Hunter Gatherers Agrarian Shift free essay sample

The most important task in human history has been to find a way of extracting from the ecosystems in which people have lived, enough resources for maintaining life †¦ the problem has been to balance their various demands against the ability of the ecosystems to withstand the resulting pressures. [Ponting 1991, p17] The period that has come to be known as the Neolithic Revolution (somewhat erroneously so [see Ponting 1991, p37]) marked the most fundamental shift in human development seen since the first bipedal human-like species walked the earth. During this time and the brief era [see Ponting 1991, p18] that has followed it to the present, humans have made a multiplicity of social, cultural and technological advancements (inclusive of the political and religious realms), all of which began with an agrarian shift by an array of hunter-gatherer societies – a shift that marked the transition from ‘savage’ Palaeolithic man to ‘economic man’. It is a frequently stated detail that the hunter-gatherer way of life was much less energy intensive than its successor and offered a relaxed, care-free lifestyle. Indeed, Marshall Sahlins contends that hunter-gatherer communities were â€Å"the original affluent societies† [Sahlins 1972, p1] who enjoyed a bountiful way of life â€Å"free from market obsessions† [Sahlins 1972, p2]. Why, then after ninety-nine percent of current human history had elapsed, were hunter-gatherers suddenly restricted to a smattering of groups across the globe? This essay will address this question and will then proceed to examine the multitude of effects (cultural, social, political; positive, negative) that this shift of modes of production had on world societies. There exist several theories as to why the Neolithic Revolution took hold of hunter-gatherer societies, the least compelling of which is the extremely base notion that it was simply an inevitable, natural human progression into the agricultural mode of production. This ‘theory’ is tantamount to the following quote by Voltaire: It is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Observe, for instance, the most is formed for spectacles, therefore we wear spectacles. The legs are visibly designed for stockings, accordingly we wear stockings. [Voltaire in Gowdy 1997, p. xxix] This ‘backward chaining’ can be extrapolated to the transition from one mode of production to another: humans fit agriculture better than they did their nomadic ways just as a stocking fits a leg more snugly than a pair of jeans – they both fit, they merely fit in a different manner. Rather than this, let it be suggested that humans’ progression from one mode of production to another is a process of forward chaining (seeing the jeans and stockings as being designed for the leg, and hunter-gatherer societies and agriculture as being designed for humans), of looking at the current system and how humans fit into it and deciding if there is another system that fits the current society in a more precise manner and why that system might be a better option. The shift from nomad to agriculturalist was one that required â€Å"no radically new techniques or development of new relationships between humans, plants and animals† [Ponting 1991, p40] so it stands to reason that there must have been an almost implacable rationale for making the decision to catalyse the transition. It has previously been mentioned that Sahlins cited hunter-gatherers as the â€Å"original affluent society†. Affluence can be roughly defined as the ‘satisfaction of material wants or desires’ and can be attained by â€Å"producing much or desiring little† [Sahlins 1972, p2]. For the greater part of history hunter-gatherers have been considered by some such as Sahlins to be affluent because they possessed few material desires that easily satisfied. As material desires increase over time, as history has shown them to, greater means are required to continue to satisfy these desires. This increasing affluence within a hunter-gatherer framework would prove to become an unsustainable practice – for instance the desire to accumulate food – that would need to be addressed by the transition to a mode of production that could feasibly accommodate the wants of the society. Essentially the shift from the nomadic â€Å"poverty that hunters and gatherers, in theory, live in† [Sahlins 1972, p9] to a relative sedentary plenty would be exhibitive of increasing affluence. The downfall of the hunter-gatherer existence can also be viewed within a social Darwinist context. Factors such as climate change and natural human development have the possibility to affect the perpetuity of a mode of production such as that of the hunter-gatherer. If hunter-gatherer tribes were to be confronted by other advanced modes of production such as agriculture that relied on the procurement of land for an ever-increasing population, and they did not accordingly adjust their own practices, they had the potential to fall by the wayside in favour of this new more sophisticated method. The continuity of hunter-gatherer groups was highly dependent on their capacity for change and adaptation. In 1997, Jared Diamond postulated that: At current rates of change, within the next decade the few remaining bands of hunter-gatherers will abandon their ways and disintegrate, or die out, thereby ending millions of years of commitment to their hunter-gatherer lifestyle [Diamond 1997, p86] In 2008 the existence of hunter-gatherer tribes is still noticeable (consider the Kalahari Bushmen of southern Africa or the Panare of South America). The majority of remaining hunter-gatherer groups have neither disintegrated nor adopted agriculture as their primary mode of production, they have merely adapted to modernity in order to continue surviving as a people in much the same way that those hunter-gatherer tribes that turned to agriculture made the transition in order to continue surviving as an indigenous unit. As stated, there are numerous arguments that attempt to explain the reason for an agrarian shift by hunter gatherers but the most persuasive argument for the implementation of agriculture is one that has elements of the above concepts (which are only partially convincing) but begins with the age-old social predicament of population pressure. Some traditional methods of land use †¦ which have been thought to sustain some sort of environmental equilibrium when population pressures exceed a particular threshold [Goudie 1994] It is estimated that the world population around the time of the Neolithic Revolution was approximately four million, the presumed maximum hunter-gatherer population that could be supported before social and environmental effects became noticeable [Ponting 1991, p42]. Any great increase in this population would begin to result in forced migration to less manageable, less abundant areas in addition to overpopulation in the bountiful regions such as rainforests. According to Ponting, hunter-gatherer societies had, by this stage, reached the ‘point of no alternative’ [Ponting 1991, p42], at which they were compelled to either perish or alter their lifestyle. Still, however, the fundamental question is not completely answered. The environmental factors for the shift have been outlined above but there were other related factors that had an impact on the widespread adoption of agriculture as the dominant mode of production. The most pivotal of these comes back to the initial question of ‘if agriculture is a more energy-intensive, more time-consuming overall and a less secure mode of production than hunting and gathering, why was it considered? The answer lies with one single advantage that stood to be gained from the acceptance of an agrarian shift: although a greater degree of effort is required for agriculture than for hunting and gathering, this extra effort provides more nutrient-rich food from a smaller land area [Ponting 1991, p41] but even with the possibility of large-scale farming in order to increase food production was shunned as there was a â€Å"common tendency of hunter-gatherers to reject farming until it was absolutely thrust upon them† [Zerzan in Gowdy 1997, p273] Somewhat contr adictorily to this, a number of hunter-gatherers were already practising agriculture on a small scale in the form of slash-and-burn agriculture [see Goudie 1994, p48] but this procedure was fundamentally different from sedentary agricultural practices. Slash-and-burn agriculture typically utilised wild varieties of plants and plots were only designed for short term use, to be left to regrow once the tribe moved on to another camp. Most importantly, this technique was not intended to obtain a surplus supply for the tribe, but simply to sustain them for the short term. Sedentary agriculture, conversely, was not a temporary approach to food production; it was primarily implemented as a permanent source of food for hunter-gatherers that had made the transition from their hunting and gathering lifestyle to a settled, agrarian way of life. Sedentary agriculture is best defined as the â€Å"creation of artificial habitats specifically for growing and tending plants† [Ponting 1991]. The nature of the areas selected for established agriculture did not lend itself to the growing of a great variety of species of plants. The hunter-gatherer’s environment, besides, consisted principally of 0. 1% edible biomass. By selecting and growing this 0. % within a confined area, a once hunter-gatherer could bring the total amount of edible biomass in a given area up to at least 90% [Diamond 1997, p88], completely removing the need to ever again gather food. Despite the apparent necessity of making the shift towards agriculture, voluntary development of th is practice is only seen in a limited number of areas such as China and southwest Asia (now known as the Middle East). This earlier shift was most likely dictated by the availability of cultivatable crops and stock animals as well as the presence of the right climate and environmental factors to allow for the initiation of this practice compounded, of course, by a people’s propensity for domestication of the necessary species. The agrarian lifestyle in these selected areas was slow to arrive at a place where it could be successfully implemented because of the above restraints. However, after its successful implementation, after a period of years the Neolithic Revolution began to extend a much larger sphere of influence which operated in one of two ways: hunter-gatherer societies after coming into contact with sedentary agriculturalists would typically find themselves faced with the option of either adopting the practices of the agriculturalists or of resisting the transition and – inevitably in most cases – falling victim to the expansion of and being replaced by these societies – some people never developed agricultural methods and â€Å"persisted until the modern world finally swept upon them. [Diamond 1997, p103] The agrarian shift that was set in motion approximately ten thousand years ago is the single most â€Å"fundamental alteration in human history† [Ponting 1991, p36] which encouraged the establishment of a larger population but made reversion to hunter-gatherer ways impossible [Ponting 1991, p38]. The only way for these societies was forward and this opened the door upon a variety of consequences for agricultural peoples, both positive and negative. The Neolithic Revolution signalled a change to a society that was based as much on economy as on subsistence and opened up the possibilities for technological and social advances. It was the Neolithic Revolution that made possible towns and cities with all that they yield in cultural and technical exchange and enrichment [Landes 1998, p41] The establishment of the first settled societies was the most radical change of civilisation that had been seen up to that point in history.