Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China. E. N. Anderson

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СКАЧАТЬ stone tools all developed together as part of one complex. This was suggested by the archaeology of the time. It has turned out to be wrong. Ground stone, pottery, and settled life all came earlier (and in that order). Pottery developed in East Asia at least 20,000 years ago and independently in the New World considerably later. Settled village life and ground stone tool technology have both been independently invented many times in many areas. Agriculture did ultimately revolutionize human society, but only very slowly.

      Agriculture developed first in the Near East, specifically the interior Levant somewhere between south-central Turkey and central Palestine. Then agriculture was invented at least once and probably twice in China. Subsequent inventions occurred in central Mexico, highland and lowland South America (probably as separate events), New Guinea, and possibly the Mississippi Valley and western Africa.

      Wheat and barley were both domesticated in the Middle East. Barley may have been independently domesticated in a few spots (D. Harris 2010: 75). The earliest wheat domesticates were two species: einkorn (Triticum monococcum, or T. urartu var. monococcum), native to Turkey, the Caucasus, and the Fertile Crescent. The development of einkorn wheat centered on the Karachadag (Black Mountain) in southeast Turkey but may have been domesticated over a much wider zone (Asouti and Fuller 2013; D. Harris 2010: 77). This species hybridized—naturally or through human selection—with the grass Aegilops speltoides to produce emmer, T. turgidum var. dicoccum, a wholly unnatural plant. Both were domesticated in southern Turkey and the western Fertile Crescent, with innovations likely occurring at various points and diffusing.

      Einkorn is almost extinct today, but emmer remains a popular crop in parts of the Middle East, and especially in Italy, where it is known as farro. Thriving in cold wet mountain conditions that bread wheats hate, it remains common in the high Apennines. It also makes a superior porridge and good pasta. Much more important is a selected variety of it, durum wheat (Triticum durum). This is not really a species—simply a form of emmer with extremely hard grains. It is the ideal pasta grain, allowing good al dente preparation. It is largely confined to the Italian world and to the northern Great Plains of North America, which have ideal conditions for growing it and therefore grow most of the world supply. But it reached China early: it is described in the fourteenth-century Yinshan Zhengyao and was found uncommonly but quite widely in North China by J. L. Buck (1937) in the early twentieth century.

      The real action, however, took place when emmer crossed with another Aegilops, A. tauschii, in northern Iran or the Azerbaijan region around 6000 BCE. Somewhere just southwest of the Caspian Sea, about 8,000 years ago, a woman noticed that her bread was astonishingly good. It was miraculously light and fluffy, as though the gods had inspired it to rise. Consistently, the bread made of grain from one part of her family field produced bread like this. No one else had anything so good. She and her husband thanked the gods, then carefully selected the grain from that part of the field, and saved it for seed. As neighbors and relatives learned of it, the new high-quality seed spread more and more rapidly. Eventually it took over the world: bread wheat is now the most commonly grown plant on earth and the staple food of billions of people.

      Eight thousand years later and many thousand miles away, a laboratory team learned that the local wheat had crossed with a wild grass, a local form of goat-face grass (Aegilops tauschii). From that grass, the local wheat obtained a gene for a form of gluten that allows the dough to trap carbon dioxide bubbles more effectively than regular gluten. The result is light, fluffy bread.

      No one knows the name of the discoverer, but we can be sure that it was a woman: baking was a woman’s job then as now in that area. She benefited humanity more, I believe, than all the kings and generals of history.

      This (slightly fictionalized) event produced bread wheat. It is nicknamed “BAD wheat” by geneticists because the genomes are respectively labeled A for the female ancestor (T. urartu), and B and D for the successive Aegilops inputs. A possible separate hybridization of the same species produced spelt, which makes better porridge but worse bread. This was not the end—other wheats have been developed but they are local and need not detain us here.

      Many other domesticates come from the Fertile Crescent, and much activity seems to center on the aforementioned Karachadag, where chickpeas are native and where some strains of barley may have originated. The oldest known cultivation so far, however, is in Syria and Jordan, where agriculture goes back to 9500 BCE or earlier.

      Dogs were domesticated about the same time, or even earlier (recent claims have them going back to 30,000 years ago). They were presumably the earliest domesticated animal, but we know surprisingly little about their origin. They first show up in ritual burials (touchingly including children buried with puppies) from the earliest agricultural levels. Sheep and goats were domesticated not long after, and somewhat later came cattle and pigs. Cattle certainly, and pigs almost certainly, were independently domesticated in several different places. We know this for cattle because the domesticate strains are radically different forms. The Indian zebu is not even the same species as the Near Eastern cow, and hybridizing them was a modern scientific triumph. The traditional East Africa cow (the Ankole) is different from both.

      Contrary to older ideas of progress, stockherding came well after farming, not before. The ancient Greeks thought herding was lower on the human scale than farming and so must have come earlier. They saddled history with this latter illusion, dispelled only by modern archaeology. Snobbism never makes good theory.

      This is not the place to get deeply into theories of agriculture, but suffice it to say that all the classic theories are wrong. Most of them depend on the idea that people were primitive savages who wandered around at the mercy of nature until some genius noticed that seeds grew into plants. Of course, everyone has known the latter for hundreds of thousands of years. Agriculture was about choosing to sow, not about learning that seeds grew into plants. Other theorists assume people invented agriculture because they “needed food,” but Carl Sauer (1952) proved long ago that people would have to be settled, knowledgeable, and aware of diverse and rich resources before they took up farming. Desperate people don’t have time to invent. As the Chinese proverb says: “When you are thirsty, it’s too late to dig a well.”

      The really revolutionary new finds are recent discoveries of large settlements just before agriculture began. The huge ceremonial site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey is only 60 km from the Karachadag (Mann 2011 provides stunning photos). In Jordan, a large, well-to-do, architecturally sophisticated village with a huge and beautiful assembly hall arose just before agriculture began (Mithen et al. 2011; this is the same Steven Mithen who delightfully holds that humans sang or at least chanted before they talked [Mithen 2006], an idea originally stemming from Giambattista Vico [1999, orig. ca. 1740]. I love the idea, but alas it is unprovable.) The villagers were eating well from game and wild plants. Clearly, settled, well-fed life preceded agriculture.

      Therefore, fairly recently, some scholars have argued that agriculture was invented not to prevent starvation but to allow people to have a large supply of favorite foods at hand for convenience, defense, and trade. Perhaps, in light of the striking architecture in Göbekli Tepe and Jordan, ceremonies required copious supplies (Hayden 2001; Mann 2011). I would bet on trade as the major driver. It provides an incentive to have lots of food close to the village to be ready at hand and also protected from raids.

      Very soon after the domestication of wheat and barley, chickpeas, lentils, and other legume crops were domesticated in the Near East. Beans were early in China, Mexico, Peru, and other ancient centers of farming, also. Their easily available protein makes them desirable crops to go along with the grains, which provide bulk calories and B vitamins but not enough protein for an easy living. The other great source of protein, animal husbandry, soon followed, with sheep and goats in the Near East, pigs and chickens in China. Then, not much later, or perhaps even earlier, came vegetables and herbs; they do not preserve well archaeologically, so we know less about them. Among the fascinating mysteries of science are the СКАЧАТЬ