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

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СКАЧАТЬ we move to western Eurasia, however, we are in a very different situation. Bellwood and Renfrew hypothesized that the Indo-European (IE) phylum was present at the birth of agriculture in the Near East and spread along with it. This is certainly false. Agriculture in the Near East began at least 11,000 years ago, and the IE phylum is a very close-knit one. Suffice it to say that the Hittite for water is wadar. This and hundreds of other close pairs prove that IE cannot possibly have split up more than about 6,000 years ago. Languages change very fast, especially in the days before books, radio, and television. Languages diverge and differentiate faster than we once thought (Brown 2010), and this process probably happened even faster in preliterate times.

      Moreover, we know that agriculture began in the dry Levantine back country. But the IE phylum has shared cognates for a whole host of cool-temperate plants and animals, including laks for salmon. (No, that word isn’t of Jewish origin.) These biota firmly fix the IE origin somewhere between northeast Europe and the Caucasus—most likely in and around what is now the Ukraine. Conversely, IE significantly lacks words for dry Levantine commodities.

      Also, there is plenty of evidence for pre-IE farmers in Europe. The surviving Basque language is the most obvious piece, but there are also the host of agricultural and rural words in Germanic that have no IE roots: “wheat,” “sheep,” “eel,” “delve,” “roe” (deer), “boar,” and even “land,” among others (Witzel 2006). Greek also borrowed from non-IE languages a whole host of agricultural and settlement words. Speakers of IE languages would hardly have borrowed such words from hunter-gatherers. Spreading in the other direction, IE speakers of the language ancestral to today’s Iranic and north Indian (Sanskritic) languages borrowed a similar large range of words, including terms for camel, donkey, and brick as well as a whole host of religious terms (including names of gods, like Indra) and literary usages (Witzel 2006).

      A recent hypothesis, based on virus epidemiology, has the IE languages originating in Anatolia and spreading with agriculture (Bouckaert et al. 2012). But again the timing is wrong; agriculture had already spread widely by the later, and more believable, timing they reconstruct, and one wonders what happened to the earlier propagators. Viruses do not make a very good model for humans.

      What, then, accounts for the spread of the IE peoples? The traditional explanation was that they developed riding, horse traction, and horse-based warfare (chariots and, probably later, riding). This explanation has received a powerful boost lately from increasingly clear evidence that the horse was domesticated in Kazakhstan around 5,500 years ago (Anthony 2007; Harris 2010)—just east of the place and time reconstructed for the IE homeland. The horse was probably a food animal first. Only after domestication could it be milked and ridden. Anyone familiar with wild equines will know that they would not stand still for either process! Horses, unlike ruminant livestock, are neither stolid nor intellectually limited. They are high-strung, sensitive, extremely intelligent animals, and to this day it takes a tremendous amount of empathy and skill to work with them. Instead of dull servants like cows, they can become super-smart companions. In Mongolia, my wife saw small boys riding bareback, standing up, controlling the horses by pressure of feet. The horses went through the most amazing maneuvers, sensitive to every touch and knowing exactly what to do.

      Breeding to maintain this level of intelligence while getting rid of the natural ferocity and cunning of wild equines was truly a piece of work. Domestication must have been a long process with a lot of mutual learning. The advantages of skilled horsemen include the military edge made famous by both ancient Greek and early Chinese authors but do not stop there; imagine the edge ancient horsemen had in herding, communications, trading, plowing, and just about every other mobile activity.

      This theory has recently been supplemented by the idea that the IE peoples had the gene that allowed them to digest lactose as adults. In most humans, the enzyme that breaks down lactose—milk sugar—is not produced after age about six. After that, they suffer major intestinal discomfort if they consume much fresh dairy food over time. Among the world’s milk-dependent peoples, however, mutant genes convey the ability to digest lactose throughout life. These genes are close to universal in Europe. They evolved quite separately among the herding peoples of East Africa (who actually have more genes for this trait than Europeans do). This is a recent development, known from many lines of evidence to be a product of dairy-dependent economics, and arose long after the beginning of agriculture.

      The European gene is fairly common in the Near East but fades out rapidly in the rest of Asia. There—in Central and South Asia, in particular—people rely on lactose metabolism by Lactobacillus bacteria to make milk palatable. Lactobacillus breaks down lactose into lactic acid, not only making the food digestible but also preserving it (lactic acid is a strong preservative). Lactobacillus fermentation has thus proved very useful: it gives us yogurt, sourdough bread, pickles, sauerkraut, soy sauce, salami, and many other preserved foods. Asians, using this technology, did not need lactase. However, to carry out and maintain Lactobacillus fermentation requires a rather sophisticated lifestyle on the part of its users. It is not something that dates back to the dawn of farming.

      Indo-Europeans were probably too mobile to maintain the sensitive, delicate cultures that give us yogurt and sourdough, so the mutant gene allowed the IE peoples to depend heavily on fresh milk products (Cochran and Harpending 2009). This may have given them a major competitive advantage as they took to nomadic herding. They could easily spread south and east into lands lacking the gene. I think this is quite probable, but evidently the pre-IE peoples in Europe also had the gene, since we know they were relying on cattle and sheep and doing at least some dairying.

      The complex of riding and lactase allowed the IE peoples to depend on nomadic stockherding and to be superior at it. This allowed them to spread with lightning speed, which they evidently did, for their languages soon cropped up from the Atlantic to the frontiers of China.

      Important to our history is one IE family in particular, the Indo-Iranian. The Iranic languages and the Sanskrit-derived languages of India are modern representatives of this early but compact branch. A number of sound shifts unite them and separate them from other IE families. Indo-Iranian speakers evidently nomadized east and south, eventually conquering and occupying vast realms from Iran to Bengal and from south Russia to westernmost China. In the process they assimilated many speakers of languages now lost. They have, in turn, lost most of their central Asian territory to Turkic languages—showing how fast languages can spread widely and then retreat. Most Turkic speakers today had ancestors who spoke IE tongues.

      Bellwood and Renfrew also thought the Afroasiatic phylum—whose most visible representative is the Semitic family—might have developed along with agriculture and spread from the Near East. This, too, is impossible. The Afroasiatic center of diversity is Ethiopia, in or near which this language phylum certainly arose. The intrusion of one small branch, the Semitic family, into Asia is a relatively recent phenomenon, probably going back not much before their entrance to history, with the Babylonians. The original Afroasiatic speakers were certainly like modern Ethiopians physically and culturally.

      So, who developed Near Eastern agriculture? The Sumerian language (and its possible relative Elamite) is in the right place at the right time. The Sumerians spread far and successfully into the best farmland before being conquered and linguistically assimilated by the Semites. Their art shows that they looked like modern Middle Eastern people—their genes have survived much better than their languages. My money is on the Sumerians.

      We will have to deal with a few other language phyla in this book. The Uralic languages (Finnish, Hungarian, and relatives) arose near enough to IE to have exchanged ancient loanwords. The Austroasiatic phylum evidently arose in eastern India—that is its center of diversity and linguistic range. It spread east, possibly as recently as two or three thousand years ago. One branch is the Mon-Khmer family, which includes Khmer, Vietnamese, and many more obscure highland languages. Bellwood thought the Austroasiatic phylum began in China, but all evidence is against this; all evidence is consistent with an origin СКАЧАТЬ