Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began

This brilliant little book contains more interesting ideas in 53 pages than most books on human origins contain in 500. Of course it's not all true, and it's not all original. Tudge's explanation for the origin of serious agriculture - the "pleistocene overkill" in which human hunters rapidly killed off the game and produced a food crisis - probably derives from a very thorough, if much less exciting book, Mark Nathan Cohen's The Food Crisis in Prehistory, published as long ago as 1977. And Tudge's other thesis - that late palaeolithic people engaged in a kind of "hobby agriculture" is perhaps more questionable. It's certainly true that initial agricultural activity would not have left much trace, so it undoubtedly goes back further than we think. But any thesis about proto-agriculture before the widespread game extinctions has to contend with the fact that the game themselves - and particularly the elephant family - would have made man's first attempts at environmental manipulation quite difficult, simply by trampling over things and eating the "crops". So the great slaughter of the big game had three effects. Firstly it provided a splendid source of food, permitting a great growth in the human population. Secondly, it then used up most of the game, producing an urgent need for new sources of food for the expanded population. Thirdly, by killing off most of the game and scaring away what remained, it made agriculture possible. But nobody expects Colin Tudge to come up with all the answers. What is wonderful about this book is that it puts forward exciting ideas in an exciting way and provokes thought and discussion. It's just the kind of book we need.

Tudge challenges the traditional view that agriculture arose suddenly about ten thousand years ago. "Civilisation" is also credited with emerging simultaneously in a mutually reinforcing feedback cycle with surplus crop farming. The evidence supporting this stance comes from archaeological finds in places like the Tigris-Euphrates Valley [Iraq], Jericho [Palestine] and Catul Hayak in Turkey. In these places grain storage facilities bespeak intense cereals agriculture. Surplus grain production and distribution techniques suggest social hierarchy, fluent communication and new approaches to the environment. The standard view stumbles a bit in how knowledge of farming spread to remote places like Central America. It's also silent on why isolated peoples like Aborigines in Australia failed to adopt "domestic" farming methods.Tudge wants a fresh assessment - starting with a proper definition of "farming". By his definition, "farming" is simply any modification of an environment supporting edible resources. "Modification" ranges from protecting a known resource from predation to diverting water to stimulate growth. There are no "fields" dedicated to crop production - the sites were opportunistic finds. Tudge here raises the point overlooked by most scholars -"farming" began at the end of the last Ice Age. The best crop sites were low-lying stream valleys containing rich soils and available water. As the glaciers melted and sea levels rose, these locations were inundated and lost to research. The Middle Eastern "burst" of agrarian development was due to a dislocated population that had already practiced farming elsewhere. The Tigris-Euphrates was an exile.Neither, Tudge argues, will we find paddocks for domestic animals in the early locations. In Tudge's view animal domestication began by selecting those animals amenable to human contact. Continuous association evoked genetic changes in these creatures until domestication became the norm. Nor were the keepers of goats, sheep and other small animals necessarily constant in the practice. Tudge notes a South African people who keep goats for some years, then abandon them for a spate of hunting.He also insists on a Darwinian perspective on farming and pastoralism's origins. The "sudden" outburst of Middle Eastern agriculture violates the Darwinian process by obscuring earlier evidence. Like any evolutionary process, each step is slow, hesitant and scattered in time and place. Success builds on success until a new pattern is firmly established. Farming and pastoralism emerged in steps, but once established, it became an irreversible process. Agriculture produces not only excess crops, but excess population to consume them. Extra land is needed to supply the new population - and the cycle repeats. This surge in population of modern humans due to agriculture , Tudge contends, was the death knell of the Neanderthals. With Tudge's form of farming originating forty thousand years ago,

The book barely caught my eye as it is so small, something like 5 X 8 in size and small as in 52 pages. I even wondered how much ionformation could someone share in 52 small pages. First off, this is a small book that is a series of short books by leading experts in evolutionary theory from the Darwin@LSE programme at the London School of Economics. Having said that, the book has 3 basic Chapters I The Several Faces of Agriculture II The End of the Neanderthals and Pleistocene Overkill and III The Neolithic Revolution. The authors explain that before about 10,000 years ago there are virtually no signs of plant cultivation or the domestication of animals anywhere in the world. Then archaeologists began to find evidence that there were several sites in the Middle East such as Jericho the West Bank and in Catal Huyuk in Turkey and further east in the Indus Valley of China and some locations in the Americas where plant cultivation or the domestication of animals became the norm. The subject of horticulture, arable and pastoral farming. And the opinion that the late Paleolithic proto-farmers were not full time farmers. But more of a hobby. And there is a wonderful discussion of how farmers were often seen as put upon and preyed upon types. This is used to suggest that the Cro Magnon and Neanderthals may have had a similar view of each other i.e. bandits. I learned that the grain found by archaeologists suggests that the grain was grown is a very organized community or sustainable fashion since the seeds/grain was much larger than that grown in the wild. And that palaeontologists emphasize that fossilization is very rare and when a fossil is found of any creature that the chance are that the creature had already been around for a very long time. The authors also share that hunters and gatherers take from their environment only what their environment happens to produce and if they take to much that the desirable prey species collapse. (page 32) That sustainable farming works because it produces expected crop. That with organized farming techniques populations grew and the chance of mankin ever going back to a simple hunter gatherer mode was gone, since there simply wasn't, isn't enough wild food for the human animal to live on. There is so much more information in this book that I just do not have the time to share. PLEASE buy it and consider it a gift to you intellect/brain.

This is a wonderful book. It is so short that each page, indeed each sentence has to be filled with information and thoughts that derive from this data. My greatest interest is in the first domestication of livestock, a subject usually covered with trite inaccuracy in books dedicated to the subject, let alone works like this with such a broad sweep of study. This book covers domestication using reference to the latest scientific publications, and if it is as accurate as this in the tiny bit for which I have some background knowledge, it gives me reassurance that the rest of the book is filled with information of a similar high quality.Is it pessimistic to feel that the whole of life is made of choices made because things change? This is what reviewer Ted Rushton says. Surely his perception of what is written in this book is flavoured by his belief in 'human progress'as he actually quotes. There is no such thing as human progress, and this is the underlying concept behind the whole of the Darwinian School of Thought. It was Darwinian Thought that brought 'How Agriculture Really Began' to us, with its little set of illuminating companion volumes.The book is superb, Mr Rushton's critique is flawed, and enters the realms of fantasy with his discussion of flowers. But why not judge for yourself?

Colin Trudge's book is a delightful little essay on the origins of agriculture. The theories of this London School of Economics scholar are innovative and well informed. He breaks down the complex that we think of as "agriculture" into its constituent activities, then argues convincingly that humans were increasing their food production through some of these activities tens of thousands of years before the Neolithic revolution--and changing their enviroment in the process. He manages to incorporate explanations for many Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic phenomena--from Pleistocene overkill to farmer-pastoralist antipathy--into his remarkable discourse. A small book well worth the money.