Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

One thing that recommends Groube’s theory is that it divorces sedentism from agriculture. This discovery is one of the more important insights to have been gained since the Second World War. In 1941, when the archaeologist Gordon Childe coined the phrase ‘The Neolithic Revolution’, he argued that the invention of agriculture had brought about the development of the first villages and that this new sedentary way of life had in turn led to the invention of pottery, metallurgy and, in the course of only a few thousand years, the blossoming of the first civilisations.¹⁵ This neat idea has now been overturned, for it is quite clear that sedentism, the transfer from a hunter-gathering lifestyle to villages, was already well under way by the time the agricultural revolution took place. This has transformed our understanding of early man and his thinking.

Although present-day ‘stone age’ tribes are by no means a perfect analogue of ancient hunter-gatherers (for one thing, they tend to occupy marginal areas), it has become clear that ‘primitive’ peoples do have an intimate knowledge of the natural world in which they live. And, although they may not practise full-scale agriculture, they certainly cultivate both plants and animals, in the sense of clearing areas and planting grasses or vegetables or fruits. They sow, drain and irrigate, they practise rough herding and ‘free range movement’. They keep pet mammals and birds and are fully aware of the medicinal qualities of certain herbs. This is surely a halfway stage between the old idea of hunter-gatherers and full-blown agriculture. By the same token, ‘there is now a considerable body of evidence in support of the view that some resource-rich locations in the Levant were occupied year-round during the terminal Pleistocene (more specifically in the Natufian and Khiamian periods: c. 10,500–8300 BC) by “sedentary foragers” who developed . . . techniques of plant exploitation, including storage and possibly small-scale cultivation . . . and who lived year round in settlements of up to half a hectare in area’.¹⁶

The fact that sedentism preceded agriculture has stimulated the French archaeologist Jacques Cauvin to produce a wide-ranging review of the archaeology of the Middle East, which enables him to reconcile many developments, most notably the origins of religion and the idea of the home, with far-reaching implications for the development of both our basic and our more speculative/philosophical innovations. If tools and the control of fire were the first ideas, clothing and shelter soon followed.

Cauvin, late director of research emeritus at the Institut de Prehistoire Orientale at Jalés in Ardèche, France (between Lyons and Marseilles), starts from a detailed examination of the pre-agricultural villages of the Near East. These begin, he says, between 15,500 and 12,500 BC, at Kharaneh in Jordan, with ‘base camps’ up to 2,000 square metres in extent and which consist of circular depressions in open air sites. Between 12,500 and 10,000 BC, however, the so-called Natufian culture extended over almost all of the Levant, from the Euphrates to Sinai (the Natufian takes its name from a site at Wadi an-Natuf in Israel). Excavations at Eynan-Mallaha, in the Jordan valley, north of the Sea of Galilee, identified the presence of storage pits, suggesting ‘that these villages should be defined not only as the first sedentary communities in the Levant, but as “harvesters of cereals” ’.¹⁷

The Natufian culture also boasted houses. These were grouped together (about six in number), as villages, and were semi-subterranean, built in shallow circular pits ‘whose sides were supported by dry-stone retaining walls; they had one or two hearths and traces of concentric circles of posts – evidence of substantial construction’. Their stone tools were not just for hunting but for grinding and pounding, and there were many bone implements too. Single or collective burials were interred under the houses or grouped in ‘genuine cemeteries’.¹⁸ Some burials, including those of dogs, may have been ceremonial, since they were decorated with shells and polished stones. Mainly bone art works were found in these villages, usually depicting animals.

At Abu Hureyra, between 11,000 and 10,000 BC, the Natufians intensively harvested wild cereals but towards the end of that period the cereals became much rarer (the world was becoming drier) and they switched to knot grass and vetch. In other words, there was as yet no phenomenon of deliberate specialisation. Analysis of the microblades from these sites shows they were used both for harvesting wild cereals and for cutting reeds, still more evidence for the absence of specialisation.