree living primates that then spread acrossthe land masses from southern Asia to North America and Europe.20

Most of these primates did not survive the period of cooling that followed but the descendants ofthe ones that did evolved into the apes that appeared around 23 million years ago.21 These apes werebeginning to look like those we see today. The need to be able to climb trees, swing from branchesand hold food without falling meant they developed very flexible joints. This had importantconsequences, as evolutionary ecologist Clive Finlayson explains, because it would give one distantdescendant the ability to manipulate the hand and, among many other things, make tools.22

Over the next six million years apes gradually evolved and spread throughout the world. But thehighest concentration and variety remained in the huge forests that covered Africa. As the worldalternately warmed and cooled, the areas open to apes grew and shrank. Eventually tree cover shrankto such an extent that that by ten million years ago apes were restricted to two small regions, centralAfrica and south-east Asia.23

Between seven and eight million years ago, after millions of years of evolutionary change, the apesin Africa split into two separate evolutionary branches. One of these gave rise to the modern daygorilla. The other branch split again two million years later with one branch becoming our first humanancestors, while the other split again, later becoming the ancestors of chimpanzees and bonobos.24

The warming that led to the spread of forests across much of the world permitted an explosion oftree-dwelling mammals which gave them and their descendants such a strong evolutionary launchplatform. The rise and fall of sea levels as the world warmed and cooled helped allow early primatesto spread around the world.

The role of climate is not the only factor in the evolution of humans but it is an important one.Using the analogy of a theatrical play, Finlayson argues that the planetary theatre takes place inseveral different acts, initially restricted to parts of Africa and Eurasia but eventually Australia andthen the Americas The scenes and stage sets change with each act and on each stage. The stagemanager is climate, constantly changing and rearranging the scenes.25

Much of what happened for the next few million years of human history is obscure. From sevenmillion to around five million years ago, we have a handful of fossil remains from African sites. But asudden event 5.33 million years BP caused the local climate to alter dramatically, impactingenormously upon our ancestors. The formation of the modern Mediterranean Sea took place when theAtlantic Ocean broke through what became the Strait of Gibraltar. The whole climate of North Africa

changed and began to resemble that which we see today. The rainforests that had covered Africabroke up, forcing the earliest ancestors of humans, or proto-humans, to walk across gaps wherethere had once been continuous tree cover.

On the shores of the ancient Lake Chad generations of proto-humans lived and evolved. Today thelake is about one and a half thousand square kilometres, but then it was enormous, its shores a mosaicof rich environments which would have gone from desert at one extreme to forest and savannah at theother.26 This variety helped to encourage our ancestors to adapt to life in different environments.

Over the next three million years these proto-humans would spread across Africa. A skeletondiscovered in Ethiopia in 1973-4 and nicknamed Lucy dates from this period. The archaeologists whofound her bones named her after a Beatles song, though her Amharic name Dinkenesh, meaning Youare amazing, is far more appropriate for early humans who dominated the world for the next fewmillion years.

Dinkenesh and her relatives were bipedal, but would not have been able to run.27 A great diversityof small-brained proto-humans like her lived from around five to 1.8 million years BP. As climatecontinued to change over this time the African landscape was transformed into much more open areasas tree cover declined. Only a few types of proto-humans survived: those who were capable ofliving in this new hostile world. But this new landscape allowed for new opportunities, chief amongthem the first stone implement made around 2.6 million years ago. As Clive Finlayson comments, theworld changed forever.28

The scarcity of fossil remains from this period makes it hard to know exactly what evolutionaryroute humans took. We do know that around two million years ago the first human-like species, Homoergaster, evolved in Africa. 29 These humans rapidly spread out across Africa and reached south eastAsia 1.8 million years ago.30 Surviving by scavenging, Homo ergaster evolved a body shape thatmade walking or running long distances more efficient.

This had enormous evolutionary consequences for humans. In females the birth canal was muchnarrower than in their immediate ancestors; this meant human babies were born earlier and theirbrains continued to develop outside their mothers wombs, so human children need to be protectedand nurtured long after those of other mammals.

There is debate as to whether Homo ergaster is a separate species from one of the most successfulof early humans, Homo erectus. It is possible that the separate names really only refer to the Africanand Asian populations of the same wider group of humans. But the colonisation through Asia byHomo erectus is an important moment in our history. From then onwards human evolution took on anew direction. Up until that point our ancestors were ape-like, afterwards they were recognisablyhuman as paleoanthropologists Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin explain:

Everything after Homo erectus was distinctly humanlike, in behaviour as well as form. The beginnings of a hunting-and-gatheringway of life came with Homo erectus, stone tools for the first time gave the impression of standardisation, the imposition of a mentaltemplate, fire was harnessed for the first timeand surely the rudiments of languageperhaps even consciousnesswereproduced in a dramatically expanding brain.31

It is possible that as long ago as 800,000 years ago Homo erectus used fire in a controlled fashion.It is generally accepted that evidence of hearths and burnt bones in caves in Zhoukoudian, China showthat Homo erectus used fire up to 500,000 years ago and at a site in Suffolk, England, by 400,000years ago.32 Homo erectus may not have had the ability to make fire though, relying on lightningstrikes or forest fires and keeping flames burning. But in the last 200,000 years hearths are

increasingly common at ancient human sites.We cannot tell when the cooking of food became ubiquitous for early humans. Some sites show

evidence that, while fire was being used, meat was not necessarily being cooked. Archaeologicalevidence from Gibraltar, for instance, shows that Neanderthals there knew that putting mussels in theembers of a fire would open them, but that meat was being eaten raw.

The use of fire was probably the first example of our ancestors controlling nature in anymeaningful sense and would have had a profound impact on their lives and social interaction.Cooking was important for early humans because it meant their diet would have improved. Cookingkills harmful bacteria and parasites and allows a greater variety of foods to be eaten. But cookingmay well have had much wider implications for human development.33 Chris Stringer explains that:

cooking provided an extra social focus for fire, in that individuals could cook for each other, for partners, kin, friends and honouredguests. Once cooking became central to human life, it would have influenced our evolution, leading to changes in digestion, gut sizeand function, tooth and jaw size, and the muscles for mastication.34

Homo erectus were extremely successful at using tools. The simplest would have been knivesdesigned for chopping, the blades made by chipping pieces from one side of a piece of stone. After amillion years of use Homo erectus had invented tools cut on two sides. Initially these were crude andsimple, but by 250,000 years ago the edges were more finely cut.

Homo erectus was the most successful of prehistoric humans, lasting for over 1.5 million yearsand spreading from Africa through the Middle East, China as far as South East Asia, sites beingknown on the Indonesian islands.

Our own human species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa around 130,000 years ago, probablydescendants of the Homo erectus who remained in Africa. Eventually we became the only humanspecies on the planet. But this process took many thousands of years. Early Homo sapiens were highlyskilled. Their larger brains allowed further developments of tools, including chisels, drills, scrapers,knives, axes and oil lamps.

The different human species did not simply replace each other; there would have been overlap forlong periods. For instance, Homo erectus would have shared territory for up to half a million yearswith an earlier species of small brained proto-humans.35 This would imply there was no immediatedomination by one species over the other or perhaps there was no need for the two groups to competefor similar foods.

Another descendent of Homo erectus was the Neanderthals. The human lineage that was to becomethe Neanderthals probably split from our own ancestors around 780,000 years ago.36 TheNeanderthals reached their heyday around 125,000 years ago, dominating Europe, hunting large gamesuch as mammoths. Homo sapiens and Neanderthal communities coexisted for some thousands ofyears. It is difficult to determine how frequent contacts between the two groups were, particularly aspopulation sizes were low. However, there is some evidence for inter-breeding and possibly theexchange of ideas such as wearing of shells or animal teeth as jewellery between the two groups.37

The exact reasons why the Neanderthals died out and were replaced by Homo sapiens are notknown. Neanderthals had been tremendously successful, surviving for over 300,000 years, but thenthey disappeared completely. Some researchers argue that as the world cooled and their preferredenvironments vanished, the Neanderthal population became geographically restricted and declined.The last population of Neanderthals died out in Gibraltar, the furthest south that they could get, around30,000 years ago.38

But it is also possible that Neanderthal populations never reached a size that enabled them todevelop further and survive the arrival of other humans.39 The truth is probably somewhere inbetween. In some parts of the world Neanderthals would have died out as a result of the changingenvironment. In others the changing climate might have led to increased competition for resourcesfrom the more behaviourally developed Homo sapiens. Our own ancestors were better able to exploitthe ecological niches that they shared with the Neanderthals. This is not to say that Homo sapiensphysically destroyed the Neanderthals, though there may well have been conflict. For whicheverreason, the Neanderthals died out and by 30000 BP Homo sapiens were the only humans on theplanet.40

At this time Earth was entering the deepest point of the last ice age. For the next 20,000 yearshumans would have to struggle with a climate that was increasingly cold and dry. Glaciers wereexpanding outwards from the North Pole while deserts were growing. At this point in our earlyhistory there were possibly only one million humans alive.41

Chapter 3

Hunter-gatherers

For the vast majority of human history humans existed by hunting and gathering. Today some groups ofhunter-gatherers survive, though few of these have remained unaffected by the influence of othersocieties. Even the most isolated groups have changed as a result of interactions with scientists,hunters, miners or forestry workers.

The very earliest humans probably lived by foraging rather than hunting. Their food came fromnuts, fruits and berries as well as the meat they could get from other animals kills or natural deaths.Stone tools meant that obtaining meat was more a question of luck than hunting ability.

For many hunter-gatherers, hunting is very important in the social life of the community, but rarelywould meat have been the most important source of nutrition. In pure energy terms hunting is not asefficient a way of obtaining nourishment as the gathering of foods.

Studies in the 1960s of the !Kung people, hunter-gatherers living in Botswana, confirms this.*Vegetables and fruit formed the bulk of their diet, with meat providing 40 percent of their calories,unevenly distributed through the year. During the best hunting seasons daily consumption of meat maybe over 2 kg per person, while at other times there was little or no meat.42

Hunter-gatherer communities live a semi-nomadic life, but they do not wander aimlessly. Theymove from place to place through a yearly cycle. The places where they stay are chosen because oftheir proximity to food sources during different seasons. At one time of year hunter-gatherers may stayclose to rivers where fish are plentiful, later they might follow a herd of animals as they move to newfeeding grounds, and at another time they stop near a source of fruits, nuts and berries. The need totravel was born from necessity. Hunter-gatherers are limited by the food available locally. Once ithas been eaten, it is necessary to find more. Sometimes hunter-gatherers do have some semi-permanent dwellings, allowing the group to return to a place with abundant food at a particular timeof the year.

The food itself, whether hunted or gathered, would be shared among the wider group, rather thanjust those who had brought it back. While there may have been divisions among the sexes about whodid what, both men and women were responsible for obtaining food. Other social roles, such aschildcare, were not the preserve of one sex either, with the group collectively taking responsibility.Anthropologist Eleanor Burke Leacock points out the way that the role of the family among hunter-gatherers differs dramatically from modern attitudes, writing that in a gathering hunting society thenuclear family, although seemingly a unit, is functionally merged in the band collective in a mannerwithout parallel in Western culture.43

Hunter-gatherer groups exhibit a much more collective social approach. Without sharing andcommunal support the bands might not survive periods of shortages. Anthropologists have frequentlyrecorded examples from around the world where hunter-gatherers without food have been helped byothers from their group. One example is from Peter Freuchen, a Danish writer. Following his own

unsuccessful hunt, he recorded the words of a fellow Inuit hunter who came to give him severalhundred pounds of meat. Freuchens profuse thanks were met with indignation:

Up in our country we are human! said the hunter. And since we are human we help each other. We dont like to hear anybodysay thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips onemakes dogs.44

Few hunter-gatherer communities that have survived until today remain unaffected by the modernworld; they are often integrated into trading networks and have manufactured goods such as clothingand tools. Despite this, they do frequently retain characteristics of their past social organisation.Their egalitarian life is often difficult for outside observers to comprehend. We will explore this laterwhen we discuss Eleanor Burke Leacocks studies of the Montagnais people of eastern Canada.

There is a characteristic lack of permanent leaders in hunter-gatherer communities. Instead there isoften a type of collective-democracy in day to day decision making. The role of leaders or chiefs is toserve the wider community, rather than materially benefit from their position, however temporary.When asked by an anthropologist if his people had chiefs, one member of the !Kung responded, Ofcourse we have headmen! In fact, we are all headmen; each one of us is headman over himself.45

Leaders among the !Kung had no real power; they could persuade, but not enforce their opinions.Local camps might well be named after an individual, for instance Bon!as camp at !Kangwa. Butthese individuals were unlikely to be leaders as we imagine them. They were often individuals knownfor being the best speakers, arguers, ritual specialists and hunters, or simply those who had lived inan area for the longest. Even the !Kung word for chief was rarely used about themselves and thenusually in a derisory manner, though it was applied to other tribes headmen and even Englishroyalty.46

In their important study of the creation of inequality in human societies, the anthropologists KentFlannery and Joyce Marcus point out that hunter-gatherer communities work actively to preventinequality from emerging. Humour and disapproval would be used to downplay any potential feelingsof superiority. A !Kung hunter asking for help bringing a kill to camp would be told, You think thisskinny bag of bones is worth carrying? The !Kung hunters also exchanged arrows before a hunt.Their arrows were individually marked, but by mixing them up, each hunter, irrespective of his skill,would eventually be credited with a successful kill. Flannery and Kent conclude that in all suchsocieties, inhabitants used social pressure, disapproval and ridicule to prevent anyone developing asense of superiority.47

But it is not simply in terms of social organisation that a hunter-gatherers view of the worlddiffers from ours. Notions of ownership or private property are radically different. Land, huntinggrounds or access to streams are not owned individually, but used collectively. This use wastemporary, based on the need for resources rather than any claim to permanent control.

The environmental historian William Cronon notes that among indigenous peoples in NewEngland, families enjoyed exclusive use of their planted fields and of the land on which theirwigwams stood, and so might be said to have owned them. But neither of these were permanentpossessions. Wigwams were moved every few months, and planting fields were abandoned after anumber of yearsno effort was made to set permanent boundaries What families possessed in theirfields was the use of them.48

A common misconception about hunter-gatherer societies is that life was short and unpleasant. Butthis is also not true. Contemporary studies and archaeological evidence have shown that hunter-

gatherers were often healthy. Their lives were not necessarily short either. The average life-expectancy might be only 30 to 40 years, but this is due to very high infant mortality levels. Amonghunter-gatherers who have had little experience of modern medicine, only 57 percent of childrenreach the age of 15.49 But those children who survived to their teenage years were likely to have longlives, long enough to become grandparents. One extensive study of hunter-gatherers concluded that forthose who reached adulthood, the modal age at death (the age when individuals were most likely todie) was between 68 and 78 years.50 The Hadza people of Tanzania and the !Kung had modal ages atdeath for adults of 76 and 74 years respectively.51

The Hadza live in an area around Lake Eyasi. Today they number around 1,000 individuals, theirlifestyle little changed from when they were first recorded in the early 20th century. The lake isabundant in game and foods such as fruit, nuts and tubers. Despite being surrounded by farmers, theHadza have not taken up agriculture, despite pressure from colonial administrations and theTanzanian government.

Because of the abundance of food, and their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, the Hadza do not have tospend much time working. In fact, their lives are characterised by lots of leisure time. For instance,one study in the 1960s commented that Hadza men seem more concerned with games of chance thanwith chances of game. During the long dry season especially, they pass the greater part of days on endin gambling. Only a minority of the men were active hunters of large animals, and while the womenare more assiduous in collecting foods it is a leisurely pace and without prolonged labour. Thefood collected includes the highly nutritious fruit of the mongongo tree, which provides around 40percent of their daily energy requirements.52

The Hadza spent an average of less than two hours a day getting food, and preferred to reject theNeolithic [agricultural] revolution in order to keep their leisure.53

This figure does not include time spent preparing food, cooking or other tasks such as looking afterchildren, but is a remarkably short time. Other studies of hunter-gatherer communities have shownsimilar results; on average an adult spends between three and five hours a day producing food.54 Totalworking hours are higher. In a study of the !Kung people the total average working week (for bothsexes) was over 42 hours, though the total time obtaining food was less than half of this. It is worthnoting that the men of the !Kung spent more time hunting than the women spent collecting food (21.6hours against 12.6 hours) yet the contribution to nutrition from the gathered food was much moreimportant.55

Because the relatively short amount of time spent collecting food for hunter-gatherers comparesvery favourably with the time spent farming, not all communities made the transition to agriculture. Asa member of the !Kung said, Why should we plant when there are so many mongongos in theworld?56

Some agriculturalists switch back to hunter-gathering when circumstances change. Neighbours ofboth the !Kung and Hadza resort to hunter-gathering if their crops fail.57

The motivation for switching from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to agriculture is complex. Agriculturebrings many benefits, predominantly the potential for greater quantities of food. But it is important thatwe do not see the benefits of agriculture as the motivation for the initial move to farming. There weremany reasons not to make the transition and the transition itself would have happened over a lengthyperiod of time. Some recent studies have argued that the switch to agriculture came, not becausepeople could foresee the benefits of agriculture, but because it developed organically out of their own

way of organising society. In particular it helped address the question of predictability of foodsupply. We have already seen how very early humans clearly understood that they could helpencourage plants to produce more food. Modern hunter-gatherer communities exhibit detailedknowledge about the varied plants and animals in their regions.

Anthropologists Fiona Marshall and Elisabeth Hildebrand argue that in some African hunter-gatherer communities the replanting of natural spontaneous crops to more accessible areas was anattempt by villagers to overcome potential problems with their normal food supplies. It is not easy totell when plants that are some distance away are ready to eat, or to protect them from pests and wildanimals. The Sheko and Dizi farmers of Ethiopia often replant yams closer to their homes, while inanother part of Africa the Okiek people are known to replant basella, a wild climbing plant commonin steep ravines, to the doorways of their homes. In both these cases the replanting has more to dowith ease of access than the amount of food obtained.58

It is not a difficult leap from this basic farming to more complex crop growing. Once agriculturehad begun, its potential rewards would have made the further expansion of farming attractive. Out ofnecessity hunter-gather communities are small groupings of individuals. Growing populations couldonly survive if they were able to split into smaller groups. If the community was unable or unwillingto divide, they would have had to find a more productive method of obtaining food. So people whohad started to grow crops, even in the most limited sense, would have been encouraged to extend thepractice.

But even this did not necessarily mean an end to the hunter-gatherer life. For instance, thecultivation of maize in the Americas did not immediately lead to communities switching to apermanent agricultural lifestyle. Writing about indigenous American tribes, historian Jake Pagedescribes the Bat Cave site in central New Mexico, where it appears that people planted this newcultigen in the spring and then went on to make their seasonal rounds, hunting and gathering, to returnto Bat Cave and harvest whatever maize plants had survived.59

Before agriculture humans lived in societies without class divisions. The development ofagriculture slowly began to change this. But, initially at least, many characteristics of hunter-gatherercommunities carried over into the new agricultural societies. For instance, studies of the Nuer peoplein Sudan in the 1930s and 1940s showed a society without leaders governed by a democraticsentiment, with limited ownership of private property beyond cattle. The Nuer were agriculturalpeople growing millet and herding cattle, but their social lives were close to the lives of hunter-gatherer communities.60

Eventually agriculture led to big changes. Most nomadic groups became sedentary and villagesbecame permanent.

At the end of the last ice age, around 20,000 years ago, humans lived an egalitarian life of huntingand gathering. Within a few thousand years, a new era of agriculture, class division and inequalitydominated.61 A few hunter-gatherer communities did survive into modern times. But class societiesallowed the accumulation of more wealth and resources and the greater mobilisation of human labour.In regions where class society arose it won out over older forms of social organisation. In the nextchapter we will look at how class societies arose, why this is associated with the development ofagriculture and what this meant for ancient societies facing environmental crisis.

* The !Kung are one of a number of peoples in Africa who use tongue clicks in their speech. The exclamation mark symbolises onesuch sound.

Chapter 4

Early agriculture, class society and crisis

In the developed world today agriculture is highly technological, dependent on heavy machinery,artificial pesticides and fertilisers. Yet of the 1.3 billion people who work the land worldwide some400 million do so without these modern innovations.62

Todays mass industrial food production is the outcome, though not the pinnacle, of a longevolution of agricultural techniques, shaped by wider social changes. This chapter looks at theearliest types of farming, how class society and the first states arose from them, and how the modernlandscape has been formed by thousands of years of farming.

The earliest forms of farming

Around 12000 BP the Neolithic era was characterised by a new technological developmentgroundor polished stone tools. The preparation of stone in this way was hard work, but it produced stronger,sharper tools than earlier flint ones. Now humans could make axes and adzes, useful for choppingtrees on a larger scale. Vast quantities of these tools were made; there are Neolithic quarries in manyplaces in the world. Around this time our ancestors started producing early forms of pottery, buildingsemi-permanent homes and breeding animals. They also began their first experiments in agriculture.

The transformation to farming is known as the Neolithic Revolution. The term was first coined bythe Marxist historian V Gordon Childe who described it as an economic and scientific revolutionthat made the participants active partners with nature instead of parasites on nature.63 Childe pointsout that the revolution arose out of existing practices, including the collecting of seeds of wildgrasses, ancestors to modern crops like wheat. He writes:

The decisive step was deliberately to sow such seeds on suitable soil and cultivate the sown land by weeding and other measures.A society that acted thus was henceforth actively producing food, augmenting its own food supply. Potentially it could increase thesupply to support a growing population.64

The use of the term revolution is sometimes criticised as the process was a long, drawn out onethat took millennia. The British archaeologist and historian Francis Pryor argues that the transition toagriculture looks more dramatic than in fact it was. Its consequences were indeed revolutionary, butthe original processes of change probably werent. In fact, they were remarkably gradual.65 Hecontinues that the revolution was certainly not comparable with the Industrial or AgriculturalRevolutions of recent times, which happened rapidly and had immediate as well as long-term effects.It was a process of change, not of revolution.66

But revolutions are not short events that take place in a few days or weeks; they are drawn outsocial and economic processes that may take years. The Neolithic Revolution was an evolutionaryprocess that arose from previous human activities, but ultimately led to a fundamental transformationin how human society organised itself. In this sense, Gordon Childe was correct. Before the Neolithic

Revolution human society was based on hunting and gathering and afterwards it was based onagriculture. This radical economic change had fundamental social consequences. People becamemore sedentary, living in permanent settlements. It encouraged more innovations such as pottery,metal working and animal husbandry. As we shall see, agriculture also led to the development ofclass societies and other fundamental changes.

Equipment such as sickles and grinding stones, pestles and mortars are essential to turning cerealplants into edible food. These tools existed long before the Neolithic Revolution, but the newtechnological process and the successes of early farming encouraged further developments.

Agriculture began in a few distinct centres of origin around the world. In these places particularplants had been domesticated and, from there, agricultural practices spread outwards among thesurrounding populations. Today six places are regarded as being centres for the independentdevelopment of agriculture. The Near Eastern Centre, commonly called the Fertile Crescent, is thebest known of these areas. It ran from the far-eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea throughMesopotamia and down towards the Persian Gulf. Here, between 10,000 and 9,000 years ago, wheat,barley, peas, lentils, chickpeas and other crops were domesticated. Later on animals such as the cow,pig and donkey were also domesticated.

The domestication of plants and animals took place at different times elsewhere in the world.These points of origin included China around 8500 BP; Central America between 9000 BP and 4000BP; South America in 6000 BP and North America in 4000 BP. A further centre of origin is found inNew Guinea possibly dating to around 10000 BP, but certainly from 7000 BP.67

In each of these areas small groups of people came up independently with the basic ideas ofagriculture. These ideas then spread rapidly outwards. Some communities would have adoptedagriculture; some would have remained hunters and gatherers, or combined elements of the two. Forexample, some tribes in the Great Plains of North America hunted buffalo and exchanged meat andhides with those groups that farmed. Some tribes did both, moving around to hunt, but returning toplaces to harvest crops. Still other groups took up farming for years, returning to hunting when theyobtained horses.

Around 10,000 years ago people in the mountains of Papua-New Guinea began to cultivate taro, aroot and leaf vegetable, but the most significant domesticated crop was a type of wheat called wildeinkorn first cultivated in the Fertile Crescent in what is now south east Turkey around 9500 BP. In thewild it would have been easily observed growing, maturing and producing more seeds in a singleseason. Wheat thus forms an ideal basis for early agricultural society. Fruit or nut trees provideplenty of nutrition, but take years to mature and reach the point where their crops are abundant enoughto make their farming worthwhile.

Harvesting selects for the biggest and best seeds from the strongest plants and once some of theseare replanted this creates a stronger, more abundant crop. Gradually early farmers developed orobtained further types of cereal. Emmer wheat comes from the natural cross between the einkorn plantand a type of grass, and this in turn led farmers to spelt wheatan important crop until medievaltimes. These plants form the basis of all modern wheat.

We can trace the spread of these new plants throughout the world. Emmer wheat was domesticatedin the Fertile Crescent. Two thousand years later we find it in Greece and 1,500 years after that inGermany.68 The same happened with other domesticated plants. Many of the animals that we nowmost commonly associate with farmscattle, goats, pigs and sheepwere domesticated around the

same time as these early crops.As we have seen, the exact reasons why a particular group of people took up agriculture are not

easy to explain. But even the earliest forms of agriculture allowed people to produce much more foodthan via hunting or foraging.

The early farming landscape

Once farming took hold it began to dramatically change the landscape. The most obvious case wouldhave been deforestation as areas were cleared to plant crops. Domesticated animals such as pigs andsheep would have also helped clear woodland as they eat the bark from trees and shrubs.

Evidence of the earliest farms can still be seen today. One of the most extensive sites of BronzeAge farming survives on the open moorland of Dartmoor in Devon, England, dating from between2000 and 1200 BCE. These Bronze Age fields run across the moor separated by parallel stone banksupon which hawthorn hedges may have been planted.69 The fields do not follow the natural contoursof the landscape; these Bronze Age people were creating an artificial landscape, deliberately shapingthe world they lived and worked in. We can speculate on what their reasoning wasas well aspreventing livestock roaming, the reaves, as the walls are known, probably marked both physicalboundaries and spaces that may have had religious or historical importance.

The people of the Bronze Age would have looked at their countryside with very different ideas toours, and we should be wary of projecting our own experiences of agricultural landscapes onto thepast. We might see an arrangement of walls as a field. For the people of the Bronze Age, the layout ofthe farm may represent something much more subtle. For instance, elsewhere in England, in Exmoor,boundaries of Bronze Age fields are influenced by the presence of barrows and burial chambers onthe horizon, places that would have had significance for the farmers.70

So rather than viewing each part of the Bronze Age landscape separatelyfields in one place,burial mounds in another and homes elsewhereit is better to see them as being linked together. Thisidea of the ritual landscape is important when looking at how people lived in the past. We maythink that only modern humans with our aerial photographs or satellite images can understand ourplace within the land. But ancient people often took great care to align their buildings and monumentsover extensive areas. Stand near the Stonehenge monument and gaze outwards towards the dozens ofbarrows visible on the horizon and you will instinctively understand this.71 Some of the focal areasfor ancient peoples would have had roots that stretched back into the much more nomadic past.Stonehenge was an area of ritual importance long before the stones themselves were tilted into place.There is no doubt that the places chosen by our ancestors for agriculture would have been picked notjust for their good soil and climate, but because of their symbolic importance. Some archaeologistssee Stonehenge as being part of an extremely large landscape, with natural bodies such as riversplaying an important symbolic role, as well as the artificial monuments, barrows and the longenigmatic ditches known as cursuses.

Despite the success of agriculture and its consequent spread, it did not provide protection against achanging world. As the climate got colder and wetter around 1200 BCE, the Dartmoor farms wereabandoned. A thousand years of farming had probably reduced the moors fertility. The first Neolithicor Bronze Age farmers had to clear the natural tree growth from the moors to create their farmland.These trees once protected the soil, retaining it with their roots. Once they were gone the fertile top

soil (which comes from decomposing leaves) would have been eroded and would not easily havebeen replaced even with manure from livestock. Farmers have always battled to maintain the fertilityof their soil. One ancient method of farming does this so well that it is still practised in some parts ofthe world today.

Slash and burn cultivation

Initially the growing of crops would have involved the scattering of seeds in natural clearings, on thebanks of rivers or on flood plans. This natural space was limited though and people would soon haveneeded to clear the grasslands, woods and forests around them. The clearance of space to farmrequired tools, initially simple stone axes, though once metals had been discovered the process wouldhave been far easier.

Slash and burn is also known as swidden cultivation. The word originates in an old English word,swithen, meaning to burn. Farmers chop down trees and then burn the wood, producing largequantities of nutrient-rich ash. Rainfall causes the ash to soak into the ground, dramatically increasingthe fertility of the soil. Once the roots and tree stumps have been cleared, seeds can be planted. Thefirst few crops are the most abundant, but the fertility quickly drops. In part this is because the nutrientrich ash is either used or washed away by later rains, but the hoeing, aeration and general farming ofthe soil also degrade it. Eventually the soil is abandoned. Shrubs, bushes and trees slowly reclaim theground, and over the years the soil gradually regenerates. At some point in the future this newwoodland can in turn be cleared and burnt and the cycle repeated. Exactly how long this cycle takesdepends on the crops grown, the size of the local population, soil and climate. It also depends on howlong different plants and trees take to reach maturity. Farmers who practise this type of agriculturebecome adept at shaping the new forest; they might plant fruit or nut trees once they leave an area, toprovide an extra supply of food for the future. Farmers will also have animals to supplement theirfoods, and frequently villages of swidden agriculturists keep some areas near their homespermanently clear for small garden plots.

This gives a hint of how structured swidden agriculture can be. Communities that practise it todayoften have very complex systems that ensure that the forest around villages is used in a particularorder. Some systems leave lands to regenerate for three or four decades, others reuse the same landwithin five or six years. Crops change year on year as the soil slowly degenerates. The complexity ofthese cycles means that occasionally the interval between one clearance of an area and the next use ofthe land is longer than the lifetime of the farmers. Those practising slash and burn cultivation wouldhave needed some form of social organisation to co-ordinate their farming.

Just how complex slash and burn cultivation can be is shown by the Hanunuo people of the islandof Mindoro in the Philippines who cultivate over 280 different types of crops. Cereals are planted inthe first year, in the next five to ten, root and tree crops such as bananas are grown. Depending ontypes of trees, the cycle lasts between ten and 35 years. Each hectare of cultivated land requiresaround 3,000 hours of labour per year.72

Slash and burn agriculture spread rapidly outwards from the centres of the Neolithic Revolution. Itallowed the population to increase more rapidly than before as more people could be fed from agiven area around a village. But once villages reached a certain population size, new villages wouldhave to be founded far enough away from the original communities that farming areas did not overlap.

Between 8000 BCE and 3000 BCE the world population grew from five to 50 million people. Studiesof modern slash and burn communities show that villages tend to be limited to around 1,000 people,and are separated by distances of perhaps five to six kilometres. This allows access to around 30square kilometres of forest per village. Modern population growth in these communities is around 3percent per year, doubling every few decades.73 It is easy to see how the development of slash andburn cultivation led to an explosion in the worlds population.

Despite the increasing food supply, swidden farming could not have produced enough to supportmany non-agricultural workers. It is likely, for instance, that those who had roles such as tool-makingwould also have had to be involved in farming. As we shall see, as agricultural practices develop,the surplus food produced is eventually enough for a society to support individuals who do not labourproducing foodeither because they have a different job, or because they are tribal or religiousleaders.

Slash and burn agriculturalists carry over some of the other characteristics of hunter-gatherercommunities, in particular a sense of collective work and common use of land. Some parts of theslash and burn agricultural cycle require high levels of labour, the clearing of areas following theburning of forests, for instance, and farmers help each other at these times. Communities would oftenrecognise particular pieces of land as being open to everyone. Even until the early 1800s in Finlandcommonly-owned forests were used by landless people for cultivation, logging and livestock.74

Permanent land ownership means little for people living in this way. Owning land where forest isregrowing would bring no gain to an individual. Villages may well allocate pieces of land toparticular families to cultivate and harvest, though this ownership ends when the land is abandonedagain. Once the forest returns, everyone has the right to collect fruit or firewood from this commonarea. This has much in common with the farming practices of some Native Americans, who, as wewill see later, vacated a piece of land after a time, leaving it available for anyone else to use.

Slash and burn cultivation was incompatible with farming methods that were about making money.Leaving an area of land to gradually regenerate would be considered wasteful by those used tothinking of land as an investment to be rented out or for growing cash crops. Slash and burn farmerswere labelled lazy or backward, as the experience of the Bemba people of northern Zambiaillustrates. By the late 1800s the Bemba had developed slash and burn agricultural methods (knownlocally as citemene) into a highly organised system. Their agriculture took place over a cycle of 20years or so and was ideally suited to a low population with plenty of woodland. Additionally and ofgreat importance to the community, permanent gardens near the villages existed where crops such ascassava and maize were grown. Men were responsible for the clearing of the trees and bushes;women stacked the wood and were responsible for harvesting later in the year. In the gardens mendug the initial plots, but womens labour on village gardens was considerable and added greatly tothe overall agricultural labour input.75 This was to the detriment of the women though, whoaccording to a study in the 1930s, worked an extra two to three hours a day doing housework.

European conquest and colonisation of the area began in the 1880s. The ancient citemene systemwas a barrier to the type of agriculture that the new colonial governments needed. Africa was rich innatural resources and the colonial governments needed a large indigenous workforce to extract them.Zambias copper mines, for instance, were the largest in the world and enormous numbers of Bembamen were sucked into working in them. In turn, this led to hunger in the Bemba villages as the numberof people clearing the forests was reduced.

These new workforces had to be fed, but old forms of agriculture could not provide food in largeenough quantities. New farming methods were imposed on Africa. Instead of the citemene system,oxen would pull ploughs through large fields. In 1905 an official said that among the traditionalpractices that must end were the wasteful methods of cultivation in cutting down trees and thusdeforesting the country. The colonial government declared that citemene would end.76 Citemenepractices were even declared evil by the British South Africa Company. The administration hopedthis action would force the Bemba to produce cash crops and raise taxes. It was also a method ofsocial control. For the Bemba, the consequences were traumatic. An anonymous bureaucrat summedup the impact of the change in dry, patronising language. The Bemba had, he said, changedcompletely from the cheerful attitude they had always borne.77

In the 1960s the government introduced a new development area around Mungwi in an attempt tofurther develop agriculture, educate people and improve the local economy. This agriculturalprogramme included farms of over 20 hectares, with piped irrigation systems and loans for newfarmers. The attempt to introduce permanent agricultural practices had an emphasis on male farmers.In contrast to the central role of Bemba women in agriculture previously, they were now sidelined.Instead they were encouraged to cook and sew. In part this was to try to attract men back toagriculture from the mines, but it mostly reflected colonial attitudes to the division of labour.

The colonial administrators in Africa who wanted to end citemene practices aimed to recreateEuropean style permanent cultivation in Zambia. They ignored the importance of foodstuffs producedfrom permanent village gardens and downplayed the central role of women in the production of food.By neglecting the role of women, the colonial government was misunderstanding the nature ofproduction in Zambia. It meant that their solutions to the crisis caused by men leaving to look forwork in the mines were inadequate.

The destruction of the older agriculture undermined community relations and increased povertyand hunger. A survey of families in 1985 showed a:

noticeable improvement in the nutritional status of children under five [on previous surveys]. However, the children ofsubsistence famers showed more significant improvement than did those of commercial farmers, indicating that malnutrition inthe latter category was a less seasonal phenomenon.78

The main reason for this seems to be that in those families engaged with cash-cropping, there areincreased demands upon women to help with this work, reducing the time available for preparingfood for children. This is not to say that similar pressures did not exist earlier. A survey in the 1930sshowed that at times of most intensive agricultural labour meals were often not produced becausewomen were too busy in the fields to prepare them. But the switch to cash-cropping intensifies thisprocess, putting a much higher burden of work on women in the family. Colonial administrators didnot understand the importance of citemene agriculture to the wider social and ecological relationshipsof the Bemba people. In the rush to make money from mining and cash crops, they failed to understandthe central dynamics of Bemba life. This in turn laid the basis for future hunger.

Deforestation

As we have seen, population growth is limited for slash and burn cultivators unless a section of thepopulation can relocate to another area. However, if further geographical expansion is impossiblethen a growing population will have to try to increase the use of the forested areausually by

decreasing the amount of time that an area remains unused before clearing it again. This in turnreduces the yield of crops as the amount of nutrients returned to the soil through the clearance ofwoods is less. Thus slash and burn agriculture can turn into deforestationthe permanent destructionof woodlands. It is important to understand that deforestation is not an automatic result of swiddencultivation; it occurs when there is not enough forest land to make slash and burn sustainable.

Deforestation has major ecological impacts. Once forests are permanently removed, rainwater caneasily wash soil away. Trees form natural barriersthey hold soil in place on the side of hills andslow down water courses, allowing time for water to be absorbed into the ground. Once the treeshave gone water runs quickly downhill leading to floods; valleys become choked with earth anddebris; rivers transport earth downstream, silting up deltas.

Even in ancient times the deforestation of the Mediterranean areas led to the rapid silting up ofrivers. Ancient Romes port at Ostia is now inland despite being built where the river Tiber enteredthe Mediterranean.

Some forms of slash and burn cultivation do not involve a cyclical system and can, on the surface,appear to be immensely destructive to forest cover. Here the community move on to a new locationwhen they have exhausted the agricultural potential of a cleared area of forest. This is known asshifting agriculture and is not the same as the systematic and mechanised clearing of forests that wesee todaythe destruction, for instance, of huge swathes of the Amazon rainforest by a small numberof landowners for cattle pasture.

Photographs of enormous vehicles tearing down the Brazilian rainforests helped to create a newgeneration of environmental activists in the 1980s and 1990s. They also helped to create the idea thatforest clearance must always be environmentally degrading or destructive. Slash and burn cultivationchanges the local ecology. But this is very different to the permanent ecological transformation of awhole area through deforestation. Slash and burn cultivation is premised on the idea that forests willreturn. The removal of any significant section of forest will have an impact on biodiversity. It cantake an extremely long time for forests to return to the state they were in before they were first clearedbetween 150 and 500 years for some Asian forests and 200 years for some European ones.79

As with the transition from hunter-gatherer communities to ones based on agriculture, the transitionfrom slash and burn to permanent agriculture is not automatic. One reason for not making thetransition is that swidden agriculture does not require as much work as permanent cultivation. Otherexternal pressures also play their role. Farmers can be prevented from moving, or face economicpressures to produce cash crops. Attitudes to ownership of land can change, often because a fardistant government decrees this. Nonetheless, shifting or slash and burn cultivation even in moderntimes has been responsible for producing significant amounts of food.

In Finland in 1830 swidden agriculture was common in two thirds of the country, and one third ofbread produced in the east and centre of Finland used grain from slash and burn cultivation.80 This didnot prevent the government enacting laws to end the practice from the middle of the 19th centuryonwards as they moved to consolidate landownership in crown hands. Later, from 1859-61, theFinnish government relaxed restrictions on sawmilling. Timber suddenly became a cash crop.Landless populations who practised swidden agriculture were a barrier to the expansion of the timberindustry. Enormous estates were purchased to guarantee future access to wood and together withcheap grain from Russia; centuries of Finnish swidden agriculture were brought to an end in the1870s.81

Permanent agriculture and the rise of class society

Slash and burn agriculture was humanitys most successful form of agriculture, lasting for manycenturies. It survives in some parts of the world, but it is not by any means the dominant form ofagriculture. Those communities that moved on from slash and burn farming to more permanentmethods of agriculture came up with an incredibly diverse set of practices that fitted the differentclimatic and geographical areas they lived in.

This needed new types of tools, new farming methods and new social organisations. In aridregions the lack of water meant that people had to develop ways of storing water for the dry season orirrigating farmland from nearby waterways. Some communities put more emphasis on animalhusbandry and developing systems of fallowing.

With agriculture becoming centred on permanent settlements, there was a further fundamentalchange: the division of society into distinct classes. The existence of classes within human society hashad profound impacts upon our ecological relationships as well as our responses to changingenvironmental circumstances, so I want to briefly look at how class divisions arose and what thismeant for our ancestors.

Before society could become divided into classes, the productive forces had to develop to thepoint when a surplus of food could be produced by those farming the landthat is, when farmerscould produce enough food to provide for themselves, their families and others who did not work theland. Until there is a surplus it is impossible for anyone not engaged in food production to survive forany length of time. Once a surplus of food was available it changed life immensely. Food could bestored against future famine, for instance.82 Using the surplus to employ some people doing otherwork instead of farming could bring benefit to the whole community. If some villagers dig a newirrigation channel instead of farming, this will improve everyones crops.

Those groups, individuals or lineages which are most able or successful at gathering a surplus offood use it, initially, in ways that benefit everyone. This leads to so-called Big Men arising, whogain prestige from their ability to give gifts, but who have no real authority. In a classic study ofcommunities in Polynesia and Melanesia in the Pacific Ocean, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlinsexplains that:

Big-men do not come to office; they do not succeed to, nor are they installed in, existing positions of leadership over politicalgroups. The attainment of big-man status is rather the outcome of a series of acts which elevate a person above the common herdand attract about him a coterie of loyal, lesser men.83

He continues:Typically decisive is the deployment of ones skills and efforts in a certain direction: towards amassing goods, most often pigs, shellmonies and vegetable foods, and distributing them in ways which build a name for cavalier generosity, if not for compassion.84

Elsewhere, among the Nambikwara of South America:The chief must not just do well. He must try, and his group will expect him to try, to do better than the others Although the chiefdoes not seem to be in a privileged position from the material point of view, he must have under his control sufficient surplusquantities of food, tools, weapons and ornaments When an individual, a family or a band as a whole, wishes or needs something,it is to the chief that an appeal is made. Generosity is, therefore, the first attribute to be expected of a new chief.85

As the surplus from production continued to grow, these individuals, or their family groups, beganto form a social class which controlled a part of societys wealth. Once they formed a separate class,they began to have different collective material interests from the mass of the population. This leadsto a self-identification for the controlling group as a separate class from the wider population.

Increasingly the new ruling class will see the interests of the whole of society as being their own.In order to protect their interests, this new class could use a part of the surplus they controlled to

employ others, soldiers to guard them, bureaucrats to organise society and priests to justify theirposition. Alongside these changes develop legal and religious institutions which also serve theinterests of the new ruling class. Consequently, with the rise of class society, there is a correspondingdevelopment of the state. The state is made up of the institutions and organisations that exist to protectthe interests of the ruling class.

Since the ruling class are dependent on the labour of others, they also have an interest in makingthem work harder so that they can appropriate more of the product of the labour for themselves. Sothe rise of class society brings with it the exploitation of one class by another. Attempts to increaseexploitation lead to conflict. Hence class society cannot be separated from class struggle. There isalways a tension between those who are taking the surplus for their own use, and those who want toensure their farms produce enough to feed their family. Thus agriculture itself becomes a contestedarea.

Not all societies developed into fully fledged class societies, but those that did were able toaccumulate more wealth and expand more rapidly. In most parts of the world early agriculturalsocieties continued until they were encountered by more powerful class societies, for instance, as wewill discuss later, European colonists arriving in the Americas. 86 Additionally, the existence ofsoldiers makes conflict possible between communities. The existence of a surplus of wealth makeswar a potentially profitable exercise. This is not to say that pre-class societies did not engage in waror fight for resources. But with the development of classes, violence becomes inherent to society.

Initially the development of class society would have helped improve the collective lot of thewhole population, but as Chris Harman explains:

once such state structures and ideologies were in existence, they would perpetuate the control of the surplus by a certain groupeven when it no longer served the purpose of advancing production. A class that emerged as a spur to production would persisteven when it was no longer such a spur.87

Womens oppression

Alongside the division of society into classes and the rise of the state, there was a fundamentaltransformation in the role of women. We have seen that hunter-gatherer and early agriculturalcommunities were based on participation of both sexes in the production of food. Later when we lookin more detail at one such community, the Montagnais in eastern Canada, we will also see howwomen had central roles in all aspects of hunter-gatherer communities. But with the arrival of classsociety women took on subordinate roles, something described by Frederick Engels as the world-historic defeat of the female sex.88

In hunter-gatherer communities men tended to be involved in hunting and women took on the roleof food gathering. This was because women had to breastfeed their children. This is not to say thatthey did not hunt and men did not gather food, but there was some social delimitation. Men were alsocentral to childcare. A study of Semaq Beri hunter-gatherers in Malaysia in 2002 found that whilemothers spent more time with children than their fathers did, there were no differences betweengenders when it came to time spent holding and carrying children. Additionally, during occasionalperiods of frequent movement, only adult males were assigned holding and carrying [of children]

activities.89These differences between the roles of men and women sharpened with the arrival of agriculture,

particularly the introduction of the plough. Agriculture ceased to be the work of both sexes andbecame dominated by men. There are a number of reasons for this. Because farming with a ploughrequires more physical strength, it favours men. But more importantly, ploughing is also difficult anddangerous to do with children. The use of ploughs reduces the amount of weedinga task that wasoften the role of women with small children. The development of agriculture eventually leads to asituation where men increasingly take on responsibility for production in the fields while women takeon responsibility for the raising of children in the home.

Even today this is noticeable in countries like Burundi where farming is based on the hoe andwomen make up 90 percent of the agricultural workforce. By contrast, in Pakistan, where the ploughdominates, only 16 percent of agricultural workers are women.90 The wider social impact of this isdramatic. An extensive 2011 study concluded that societies which traditionally used the plough havelower rates of female participation in the workplace, in politicsas well as a greater prevalence ofattitudes favouring gender inequality.91

As men increasingly took on producing food, and women the tasks associated with looking afterchildren and preparing food, decisions about production were taken by the men, and women weresubordinated, though their role might differ depending on which class they belonged too. Over thecenturies the social differences in the roles of women and men have helped to undermine thecollective solidarity of those at the bottom of society in the face of attempts by the ruling class toincrease their exploitation. The continued oppression of women has its roots in changes that occurredthousands of years ago with the development of agriculture and the beginnings of class society.Ending that oppression permanently will also require fundamental social change.

The ancient Egyptian state and environmental crisis

Egypts human history stretches back long before the time of the Pharaohs.92 When Homo erectusdispersed into the Middle East from Africa they probably travelled through the lands around the Nile.A dried up stream, Wadi Kubbaniya, near the modern city of Aswan has archaeological evidence ofprolonged human habitation as early as 17000 BP.

Today North Africa is a hot, dry part of the world, a climate that has endured for around 6,000years. But before this it was cooler and wetter. For almost 9,000 years people in North Africa hadfarmed the land, developing and expanding the agriculture that had spread from the Fertile Crescent.During the Neolithic period the area supported a few thousand nomadic cattle herders.

The earliest evidence of agriculture in North Africa comes from the shores of the ancient LakeFaiyum in Egypt. Today this lake covers 200 square kilometres. In 5000 BCE the lake was a hundredtimes larger and thousands of people would have grown crops with its water, hunted the animals thatcame to drink and caught its fish.

Between 5450 BCE and 4400 BCE, the Faiyumian culture lived on the lake shore. The existence ofgrain storage pits are the best evidence for farming here, some up to a metre and a half in width andalmost a metre in depth, to store barley and emmer wheat. Other archaeological evidence points to thebreeding of sheep, goats, pigs and cattle. Agriculture was not the key source of food for the Faiyumianpeople but for their descendants and the people of the Nile River it would become increasingly

important.The early development of agriculture in Africa is unusual