TecC 10 - Seeds of Civilization: The First Great Bargain
Sowing time, reaping change: property’s patient path to prosperity
One reason I’m calling this series and my approach ‘technocentric’ is that this is focused on exploring and understanding the role of intelligence in human-driven progress. And on this journey thereof, we’ve barely scratched the surface. Let’s next focus on another huge change in the story of human progress that would in many ways change things forever. It should give us food for thought!
When it comes to the application of intelligence as mentioned above, another key factor is the resources at hand, which also leads to the question of not just what resources are easily available to us but also how we can make more resources available, and more easily. The bulk of the exploration of that question will be in a different series, under a different paradigm (remember what it is?), but let’s here get back to the technocentric view of it.
Tools to Tables
We have previously discussed how early hominid species managed to apply intelligence to modify things from the environment and devise something new, something of utility - what we’ve called a ‘tool’, the first of them being made out of sharpened stone to aid hunting. We then looked at how, by learning to control fire, we were able to consume the hunted in cooked form, giving us huge reserves of protein and energy, freeing us up for other pursuits.
This as such worked. The protein from the meat is explained to have aided the increase of brain size, and thus more intelligence which, in a virtuous circle, enabled better tool-making and so on. But you might say, something was still missing. Or at least, could we – as in, the early humans – not have had a more secure source of food than having to chase animals in the wild?
Well, as I’ve touched upon in the previous episode, such calculation might be easy for us to relate to in hindsight and we cannot assume they went through such a thought-process. Early humans would have probably been reasonably satisfied at the idea of hunting game and using fire to cook and eat it, especially if they had memory of not being able to do so, or over time, the example of others not doing so.
Gather or Grow
We commonly refer to these early human groups as ‘hunter-gatherers’, and so far I’ve mainly only touched upon the hunting part, as you might have gathered!
It is easy to picture that between the two activities, hunting wild game was more likely the remit of the stronger members of the group, mostly males, and complementarily gathering being taken up by the others. Gathering, was of course literally low-hanging fruit, alongside nuts and berries and such like, thus being physically easier and less risky than hunting.
You may be forgiven for entertaining the thought just as me that such gatherers might have entertained the thought: what if we could always have these fruitful (and nutful and berryful) trees growing near us always rather than us having to move from place to place to find new reserves of such easy pickings!1 But it probably never occurred to such early human groups that such a ‘luxury’ might even be possible. Until the right climatic circumstances came along.
Seeds of Change
We of course take growing food for granted, we’ve seen it in our lifetime, perhaps, even for a child growing up in a dense urban environment, there might be the example of pots of herbs in the apartment, or an apple tree in the garden. But it must have taken early humans the accident of circumstance to stumble upon the idea that planting seeds could bear fruit - again, quite literally, and nuts and grain and other edible items.
I have very briefly mentioned the impetus to agriculture in TecC04. Agriculture developed independently in about 6 regions across the world, but the most well-known version of it is the developments around Mesopotamia, or the Fertile Crescent, going back roughly 10,000 years ago. The core artefactual details of this development are fairly straightforward to relate to: till the soil, ie, prepare it for cultivation, plant seeds, water them and manage their growth. Yes, there’s a myriad of details there, but that’s the essence of it.
And of course these would have happened incrementally, by leaps and bounds, by trial and error, spanning hundreds even a couple of thousands of years before it became settled practice, in many senses of that phrase! And while we can indeed dig into the details of it, in our broader technocentric journey, what’s also of interest to us is the ‘institutional technologies’ underpinning these purely physical developments.
A Viable View
I would propose that one of the main intellectual leaps at work here is what much later in psychology comes to be referred to as ‘delayed gratification’. Having discovered that sowing seeds can lead to a fine crop after a few months, early groups had to contend with the need to delay their expectation of reward for such a long period of time. I suspect this wouldn’t have been easy, when compared of course to the time-frames in the hunter-gatherer alternative.
Think about it, you have got a bunch of seeds you know can either be consumed here and now, or a portion of it stowed away until the next fertile growing season. And as a group of people – remember these are what we may call fully autonomous groups, there’s nobody else telling them what to do - you opt for delayed gratification. You forego, you forsake, you forfeit the consumption of all the grain in the hope – yes in the earliest scenarios given the vagaries of the environment and their own immature stage of such farming practice, it might might have been more wishful thinking than thoughtful planning – in the hope and desire of reaping what you’ve sown many moons later!
And again, when we say, as a group you decide to stow away some of the grain - this requires the formulation of other socioeconomic and eventually legal systems, to ensure that this is indeed a viable2 and sustainable practice. As I’ve briefly hinted previously, the main systems of relevance here are the notions of property rights and their legal enforcement.
Bounds of Belonging
If you haven’t watched some of these videos in particular on YouTube where ‘modern man’ makes contact for the very first time with uncontacted tribes - these are isolated human groups3 that have practically been living in the early stone age with no knowledge or experience of all human development the rest of us have known since, you might be tempted after reading this to take a look. While the ethics of suddenly intruding into the natural habitats of such isolated peoples can be discussed elsewhere,4 just watching such existing video footage already taken makes for some fascinating observation.
One image that stood out is where this individual only recently exposed to such modern contact seeks to pull out the T-Shirt worn by one such ‘modern man’, for himself, having never seen such clothing previously. I’m of course referring to the substantially different, or non-existent, notion of property as prevalent among such hunter-gather groups, who could more-or-less hunt and gather at will.
I discussed the development of such concepts briefly in TecC 05 - The Two Faces of Prometheus, talking about how this was the embryonic stages of the institution of the State, which is a central part of all human living with the exception of such yet-uncontacted tribes and possibly lawless hinterlands in some remote terrains.
Farming’s Free Perks?
But one question remains unanswered.5 Why did small human groups go to such great lengths of effort and investment6 in the early days of only-later-so-called Agricultural Revolution?
One documentary I watched connected this with the accidental and continued fermentation of some of their grain giving early experimenters of farming access to light forms of what we now consume as beer! I couldn’t be sure if that documentary was sponsored by a brewery chain, and I don’t want to trivialize such a hugely influential phenomenon as farming, but… who knows eh?
Some of you might find it easier to resolve that question the next time you’re having a drink, at least for yourselves!
A stone-age version of the mountain-Mohammed question I hear you say!
I only meant ‘viable’ in the normally used sense of the term and then the dictionary (Oxford) lists at least two other additional and more literal senses, one under ‘Botany’: “able to germinate”, and the other under ‘Biology’: “capable of surviving or living successfully, especially under particular environmental conditions”!
Mainly found in the Amazon jungle and Papua New Guinea but also in parts of Africa
And the debate can go and has gone in both directions: do we not offer them the fruits of modern civilization?, is it not better to let them be the way they are?
Even in academic circles there doesn’t seem to be a definitive answer that’s found consensus
A more economics-y word for ‘delayed gratification’!