WTWRFN (Foragers, Farmers)
Ian Morris, WTWRFN
The early farmers of the Hilly Flanks [an area covering today’s Iraq, Syria] transformed the way people lived [..]
Female foragers, who regularly carry their infants with them as they walk thousands of miles every year gathering plants. Not surprisingly, they do not want too many children [..] But the more they settled down [into farming life] the less they needed to do this. Having more babies in fact became a boon, providing extra labor, and recent skeletal studies suggest that the average woman in an early farming village, staying in one place with stores of food, gave birth to seven or eight babies [..] The more food people grew, the more babies they could feed [..]
Little hunter-gatherer bands had had broad geographical horizons but narrow social ones: the landscape changed but the faces did not. The early farmer’s world was just the opposite. You might pass your whole life within a day’s walk of the village where you were born, but what a place it was—full of shrines where the gods revealed themselves, festivals and feasts to delight the senses, and gossipy, nosy neighbors in solid houses with plastered floors and waterproof roofs [..]
By imposing such mental structures on their world, Hilly Flankers were, we might say, domesticating themselves. They even remade what love meant. [..]
To do well, people now needed property—a house, fields, and flocks, not to mention investments like wells, walls, and tools. [..] Life increasingly focused on small family groups, probably the basic unit for transmitting property between generations. Children needed this material inheritance, because the alternative was poverty. Transmitting property became a matter of life and death [..] There are signs of what can only be called an obsession with ancestors. We perhaps see it as early as 10,000 BCE [..] as farming developed, it escalated. Burying multiple generations of the dead under house floors became common, mingling bodies in ways that seem to express very physically the link between property and descent.[..] Such intimacy with corpses makes most of us squeamish but clearly mattered a lot to early farmers in the Hilly Flanks.
Most archaeologists think it shows that ancestors were the most important supernatural beings. The ancestors had passed on property, without which the living would starve; in return the living honored them. Possibly ancestral rituals clothed the transmission of property in a holy aura, justifying why some people owned more than others. People may also have used skulls for necromancy, summoning ancestors to ask when to plant, where to hunt, and whether to raid neighbors [..]
[H]ierarchy developed fastest within households. I have already observed that men and women had had different roles in foraging societies, the former more active in hunting and the latter in gathering, but studies of contemporary groups suggest that domestication sharpens the sexual division of labor, tying women to the home. The high mortality/high fertility regime required most women to spend most of their lives pregnant and/or minding small children, and changes in agriculture—changes that women themselves probably pioneered—reinforced this.[..]
With so much at stake [for land / tools inheritance], men in modern peasant cultures want to be sure they really are the fathers of the children who will inherit their property. Foragers’ rather casual attitudes about sex yield to obsessive concern with daughters’ premarital virginity and wives’ extramarital activities. Men in traditional agricultural societies typically marry around the age of thirty, after they have come into their inheritance, while women generally marry around fifteen, before they have had much time to stray. [..] By, say, 7500 BCE a girl would typically grow up under the authority of her father, then, as a teenager, exchange it for the authority of a husband old enough to be her father.
Marriage would become a source of wealth as those who already had good lands and flocks would marry others in the same happy situation, consolidating holdings. The rich got richer.