The Neolithic Revolution: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

However, we might be able to resolve these two conflicting narratives by suggesting that many historical changes bring real improvements or advantages to a civilization, but that these innovations often have real downsides and negative tradeoffs. There is frequently a “two steps forward, one step back” process in the history of civilization, and understanding it will help explain how and why the first cities and large-scale states developed.

In short, sedentary farming and the development of kingdoms and states were positive developments in the long run, and often very miserable to live through.

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Farming vs. Hunting and Gathering

Let’s start by going back to our first farmers, and contrasting them with the hunter-gatherers who came before them. Today, we tend to romanticize farming as traditional and “natural,” in contrast with life in industrial cities or post-modern homes full of digital technology. Farming in our minds represents a simpler time, and you can find plenty of people who claim to wish to return to it, or wonder if we were better off as farmers.

And yet, life as a Neolithic farmer may have been worse in many ways than life as a hunter-gatherer. Hunter-gatherers had protein-rich diets with lots of meat and nuts, were able to rest for long periods of time in between hunts, and could easily pack up and move at a moment’s notice. Farming, by contrast, is very hard work. Farmers work from sunup to sundown for much of the year, and rarely take a day off (animals need milking and feeding no matter what). Farming involves hours and hours of laborious and repetitive back-breaking tasks such as plowing, sowing, weeding, and harvesting. Animals need constant tending and care, and the fixed and permanent nature of farming means that farms are always at risk of predation from animals or bandits.

And the results of agriculture are not always spectacular, especially for many pre-modern farmers. Most farmers focused on one or two staple crops, usually grains such as wheat, rice, barley, or maize (corn). While hunter-gatherers ate freshly killed meat and wild plants, farmers mostly ate…bread. A huge percentage of the calories consumed by pre-modern farmers came from grains (bread, porridges, rice, cornmeal, etc), with only small amounts of dairy and meat. One advantage of living near coasts and bodies of water was access to fish as another source of protein. Fruit and vegetables were available, but only when in season, and usually only grown locally.

We can see the results of this change in the skeletal record. Across the globe, farmers were shorter and smaller than most hunter-gatherers, and often nutritionally-deficient. They developed dental problems from cavities caused by the sugars in grains, and often their teeth wore down from tiny bits of stone that chipped off from stone mills. They also suffered from arthritis and had skeletal deformities from doing the same repetitive tasks and motions over and over again for decades.

And they were sicker. Staying in one place near other humans, and living alongside domesticated animals, helped diseases evolve and spread quickly. Many of the worst diseases in history, such as bird and swine flus, cowpox, and (via fleas) bubonic plague, have spread due to close contact with animals. During winter, many farmers brought their livestock indoors, often into family homes for warmth, and concentrated dwellings of humans and animals also produced large amounts of manure and waste material which could infect drinking water. Hunter-gatherers could avoid diseased communities simply by walking away and staying isolated; but farmers were stuck in one place. Farming and civilization brought plagues and pandemics, which were made even worse by the cramped conditions of cities with no indoor plumbing. If you’ve ever seen a movie where someone walks through a medieval village and has a chamber pot dumped on them from a window…. Also, animals in cities produced huge amounts of manure. In old Western movies, when a character gets thrown out of a saloon in the mud on the street next to where all the horses are tied up, they aren’t just landing in mud.

So why did farming even take hold in the first place? Some anthropologists in the mid 20th century argued that hunter-gatherers actually had it better, and that farming was a step in the wrong direction. This played into old tropes about “noble savages” who were more virtuous and in touch with nature, and untainted by the evils of civilization. As we have seen already with hunter-gatherers, this is most likely a myth; the skeletal remains of hunter-gatherers show shockingly high rates of violent death. But it’s quite possible that many hunter-gatherers thought themselves better off than farmers, and often raided farms for food, animals, and captives.

Therein we have a clue. Hunter-gatherers may have raided farmers, because life as a hunter-gatherer was inherently feast-or-famine. If you didn’t kill a deer that day, you didn’t eat, or at least hoped that the women in your tribe had gathered a few nuts and roots for dinner. Hunter-gatherers had low population levels and frequently fought each other precisely because it was so easy to overhunt a given area and kill off most of the readily available wild game. It’s possible that aggression and violence in hunter-gatherer societies helped keep population levels low, allowing game animals to replenish during times of over-crowding. The carrying-capacity of the land simply wasn’t very good for supporting a large population.

There were also far more farmers, and as we saw with specialization and our hypothetical Neolithic farming village, they could work together. This not only helped farmers living in individual communities, but it also encouraged further development in trade, and eventually, specialization within entire communities and regions. As with farming itself, trade and interdependence between communities had real advantages, as well as potential tradeoffs and risks.

Comparative Advantage, Trade, and Civilizational Collapse

We saw that our Neolithic farmers could improve their lives by specializing in tasks they were good at or enjoyed, and trading with each other for what they needed. But it turns out that an individual doesn’t even have to be the absolute best in a given field to benefit, as the 19th century British economist David Ricardo noticed. Ricardo studied trade between Britain and Portugal (looking at how Britain produced cloth, while Portugal produced wine) and found that even if one country could make multiple products, they were better off focusing on the thing they did best, and trading with another country. He dubbed this the law of comparative advantage, and even proved it mathematically.

There are downsides and risks to trade and specialization, of course. If a person or country isn’t self-sufficient in making and producing everything they need, then a market crash or collapse in trade could lead to ruin. You can imagine a naysayer in our hypothetical village objecting to the idea of a communal mill, pointing out that if the mill broke or the donkey died, the whole village would suffer. Or that if everyone in the village switched to making dyes for wool to trade with another town several miles over, the village would become dependent on outsiders, and vulnerable.

And quite a few times in history, these vulnerabilities do help precipitate crashes. It’s quite likely that a breakdown in the bronze trade around 1200 BC played a role in the Bronze Age Collapse, which proved catastrophic for civilizations across the Mediterranean and Near East. In many places, the resulting civilizational collapse was worse than the fall of the Western Roman Empire. We tend to remember the warnings of imminent collapse which came true, and conveniently forget all the ones that didn’t. Still, if they repeat themselves enough, the naysayers will eventually have a point.

However, the quest for self-sufficiency above all else is probably more idealistic and less realistic than many might think. No one person can actually grow and make all the things they need to survive. Even in the classic days of Westward expansion when rugged and self-reliant pioneers tamed the wilderness, railroads and factories supplied critical materials that made the taming possible. The Plains Indians could never have been defeated without gunpowder weapons made by specialist gunsmiths, and American farm wives on the frontier coveted the first Sears, Roebucks catalogs, which enabled them to order finished goods from factories back East.

In recent years, Americans have argued a great deal about the merits of offshoring jobs to other countries, and whether this has hollowed out communities at home. For both doctrinaire free-traders and protectionists, this debate is probably more complicated and not as simple as any one side in it would like to admit. It’s probably also a very old one, echoing all the way back to pre-farming hunter-gatherers arguing over whether to specialize in making fish-hooks to trade with other clans for mammoth meat.

Two steps forward, one step back

Sedentary civilization, then, may have been a case of “two steps forward, one step back.” Many aspects of life were worse than what came before, but the tradeoff was, in the long run, positive. And over time, humans found ways to mitigate and improve the worst features of sedentary life. Later farmers found ways to work land that Neolithic farmers couldn’t, and as trade networks and specialization developed, farmers found ways to supplement their diet, purchase finished goods from far away, and hedge against downside risks such as crop failures. By 1800 AD, life as a farmer was as physically demanding as it had been six thousand years before, but it was much better in many other ways and had a far better standard of living.

This feature of historical change, where a new innovation or way of living is initially worse than what came before, is one that we’ll see repeated over and over again. Life in large cities was even more disease-prone than farming, and added extremely high levels of crime. Cities were also targets of invasion and sieges, and supported the infrastructure needed to make governments and tyrannical kings. Hunter-gatherers may have periodically fought each other over hunting grounds in very small skirmishes, but cities and kingdoms could wage large-scale warfare and slaughter whole populations.

However, cities also produced the trade and surplus wealth necessary to support the arts and sciences, and foster institutions of high culture and leisure. Astronomy predated cities and kingdoms, but we remember civilizations such as the Babylonians for building tall temples for star-gazing and recording eclipses and the movements of the planets. Even today, cities produce some of the worst crime, as well as the best museums and opera houses.

During the Industrial Revolution, millions of farmers moved from the countryside to the new manufacturing cities springing up in Britain, Germany, and America, to work in factories. Life as a manufacturing worker in the Industrial era was extremely difficult by our standards, with ten-to-twelve hour workdays, six days a week, often in dangerous conditions, and for low wages. Workers lived in cramped tenement or row houses in filthy cities full of pollution, disease, and crime. These conditions were shocking, and led to many welfare reforms and regulations which, along with rapidly increasing wealth and standards of living, eventually created the huge suburban communities most of us live in today, which are fantastically wealthy and pleasant places to live in, measured against any historical period.

The 16th and 17th centuries experienced something similar with the printing press, which made the Bible available to all who could read, and helped jump-start the Scientific Revolution. It also produced a huge amount of scurrilous content, propaganda and fake news, and even made witch-burnings more common through the publication of manuals on how to supposedly find and identify witches. Digital technology, the internet, and artificial intelligence, will undoubtedly lead to new evils and miseries which humans will have to eventually learn to fix. There is some comfort in remembering that cleaning up our messes is actually a very old human accomplishment.

The Atrahasis Myth and the Creation of Humans

In Sumerian myth, humans were born out of divine sacrifice, and possessed knowledge. Upon these bloody bricks was civilization founded.

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