Tudge challenges the traditional view that agriculture arose suddenly about ten thousand years ago. "Civilisation" is also credited with emerging simultaneously in a mutually reinforcing feedback cycle with surplus crop farming. The evidence supporting this stance comes from archaeological finds in places like the Tigris-Euphrates Valley [Iraq], Jericho [Palestine] and Catul Hayak in Turkey. In these places grain storage facilities bespeak intense cereals agriculture. Surplus grain production and distribution techniques suggest social hierarchy, fluent communication and new approaches to the environment. The standard view stumbles a bit in how knowledge of farming spread to remote places like Central America. It's also silent on why isolated peoples like Aborigines in Australia failed to adopt "domestic" farming methods.
Tudge wants a fresh assessment - starting with a proper definition of "farming". By his definition, "farming" is simply any modification of an environment supporting edible resources. "Modification" ranges from protecting a known resource from predation to diverting water to stimulate growth. There are no "fields" dedicated to crop production - the sites were opportunistic finds. Tudge here raises the point overlooked by most scholars -"farming" began at the end of the last Ice Age. The best crop sites were low-lying stream valleys containing rich soils and available water. As the glaciers melted and sea levels rose, these locations were inundated and lost to research. The Middle Eastern "burst" of agrarian development was due to a dislocated population that had already practiced farming elsewhere. The Tigris-Euphrates was an exile.
Neither, Tudge argues, will we find paddocks for domestic animals in the early locations. In Tudge's view animal domestication began by selecting those animals amenable to human contact. Continuous association evoked genetic changes in these creatures until domestication became the norm. Nor were the keepers of goats, sheep and other small animals necessarily constant in the practice. Tudge notes a South African people who keep goats for some years, then abandon them for a spate of hunting.
He also insists on a Darwinian perspective on farming and pastoralism's origins. The "sudden" outburst of Middle Eastern agriculture violates the Darwinian process by obscuring earlier evidence. Like any evolutionary process, each step is slow, hesitant and scattered in time and place. Success builds on success until a new pattern is firmly established. Farming and pastoralism emerged in steps, but once established, it became an irreversible process. Agriculture produces not only excess crops, but excess population to consume them. Extra land is needed to supply the new population - and the cycle repeats. This surge in population of modern humans due to agriculture , Tudge contends, was the death knell of the Neanderthals. With Tudge's form of farming originating forty thousand years ago, modern humans outproduced the Neanderthals in both population and resource dominance.
This slim volume proposes many innovative and challenging ideas. Tudge is on solid ground in negating the "abrupt flowering" of modern humans and agriculture in the Middle East. He rightly argues for simpler beginnings of such a complex process. This is an important book in an important series. Tudge's excellent prose skills make this small book a delight to read. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
