Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

A number of specific sites have been identified where domestication may have first occurred. Among these are Tell Abu Hureyra and Tell Aswad in Syria, which date back to 10,000 years ago, Karacadağ in Turkey, Netiv Hagdud, Gilgal and Jericho, in the Jordan valley, and Aswan in the Damascus basin, also in Syria, which date back even further, to 12,000–10,500 BP. An alternative theory – still speculative – is that man’s increasing control of fire enabled him to burn huge tracts of forest, and that the tender grasses and shoots that would have grown up amid the burnt remains would themselves have been, in effect, domesticated plants and would have attracted herbivorous game.⁷ This would have needed a knowledge of ‘slash and burn’ technology and tools sufficient to cut down large trees – to create firebreaks. It is by no means certain that early humans had such tools.

In the case of animal domestication the type of evidence is somewhat different. In the first place we should note that the general history of the earth helped somewhat: after the last Ice Age most species of mammal were smaller than hitherto.⁸ One or more of three criteria are generally taken as evidence of domestication: a change in species abundance – a sudden increase in the proportion of a species within the sequence of one site; a change in size – most wild species are larger than their domestic relatives, because humans found it easier to control smaller animals; and a change in population structure – in a domestic herd or flock, the age and sex structure is manipulated by its owners to maximise outputs, usually by the conservation of females and the selection of sub-adult males. Using these criteria, the chronology of animal domestication appears to begin shortly after 9000 BP – that is, about 1,000 years after plant domestication. The sites where these processes occurred are all in the Middle East, indeed in the fertile crescent, at locations which are not identical to, but overlap with those for plant domestication. They include Abu Hureyra, at 9400 BP, Ganj Dareh in Iran, at 9000–8450 BP, Gritille in Turkey, at 8600–7770 BP, and Tell Aswad, Jericho, Ramad, ’Ain Ghazal, Beida and Basta, all just post-dating 9000 BP. In most cases, the sequence of domestication is generally taken to be: goats then sheep, to be closely followed by pigs and cattle. ‘The transformation from a hunting and collecting economy, perhaps beginning with the cultivation of wild cereals, to the establishment of permanent villages and a mixed agricultural economy with fully domesticated races of plants and animals, took place over at least 3,000 years.’ There was no radical break; for many years people simply tended ‘wild gardens’ rather than neat smallholdings or farms as we would recognise them. There was a transition period where hunter-gatherers culled smaller animals. Pigs do not adjust to the nomadic way of life, so their domestication implies sedentism.⁹

So far as animal domestication is concerned, it first took place in the hilly/mountainous region where modern-day Iran, Iraq and Turkey meet, the most likely reason for this being that, in a situation where most wild species were not naturally domesticable, hilly regions (with a variety of altitudes and therefore of vegetation) would have produced the greatest range of animal species, and the greatest variation of individuals within species. Such an environment would have been the most likely to have produced smaller types, more amenable to control.

For the Old World, then, the location and timing of agriculture is understood, as are the plants and animals on which it was based. Further, there is a general agreement among palaeobiologists that domestication was invented only once and then spread to western Europe and India. Whether it also spread as far afield as south-east Asia and central Africa is still a moot point, and the most recent genetic evidence of farmers (as opposed to their plants) is not as conclusive as it might be. It shows that modern-day Greeks share 85–100 per cent of their (relevant) genes with Middle Easterners (from Baghdad, Ankara and Damascus), whereas Parisians share only 15–30 per cent. Some archaeologists have suggested that this means that it wasn’t the idea that spread, but people practising the idea, but not everyone accepts this.¹⁰