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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
'A welcome ally in the fight against fake history' Eleanor Janega, author of The Middle Ages From the fall of Rome to the rise of the Wild West, David Mountain brings colour and perspective to historical mythmaking. The stories we tell about our past matter. But those stories have been shaped by prejudice, hoaxes and misinterpretations that have whitewashed entire chapters of history, erased women and invented civilisations. Today history is often used to justify xenophobia, nationalism and inequality as we cling to grand origin stories and heroic tales of extraordinary men. Exploring myths, mysteries and misconceptions about the past - from the legacies of figures like Pythagoras and Christopher Columbus, to the realities of life in the gun-toting Wild West, to the archaeological digs that have upset our understanding of the birth of civilisation - David Mountain reveals how ongoing revolutions in history and archaeology are shedding light on the truth. Full of adventures, and based on detailed research and interviews, Past Mistakes will make you reconsider your understanding of history - and of the world today. 'Past Mistakes takes what we think we remember from history class and sets the record straight! Definitely worth reading if you're ready to have your mind blown and then be filled with rage that you've been hoodwinked for this long.' The Tiny Activist
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Contents
INTRODUCTION
Blue beards and white power
Standing in the Ashmolean museum I have the sudden urge to laugh. Given that I’ve come to Oxford to see an exhibition of classical sculpture, this might seem odd. But the busts and statues before me aren’t the dead-eyed marble creations we’ve come to associate with the ancient world. Rather, they’re plaster reconstructions of what the artworks might have looked like when they were first created over 2,000 years ago – complete with their original, very loud, coats of paint.
The effect is startling, to say the least. Cold marble is transformed into warm skin tones. White robes become vibrant costumes. Bronze figures stare back at you with disconcertingly lifelike eyes. Particularly alarming is a sculpture of Paris, the archer and playboy prince from Greek mythology. In the marble original, carved some 2,500 years ago on the island of Aegina and now faded to a dirty white, he looks noble and deadly; in the replica, dressed in a luridly patterned outfit of yellow, blue, green and red, he looks like he’s just graduated from Clown College.1 I can’t help but snigger.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about these reconstructions, however, is that they probably would have been utterly unremarkable to inhabitants of the ancient Mediterranean. We don’t know the exact tints or techniques they employed, but an increasingly sophisticated array of ultraviolet, infrared, X-ray and chemical analysis tells us for certain that classical sculptures 2were almost never left unadorned. In fact, just about everything the Greeks and Romans could slather in paint or bedeck in jewels, they did.2 The 40-foot statue of Zeus in Olympia – one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World – was garishly clad in gold, ivory, gemstones and brightly painted wood. The Parthenon once housed a similarly gigantic and gaudy statue of the goddess Athena until it burned down sometime in the 3rd century CE. Even the Parthenon itself was brightly decorated with colourful friezes. And while there’s evidence that some artists aimed for a naturalistic finish, with realistic skin and hair tones, it’s clear that others opted for all-out psychedelia: archaeologists have uncovered the remnants of green horses and blue-maned lions. The limestone remains of a three-headed monster discovered at the Acropolis is known to have had black eyes, yellow skin and blue beards.
The Greeks and Romans were by no means unique in their love of colour. A wide range of ancient and historic cultures – from the Japanese to the Vikings to the Aztecs – were united by their appreciation of what archaeologists call polychromy: the use of colour in art and architecture. China’s Terracotta Warriors were once brightly painted with greens, reds, violets, pinks, whites and blues. Mesoamerican cultures like the Maya decorated their sculptures, structures and even pyramids in blocks of red, blue, yellow, pink and green. The castles of medieval Europe, in contrast to the dark and dingy lairs of popular imagination, were stuffed with brightly coloured furniture and wall hangings.3 The fantastical stone carvings in the 12th-century abbey at Cluny, in eastern France, were so garish that St Bernard of Clairvaux complained that they were distracting the monks. ‘One would rather spend the whole day gawking at them … than in meditation on the word of God,’ he grumbled.4 3
St Bernard may not have approved, but there was sound reasoning behind the carnivalesque colour schemes of his contemporaries and others. Bright hues helped friezes and sculptures mounted high up on temple walls to be clearly visible. Artworks often carried religious or political meaning, and distinctive colours conveyed a more intelligible message than a block of monochrome marble. What’s more, in the days before the mass production of paints, colour was expensive. Pigments had to be extracted from such obscure sources as tropical plants, toxic metals and the ink sacs of cuttlefish. The bright blue details on Tutankhamun’s funerary mask came from the mineral lapis lazuli, which was mined only from a remote valley in what is now Afghanistan and was more valuable than gold. The gaudier the art, therefore, the wealthier the patron.5
Such motivations become lost or obscured in the sterilised scholasticism of the art gallery or exhibition hall. As a result, attempts to recapture lost polychromy, as with the exhibition at the Ashmolean, can be jarring to those who have long admired the austerity of classical sculpture or the solemnity of Gothic architecture. When an ancient Egyptian statue of the falcon-headed god Horus was recreated in its original hues by the British Museum in 2011, complete with big cartoon eyes, the result bore an unsettling resemblance to Sesame Street’s Big Bird. When a famous statue of the Roman Emperor Augustus was reconstructed with violently crimson clothes and bright scarlet lips, one shell-shocked historian claimed to ‘suffer … trauma’ when he saw it.6 Other colourful replicas have been described as ‘tasteless’, ‘tacky’ and ‘childlike’. Ongoing renovations of Chartres Cathedral in France, aimed at restoring the building’s original bright and colourful interior, have sparked numerous complaints and petitions accusing it of ‘erasing history from the Gothic masterpiece’.7 4
Why is all this such a shock to us? If the past really was an eye-watering kaleidoscope of colour, as archaeologists are insisting, then why isn’t such information more widely known? It’s not as if the ancient Greeks were being coy about their love of colour. The tragedian Euripides mentioned it in a number of his works, for instance. ‘Look!’ cries a character in his play Hypsipyle, ‘cast your gaze upward, and marvel at the painted sculptures in the gable!’ He even has Helen of Troy, sick of her dangerously good looks, wishing she could ‘shed my beauty and assume an uglier aspect, the way you could wipe colour off a statue’. The sculptor Praxiteles shared this view, acknowledging that his favourite creations were those which had been painted by the artist Nikia. There are even depictions on Greek vases of artists painting statues.8
The first explanation is simple enough: colour fades. Paints exposed to the elements, like those at the Acropolis, gradually bleach and peel. Artworks that end up buried underground are often better preserved, although they can rapidly deteriorate once brought to the surface. A visitor to the Acropolis in the 1880s noted that a newly-unearthed artefact would often be ‘surrounded by a little deposit of green, red and black powder which had fallen from it’.9 When the Terracotta Warrior pits were first opened in the 1970s, remaining traces of paint began flaking off the statues within minutes due to the changing humidity of the tomb.
It’s the second explanation, however, that’s far more interesting: classical sculpture is monochrome because we want it to be. When the remains of ancient Rome were first uncovered in the 15th century – by which time much of their original hues had vanished – it became widely accepted that they had always been white. Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo sought to recapture the majesty of classical sculpture by creating unadorned statues. ‘The more painting resembles sculpture, the better I like it,’ the old 5master opined, ‘and the more sculpture resembles painting, the worse I like it.’10 The ‘noble simplicity’ of pure white marble came to be revered as beautiful in its own right. ‘Colour contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty,’ declared the influential art historian Johann Winckelmann in 1764. ‘The whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is.’ Colour – especially bright colour – was dismissed as a childish plaything of ‘uneducated’ and ‘savage’ cultures.11
So when evidence for ancient polychromy began to creep into academic circles during the 18th and 19th centuries, archaeologists and artists, having invested heavily in the myth of classical whiteness, resisted. Facts were forced to fit theory. Remnants of paint were dismissed as dirt or soot. Greek statues with pigments still intact were attributed to other, less revered civilisations, such as the Etruscans. Many archaeologists actually scrubbed any remaining traces of colour off statues in order to ‘restore’ the marble’s gleaming whiteness. The renowned chemist Michael Faraday subjected marble friezes from the Parthenon to abrasive grits, alkaline solutions and even nitric acid in an attempt to recover ‘that state of purity and whiteness which they originally possessed’.12 In a move subsequently lamented as a ‘cock-up’ by the British Museum, sections of the same friezes were attacked with metal scrapers and chisels in the 1930s by staff trying to remove ‘discolouration’ from the stone. The discolouration, it turned out, included remnants of the friezes’ original bright paints.13
Even today, more than 40 years after ancient polychromy was finally accepted by the majority of archaeologists, it’s a subject that can still surprise. Depending on your perspective, the image of classical sculpture slathered in bright paint can be funny, shocking or even upsetting. It will take time and effort to see past centuries of collective colour blindness and shake off the myth of a monochrome past. 6
The temptation is to leave the story of ancient polychromy there – as a colourful footnote in the history of humanity, but one that need hardly concern the non-specialist. However, it’s here that the story really gets interesting. In September 2016, universities in the United States started receiving flyers and posters from an unknown organisation calling itself Identity Evropa. Within a month, students at more than two dozen campuses across the country were finding these posters pinned to noticeboards, taped to walls and scattered around libraries. More were discovered in 2017 in universities and around towns throughout the USA. In 2018 the leaflets were even dropped from a plane. They all included a call to action – phrases such as ‘Protect Your Heritage’ or ‘Serve Your People’ – printed in bold over the image of a scowling, white marble statue.14
Identity Evropa soon made its motivation known online. As the name implies, the organisation sees itself as defending the USA’s ‘European heritage’, which it believes is being eroded by a growing ‘anti-white’ bias in the country. ‘We are dedicated to educating the people of European heritage about the importance of a Eurocentric identity,’ the group explained.15 Don’t let the pseudo-scholarly language or allusions to classical antiquity fool you: this is white nationalism in a rented tweed jacket. Identity Evropa is one of the many new or revived far-right organisations that have appeared in the USA in recent years under the broad ‘alt-right’ label. The group advocates the complete shut-down of immigration into the Unites States and supports ‘re-migration’: the deportation of US citizens not of European descent. Its leaders have espoused misogynist, racist and anti-Semitic abuse.16 And they consider classical sculpture the perfect mascot for their crusade. 7
Identity Evropa – which has since rebranded itself as the American Identity Movement – isn’t alone among the far-right in its enthusiasm for the classics: a range of hate groups around the world have expressed their admiration for the ancient world. Nor is it the first – both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany conveyed their particular brands of white supremacism with the help of white marble sculpture. It seems that the myth of a monochrome past has had consequences far beyond aesthetics. The snow-white marble statues of popular imagination have given rise to the impression that the ancient Mediterranean was inhabited solely by snow-white people. Artists and art historians, raving about the beauty of white marble and the savagery of colour, helped cement the belief.
The ‘Ideal Beauty of the Ancients’ came to be held up as a paragon of white beauty. One statue in particular, a mulleted young man known as Apollo of the Belvedere – which can be found on Identity Evropa’s propaganda today – was particularly admired for its apparent aesthetic perfection. Johann Winckelmann described in positively lascivious tones the sculpture’s ‘blooming beauty’ and ‘perfect virility’, concluding that it was ‘a form more perfect than your eye had ever seen’.17 When concepts of race and racism bled into science in the 18th century, anatomists began proposing the Apollo as the holotype of the white race. A number of biologists even guessed what the statue’s skull would have looked like and, through degrading comparisons with the skulls of apes and ‘lower races’, used this fictional anatomy in an attempt to scientifically prove their racial hierarchies.18
These ideas later fed into the Nazi myth of Aryan supremacy. Hitler was at times personally involved in acquiring Greek and Roman sculpture for the Third Reich, repeatedly holding them up as the aesthetic standard for his subjects to match and surpass. ‘Man has never been more similar in appearance and in 8sensibilities to the men of antiquity than he is today,’ he told a crowd at a Munich art gallery in 1937.19 Classical sculpture also played an important role in Mussolini’s short-lived bid to build a second Roman Empire, and Fascist Italy was festooned with bright white marble statues of young, virile, improbably muscular young men, embodiments of ‘the Italian race’.20
For those who still harbour an inordinate fondness for pale skin, Greek and Roman sculpture retains these racial connotations. Groups like Identity Evropa see the Apollo of the Belvedere and other works as the sole property of white Europeans and Americans, and their whitewashed view of classical history allows them to establish an exclusive line of descent from the glories of the ancient world to present-day ‘people of European heritage’.
Of course, it’s ironic that a group championing white, male, European identity should adopt as its mascot classical sculpture. Not only were ancient statues never intended to appear bone-white, but they weren’t always intended to represent ‘white’ people. Analysis of trace pigments on Roman busts reveals that they once represented people with complexions ranging from rosy white to deepest brown (the Roman Empire, after all, stretched from Scotland to Syria). A painting of the emperor Septimius Severus, who came from a wealthy Berber family, depicts him with brown skin that would have excluded him from groups like Identity Evropa. Then there are the numerous Roman sculptures of African people, often carved out of dark basalt rock and with traces of mahogany paint still present.21
Trying to force modern conceptions of colour and race onto the ancient Greeks is an even more hopeless task. The Greeks’ perception of colour was so notoriously weird to modern sensibilities that the former British Prime Minister and amateur classicist William Gladstone suggested they suffered from mass 9colour blindness. They had only a handful of words to describe the spectrum and seemingly no concept of blue (Homer famously described the sky as ‘bronze’ and the sea as ‘wine-dark’). Moreover, the few words they did use were bafflingly slippery in meaning. Depending on the context, the word khloros could be used to describe the colour of leaves, honey, blood, sand or ‘the pallor of the skin of the terrified’. Their term for white could also mean a fast-moving dog. This bizarre conception of colour extended to people, who are variously described in Greek writing as having yellow hair, green skin and black eyes. In the Odyssey, Homer repeatedly described the hair and beard of the hero Odysseus as ‘similar in colour to the hyacinth flower’.22
Funnily enough, the one colour a Homeric hero would have resented being described as was white. Pale skin was associated with house-bound women and the description was considered an effeminate slur if applied to a man. Tim Whitmarsh, professor of Greek culture at the University of Cambridge, writes that ancient Greeks ‘would have been staggered’ to discover they were now celebrated as icons of whiteness. And yet that’s exactly where they find themselves in the 21st century. All because artists and archaeologists didn’t see – or didn’t want to see – paint on classical sculpture.
This isn’t a book about the past. Not quite. Rather, it’s a book about how we mistake and misinterpret the past, and why that matters to us in the present. Like how a mistake about the colour of ancient sculptures can inadvertently fuel white nationalism, or, as we’ll discover, how a travelling circus convinced Americans that their country was won with guns, or how an ancient Roman smear campaign still informs our conception of who is and isn’t ‘civilised’. 10
Humans are wonderful at making mistakes. We do it all the time, whether through honest accident, unintentional bias or wilful ignorance of what we know to be true. And history is by no means immune. Many archaeologists accepted the enigmatic crystal skulls of Central and South America as genuine artefacts until studies revealed them to be modern hoaxes. Hopeful amateur historians spent centuries trying to decipher a mysterious runic inscription in southern Sweden before it was shown to be natural cracks in the rock. When the archaeologist Karl Mauch explored the ruins of the medieval city of Great Zimbabwe in southern Africa in 1871, he refused to believe that such a sophisticated settlement could have been built by Africans and instead made the far stranger assertion that it was Phoenician or Semitic (a conclusion he reinforced by claiming wood at the site smelled like his cedar pencil and therefore must have come from Lebanon). As a result, many of our treasured beliefs about the past are simply testaments to past mistakes – a fact shoved in my face during that trip to the Ashmolean.
And as with the case of painted sculpture, it would be short-sighted to dismiss the myths, mistakes and misconceptions about the past as something solely of professional interest. Because history, perhaps more than any other discipline, is used to explain and justify the world we live in. We appeal to the past to show how progressive or retrograde we are; how peaceful, violent, connected, isolated, educated and ignorant we’ve become. Consequently, whenever society is debated or scrutinised, our depictions of the past – whether printed on a page or carved in stone – become lightning rods for emotion and action. When the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by US police in May 2020 sparked worldwide protests against racial inequality, attention quickly focussed on public monuments to historical 11figures associated with racist practices. In the USA, dozens of statues of the explorer Christopher Columbus, as well as memorials to Confederate leaders, have since been vandalised or torn down. In the UK, depictions of slave traders and imperialists have received similar treatment. Australian protesters have likewise demanded that memorials to the architects of the ‘White Australia’ policy, which attempted to prevent all non-European immigration into Australia, be removed from public view. These calls have in turn incited others to defend statues against what they consider to be the ‘historical whitewashing’ of protesters.
Regardless of where we stand on these and other debates, it’s impossible to deny the role of history in shaping our perceptions of society, both past and present. And so when we get our history wrong, it can have far-reaching and unexpected consequences for how we view ourselves and make sense of our world. History, whether we like it or not, has an annoying habit of being relevant. 12
Notes
1. Anonymous (2017). ‘Gods in Color: Painted sculptures of antiquity’. Liebieghaus Skulpturen Sammlung (online): http://buntegoetter.liebieghaus.de/en (accessed 27/08/18)
2. Kiilerich, B. (2016). ‘Towards a “polychrome history” of Greek and Roman sculpture’. Journal of Art Historiography 15: 1–18 Kopczynski, N., de Viguerie, L., Neri, E., Nasr, N., Walter, P., Bejaoui, F. and Baratte, F. (2017). ‘Polychromy in Africa Proconsularis: Investigating Roman statues using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy’. Antiquity 91(355): 139–54
3. Boone, E. (ed.) (1985). Painted Architecture and Polychromatic Monumental Sculpture in Mesoamerica. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University. p. 1 Brazil, R. (2017). ‘Colouring in the past’. Chemistry World (online): https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/raiders-of-the-lost-pigments/3007237.article (accessed 30/11/18)
4. Rudolph, C. (1988). ‘Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia as a description of Cluny, and the controversy over monastic art’. Gesta 27(1/2): 125–32
5. Skelton, H. (2004). ‘A history of pigment use in western art: Part 1’. Paint & Coatings Industry 20(1): 32
6. Talbot, M. (2018). ‘The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture’. The New Yorker (online): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-whiteness-in-classical-sculpture (accessed 01/12/18) Spivey, N. (2006). ‘Art and archaeology’. Greece and Rome 52(2): 272–5. p. 272
7. Evans, S. (2015). ‘Save Chartres Cathedral’. Change.org (online): https://www.change.org/p/save-chartres-cathedral (accessed 29/11/18)
8. Anonymous (2017) Talbot (2018)
9. Ibid. 290
10. Somervill, B. (2005). Michelangelo: Sculptor and Painter. Minneapolis: Compass Point Books. p. 80
11. Neuenfeld, N. (2015). ‘The Colouring of Ancient Sculptures: The Driving Force of Expression?’ pp. 67–75 in: Klose, C., Bossert, L., and Leveritt, W. (eds.): Fresh Perspectives on Graeco-Roman Visual Culture. Proceedings of an International Conference at Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, 2nd– 3rd September 2013. Bond, S. (2017). ‘Why We Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color’. Hyperallergic (online): https://hyperallergic.com/383776/why-we-need-to-start-seeing-the-classical-world-in-color/ (accessed 27/08/18)
12. Oddy, A. (2002). ‘The conservation of marble sculptures in the British Museum before 1975’. Studies in Conservation 47(3): 145–54
13. Kennedy, M. (1999). ‘Mutual attacks mar Elgin Marbles debate’. The Guardian (online): https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/dec/01/mae-vkennedy (accessed 01/12/18)
14. Anonymous (2018). ‘Identity Evropa’. Southern Poverty Law Center (online): https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/identity-evropa (accessed 17/08/18) Jaschik, S. (2017). “‘Unprecedented” White Supremacist Activity’. Inside Higher Ed (online): https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/07/report-documents-white-supremacist-activity-campuses (accessed 27/08/18)
15. Morse, H. (2018). ‘Classics and the Alt-Right: Historicizing Visual Rhetorics of White Supremacy’. University of Michigan LearnSpeakAct (online): https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/learn-speak-act/2018/02/15/classics-and-the-alt-right/ (accessed 27/08/18)
16. Anonymous (2018)
17. Harloe, K. (2007). ‘Allusion and ekphrasis in Winckelmann’s Paris description of the Apollo Belvedere’. The Cambridge Classical Journal, 53, 229–52. pp. 230–31
18. Morse (2018)
19. Chapoutot, J. and Nybakken, R. (trans.) (2016). Greeks, Romans, Germans: How the Nazis Usurpers Europe’s Classical Past. Oakland: University of California Press. p. 175–6
20. Gori, G. (1999). ‘Model of masculinity: Mussolini, the ‘new Italian’ of the Fascist era’. The International Journal of the History of Sport 16(4): 27–61. pp. 49
21. Morse (2018) Panzanelli, R. (ed.) (2008). The Color of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute. 291 Bradley, M. (2009). ‘The importance of colour on ancient marble sculpture’. Art History 32: 427–57
22. Platnauer, M. (1921). ‘Greek colour-perception’. The Classical Quarterly, 15(3–4), 153–62 Whitmarsh, T. (2018). ‘Black Achilles’. Aeon (online): https://aeon.co/essays/when-homer-envisioned-achilles-did-he-see-a-black-man (accessed 06/12/18)
CHAPTER 1
The false dawn of civilisation
The history of civilisation used to be a simple thing. The curtains rose some 10,000 years ago on the grasslands and woodlands of Southwest Asia. Humans had just emerged from the grievous rigours of the Ice Age, where they eked out a meagre existence hunting wild game and gathering fruits and roots, much like their predecessors had done for millions of years. It made for a brutal, and brutally short, life. Technology was limited to wood, bone and stone. Artistic expression amounted to small pieces of jewellery and the occasional cave painting. People were almost certainly spiritual, but what religious beliefs they had were undoubtedly simplistic.
The world was changing, however, and the retreat of the ice sheets and permafrost opened up new possibilities for our distant ancestors. Somewhere in the fertile hills east of the Mediterranean, people began to realise that they could make a better living for themselves if they farmed animals rather than hunted them and harvested plants rather than foraged for them. As it happened, the ancient Near East was full of domesticable plants and animals. Cereals like wild wheat and barley, and pulses such as lentils and chickpeas grew freely on the plains. In the mountains to the north, the ancestors of cows, pigs, sheep and goats could be found. A few forward-thinking groups set down their spears, picked up their sickles, and set to work on the long process of domestication. 14
The effect is revolutionary – perhaps the greatest turning point in humanity’s history. Agriculture ties farmers to the land, ending aeons of restless wandering. Permanent houses and settlements soon build up in fertile areas. With a steady food supply, people are living longer and healthier lives than their hunter-gatherer ancestors. Farmers are able to amass surplus food which they can store for the future, allowing agricultural communities to survive tough years that might wipe out a band of hunters. With food in reserve, they use their free time to develop new skills such as pottery, artwork, carpentry and masonry. Inventions soon come thick and fast: sophisticated tools, metalworking and the wheel, the epitome of ancient ingenuity. Agricultural surpluses also allow individuals to accumulate more resources than they could otherwise acquire by their own efforts, thus beginning the rise of political power and a religious and bureaucratic aristocracy. Villages grow into sprawling cities with elaborate palaces, tombs and temples, where a nascent priestly class presides over complex religious rites and mysteries. Commerce between cities prospers as trade routes reach further afield in search of new and exciting goods. In order to keep track of these ever-growing networks, merchants begin to use little pictures and symbols to record their transactions, paving the way for the emergence of the first writing systems sometime around 3000 BCE. Within a few thousand years, humans have transformed themselves from nomadic hunters, living in bands of no more than 40 individuals, to literate urbanites in cities teeming with tens of thousands. Civilisation has dawned.
Most of us have heard this story before, at least in outline. It’s a familiar and compelling image of humanity’s irreversible and inevitable progress. And, as we’ll see, it’s an image that’s proved enormously influential – not just in history and archaeology, but philosophy and politics in general. 15
It’s also completely wrong.
People have always been fascinated about their origins. Where did we come from? How did societies, cities and civilisations arise? Today we attempt to answer these questions with evidence-based history and archaeology, but this wasn’t always the case: for much of humanity’s history, religion and mythology provided the answers to such questions. The ancient Greeks told of how Prometheus, the Titan, incurred the wrath of the Olympian gods by imparting the secrets of fire, medicine and mathematics to the first humans. In Inca mythology, the god Viracocha willingly taught people the arts of civilisation as he wandered the Earth. For ancient Mesopotamians, meanwhile, humans were created solely to relieve the gods from the burden of physical toil.
In Christian Europe, the Bible and its old Hebrew myths were the sole authority on the matter. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth, raising land out of the oceans and populating it with plants and animals. Humanity, banished from paradise, found themselves huddling together in the first cities for protection against the fearsome world beyond Eden. The discoveries of agriculture, music and metallurgy soon followed, each invented by one of three brothers. It was a simple, if simplistic, answer to questions about the origin of civilisation. And, for a few thousand years, it was as good a guess as anyone’s.
So long as the biblical account held supreme authority, Christians felt no need to investigate the prehistoric past. After all, prehistory – the time before writing and recorded history – simply didn’t exist, given that people in medieval Europe had a written account of history reaching all the way back to the very first day of creation. Evidence of a distant past not described in 16Genesis often surfaced, but these finds were regarded as natural or fantastical curiosities. When farmers in Central Europe kept unearthing ancient potshards, they assumed that pottery must grow naturally in the soil. Teardrop-shaped hand axes were widely known as thunderstones and believed to be the result of lightning striking the earth. Stone arrowheads and other weapons, meanwhile, were variously ascribed to elves or angels and believed to have magical properties.1
It wasn’t until the 16th century that these ideas began to be challenged. By this time, Europeans were starting to explore the Americas, and were returning home with tales of ‘barbarous Nations’ wielding stone tools and weapons remarkably similar to the thunderstones and elf bolts being unearthed back home. If people were using such items today, might Europeans have once done the same? Might they once have lived like Native Americans? And, if so, might the Bible be wrong?2
These questions fundamentally changed our understanding of the distant past. Inspired by the half-terrified accounts of the New World reaching Europe, the primaeval Earth was no longer the paradise of Genesis or the Arcadia of classical legend, but a howling wilderness of beasts and savages. As the English philosopher John Locke opined in 1689: ‘in the beginning all the world was America’.3 This new view of humanity’s beginnings was most famously expressed by Locke’s contemporary Thomas Hobbes, who described ‘the Naturall Condition of Mankind’ as ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’. Before civilisation, insisted Hobbes, ‘there is no place for Industry … no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death.’4 17
With serious doubts now hanging over the biblical account of civilisation’s origins, European scholars made the first attempts to study prehistoric artefacts and monuments in a scientific manner – ‘to make the Stones give Evidence for themselves’, as the 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey put it.5 Early prehistorians like Aubrey began to carry out deliberate excavations, carefully documenting not only the artefacts they found but the locations in which they were unearthed. From these efforts emerged, slowly and fitfully, the bare bones of prehistoric archaeology. By the late 1700s it was becoming clear that ancient tools and weapons in Europe tended to be made out of one of three materials – stone, bronze or iron – and archaeologists began to order the distant past into successive ages based on these three substances. The subsequent development of typology – the study of an artefact’s appearance – allowed scholars to construct relative chronologies for arrowheads, brooches and other ancient items based on the change in their designs over time.6
The decisive break with the version of history described by scripture came in the early 19th century, when antiquarians abandoned the biblical chronology they had relied on up until now. By this time the sheer quantity of prehistoric finds was becoming difficult to squeeze into the few thousand years of history allowed for by Genesis, which, if its dates and genealogies were to be believed, insisted that the world could be no more than 7,000 years old. (In 1650, the Archbishop of Ireland even managed to calculate the very moment of creation: the evening of Saturday 24 October, 4004 BC.7) This was especially problematic for stone and bronze artefacts, given that the Old Testament made no mention of either a Stone Age or a Bronze Age; Adam’s descendants are said to be working with iron in little more than a century after the creation of the world. Archaeologists turned instead to the new science of 18geology, which had shown through the study of the unfathomably slow processes of deposition and erosion that the Earth must be much older than the Bible asserted. As the pioneering geologist James Hutton concluded in 1788: ‘we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.’8
The understanding that the Earth must be millions, if not billions, of years old transformed prehistory. It was no longer a few hundred or thousand years long, but hundreds of thousands of years long, stretching back into the deepest past. This was terra incognita for 19th-century archaeology – a vast expanse of time for which religion and mythology had no answers. And somewhere in this uncharted territory were the secrets to the origin of civilisation.
To understand 19th-century archaeology, it helps to understand the 19th-century archaeologist. He – and it was a he – was almost without exception a wealthy white Westerner. He was among the lucky few for whom the ongoing upheavals of the Industrial Revolution were a wholly positive experience; the working-class world of choking pollution, rampant poverty and appalling labour conditions was out of sight and out of mind. For him, the age of coal was an age of cheaper goods, faster transport and increasing convenience, where each generation found themselves living longer, staying healthier and working less strenuously than that last. ‘Our pleasures are increased, our pains are lessened; in a thousand ways we can avoid or diminish evils which to our ancestors were great and inevitable,’ proclaimed the pioneering prehistorian (and fantastically wealthy baronet) Sir John Lubbock in his 1865 book Pre-historic Times.
For Lubbock and his fellow prehistorians, progress was the order of the day. The dizzying pace of scientific and technological 19advancement convinced many of them that it was an inherent feature of the modern world. And not only in science and technology: with the superior civilisation of the West blazing the trail, all human endeavours would surely improve – art, religion, politics and morality, even human nature itself. Looking into the future, they boldly predicted the coming dawn of a technological ‘utopia’ as the ultimate and inevitable end-point of this progress.9
It was a short-sighted worldview, one that was either unable or unwilling to consider the many problems associated with industrialisation outside the upper echelons of society. It’s doubtful whether such a confident outlook would ever have come from the subjects of Britain’s sprawling empire (just months after Lubbock’s Pre-historic Times was published, over 400 Jamaicans were hanged for rebelling against British rule) or indeed from the lower classes back home, for whom the miseries of industrialisation meant stagnating or even falling life expectancies.10
But then academia was a short-sighted world, and it embraced the Victorian worship of progress wholeheartedly. And so when scholars ventured into the world of prehistory they did so not just to understand the past, but to better comprehend ‘the progressive nature of man’ through the development of civilisation.11 As the American archaeologist Alice Kehoe writes: ‘prehistoric archaeology’s raison d’être was to reveal the trends operating on human development.’12 Typologists arranged artefacts from crude stone tools to increasingly complex iron creations as a demonstration of humanity’s growing ingenuity. Geologists adapted stratigraphy – the study of rock layers – to argue that archaeological finds could be ordered into distinct bands of progressively more complex societies. ‘Like the successive geological formations, the tribes of mankind may be arranged, according to their relative conditions, into successive strata,’ declared the 19th-century American 20anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. ‘When thus arranged, they reveal with some degree of certainty the entire range of human progress from savagery to civilisation.’13
The publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 had a profound influence on these lines of thinking. Darwin’s theory of evolution, which posited that only the organisms best adapted to their environment would survive to pass on their characteristics, encouraged prehistorians to regard humanity’s ‘progressive tendencies’ as not merely trends but as a fundamental fact of life. If species could evolve, why not cultures? The archaeological record already seemed to show a clear progression from simple to complex, primitive to advanced; now evolution provided the mechanism to explain this process. ‘From their first struggles in the battle for life,’ explained the archaeologist Sir James Simpson in 1861, ‘our primaeval ancestors successively passed upwards through the varying eras and stages of advancement.’14
Encouraged by notions of cultural evolution, prehistorians began to regard progress as a fundamental ‘law of nature’, as inescapable as the laws of physics. ‘The inorganic has one final comprehensive law, GRAVITATION,’ bellowed the Scottish geologist Robert Chambers. ‘The organic … rests in like manner on one law, and that is DEVELOPMENT.’15 This Law of Progress was expressed through ‘a natural as well as necessary sequence’ of cultures, a set of developmental stages through which all human societies must pass if they are to ‘progress towards a higher stage of civilisation’.16 Wherever you dug in the world, it was argued, you would find evidence of groups evolving through the same stages of savagery and barbarism, before finally arriving at civilisation. Resting atop the pinnacle of progress were, of course, Western Europe and North America, with their cities and railways and factories.17 21
It was, as the philosopher Bertrand Russell once noted, ‘a very convenient doctrine’.18 By a remarkable coincidence, every proponent of the Law of Progress just so happened to belong to the most advanced culture on Earth. Upper-class European man John Lubbock somehow concluded that upper-class European men were the most highly evolved group of humans, above other ethnicities, genders and even economic classes. For the American Morgan, meanwhile, it was the network of railways criss-crossing North America that represented the culminating ‘triumph of civilisation’.
The Law of Progress went deeper than simple self-praise, however. By positioning the West as the most advanced civilisation, the inevitable end-point of human development, it allowed Europeans and North Americans to dismiss other cultures that didn’t resemble the West as ‘primitive’, ‘inert’ and cultural ‘dead ends’.19 Unfamiliar features of society were scorned purely because they were non-Western, regardless of what other qualities they might possess. The Chinese writing system for example, despite having served successive empires perfectly well for millennia, was considered uncivilised because it wasn’t phonetic like European alphabets. Contemporary hunting and foraging societies bore the brunt of this denigration, being regarded as little more than living fossils of Stone Age savagery. ‘However little we may be interested in the American Indians personally,’ yawned Morgan, they could at least provide us with ‘an exemplification of the experience of our own ancestors … in the Lower Status of barbarism.’20
Needless to say, such contemptuous views of people beyond the Mediterranean proved very useful for the West’s rapidly expanding colonial ventures. As interpreted by the likes of Morgan and Lubbock, prehistory proved that the West, as the most highly evolved civilisation, was morally justified in its imperial conquests of the rest of the world. There was no point mourning the deaths 22of incarcerated Tasmanians under British imperialism, or the decimation of Native Americans under the United States’ westward expansion: as less-highly evolved cultures, it was only natural that they should be overpowered by European civilisation. Indeed, it was inevitable: an inescapable outcome of the immutable Law of Progress. It was literally written in stone: the West was destined to dominate. These ideas were sometimes expressed in openly racist terms, with serious attempts to correlate the evolution of lighter skin with advances in civilisation.21
Not every European or American subscribed to this view. ‘If you would see the most extensive acquisition of knowledge enforced by the necessities of life, you must know what is the life of a savage,’ wrote the Scottish author John Wilson in the 19th century. ‘If you have the imagination to represent to yourselves one-twentieth part of the knowledge which a savage will thus be driven to possess by his mere physical necessities, you will be astonished to find how much like a learned man he is.’22 The pioneering prehistorian Daniel Wilson (no relation) shared this view, arguing that there was nothing to prevent savages from becoming civilised – nor civilised Europeans from turning savage. Such protests were in the minority, however. By calling into question the philosophical foundations of empire, they proved far too inconvenient to ever be popular.23
Consequently it was the prophets of progress, and not their more sceptical contemporaries, who laid the foundations for our understanding of prehistory. Their scorn for hunter-gatherers, itself a hangover from Hobbes’ primaeval nightmare, survives today in the familiar stereotype of the knuckle-dragging, club-wielding caveman. The unmistakable stink of white supremacism still lingers in the iconic ‘evolution of man’ image, which almost always depicts a line of dark, shambling apes evolving into 23upright, light-skinned men. The singular importance of Western society emphasised farming as the dividing line between savagery and civilisation, and the ongoing Industrial Revolution shaped the notion of an equally dramatic ‘agricultural revolution’ as the catalyst for innovation and progress. If this is sounding familiar, there’s a good reason: from these elements of Victoriana arose the classic account of civilisation’s origins which opened this chapter, an account which was to define the way we looked at prehistory and the present for well over a century.
This perception of civilisation was shattered one evening in October 1994, when a German archaeologist named Klaus Schmidt climbed into a taxi in the Turkish city of Urfa. His directions were curious, to say the least. Somewhere in the dusty limestone hills beyond the city could be found a low mound with a single mulberry tree growing atop it. The locals called it ‘Potbelly Hill’, in Turkish: Göbekli Tepe. With Schmidt that evening were Michael Morsch, an archaeology student, and a local boy who knew the way to the hill.24
Göbekli Tepe had been investigated once before, in 1963 by an American archaeologist who dismissed it as the site of an unremarkable medieval graveyard. Coming across the archaeologist’s notes, Schmidt was intrigued by its description of a hilltop littered with chipped and carved stone. It sounded remarkably like a Stone Age ‘tell’ – an artificial mound formed through the accumulation of man-made detritus – of which there were many in this region of southern Turkey. He decided to investigate Potbelly Hill for himself.25
As the road became impassable, Schmidt and his motley band – taxi driver included – set out on foot to find the hill. At first the 24area didn’t look like a promising archaeological site: ‘nowhere was the slightest archaeological trace,’ he later recalled.26 Just as things were looking hopeless, however, their guide pointed to something in the distance. Schmidt’s doubts vanished in an instant. As soon as he saw the hill, he knew Göbekli Tepe wasn’t a natural feature of the landscape. To his experienced eye this was indeed a tell – and, at 50 feet tall, an enormous one at that, representing centuries of prehistoric activity. ‘Only man could have created something like this,’ he recounted. ‘It was clear right away this was a gigantic Stone Age site.’27
Schmidt returned to the site to begin archaeological excavations the following year, excited but uncertain as to what he might find. His team quickly realised that the ‘medieval gravestones’ noted in the 1963 survey were in fact prehistoric in origin. The people of Göbekli Tepe, whoever they were, were competent and confident stonemasons. On the very first day of digging, the team found a relief carving of some four-legged animal poking out of the hill, and over the following years they discovered other statues of animals, a larger-than-life carving of a human head, stone masks, and a rather arresting foot-long penis sculpture. They also uncovered the mysterious remains of large stone rings, more than a foot in diameter, whose purpose remains completely unknown.28
The most remarkable finds, however, were a range of enormous T-shaped pillars, the biggest standing twenty feet tall and weighing ten tons. Despite their severe geometric design, these pillars are thought to have represented people: they have stylised arms and hands and a hint of clothing, though no other traces of a body. Many of these faceless giants are intricately carved with geometric designs and a menagerie of fearsome-looking animals, including spiders, snakes, scorpions and vultures, as well as foxes, boars and cranes. There’s something unsettling about the world 25they conjure: wolves bare their teeth in savage grins, emaciated lions display prominent ribs, and carvings of severed heads decorate a number of the pillars.29
Since Schmidt’s initial discovery, more than a decade of digging has built up a detailed – though still incomplete – picture of what Göbekli Tepe once was. The site consisted of a number of circular enclosures sunk some ten feet into the ground and ringed by a stone wall and bench. In the centre of each enclosure stood two T-shaped pillars, with a further ten or twelve smaller pillars placed at intervals in the surrounding wall. If the enclosures were once roofed, as some archaeologists suspect, entering one of these subterranean spaces would have been a foreboding experience. The site was exclusively religious; the usual traces of daily life, such as fire pits and rubbish heaps, are conspicuously absent. Moreover, the recent discovery of human skull fragments, with traces of red ochre and ritualistic carving still present on them, suggests that some sort of skull cult may have practised there. Curiously, the enclosures were deliberately filled in with rubble after a relatively short period of use, and new enclosures were built on top of them. Over the seven centuries that Göbekli Tepe was in use, the constructions became smaller and less impressive until the entire site was eventually abandoned.30
It was undoubtedly a remarkable archaeological discovery. But something troubled Schmidt and his team. According to the accepted development of complex societies, Göbekli Tepe had to have been the product of a farming community. There’s simply no way that hunter-gatherers could have found the time to develop the skills needed to construct such a monumental site. And yet the hilltop positively glittered with flint arrowheads. What need would farmers have had for bows and arrows? More puzzling still were the many pieces of animal bone discovered at the site. After 26examining some 15,000 samples, it was found that every single one of them belonged to wild animals such as gazelle, wild boar and aurochs, the ancestor of today’s cattle. Not one bone fragment belonged to a domesticated animal, implying that the builders of Göbekli Tepe weren’t farmers, but hunters.31
It was only when they dated the stone tools at the site that they could explain the arrowheads and missing farm animals: Göbekli Tepe was built between the 10th and 9th millennia BCE, some 11,500 years ago, before farming had even been invented. That’s 6,000 years older than Stonehenge, and a full 7,000 years before the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza. Göbekli Tepe is more distant in time from both those ancient monuments than they are from us today. This carefully crafted and richly artistic religious complex was indeed built by hunter-gatherers. According to the standard account of the origin of civilisation, it shouldn’t exist.32
While researching this chapter I failed to meet a single archaeologist who wasn’t stunned by Göbekli Tepe and its implications for our understanding of the past. ‘It turns everything upside down,’ says Trevor Watkins, an expert in Near Eastern prehistory who’s visited the site many times. ‘This was pre-domestication, pre-farming, and yet there were people building these huge stone monuments.’ Not only does it show that Stone Age hunter-gatherers had complex belief systems, but that they had the time to hone the skills necessary to carve and erect ten-ton monoliths. ‘It would have been a colossal amount of labour to quarry, carve and move these huge stones,’ Watkins explains to me. ‘And then remember that Göbekli Tepe sits atop a bare limestone ridge. You can’t live there. There’s no water, no soil. So whatever effort you need to build this monument, double it, because you have to factor in the logistics of keeping its builders supplied with food and water.’ 27
All this would have required detailed planning and extensive cooperation between hundreds of individuals from numerous nomadic bands throughout the region, something few believed was happening on such a scale at this time. ‘This is a level of social organisation that no one had expected from “primitive” hunter-gatherers,’ adds Watkins. Artistically, too, the site shows a level of planning rarely attributed to the inhabitants of prehistory. The carvings are raised reliefs, rather than simple scratches in the rock, meaning that their creators knew what they were going to make before they started. In addition, different enclosures around the site appear to have different themes, with one filled with depictions of boars, another snakes, and another foxes.33
All this cooperation and creativity was driven by an urge that can only be called religious. Attempts to interpret the beliefs that once gave this place meaning are fraught with danger, given the amount still unknown about the site (more than 90 per cent of it remains unexcavated), but the site’s size and detailed iconography indicate that the religious convictions of the people who built and used Göbekli Tepe were unexpectedly complex. The fact that the enclosures would have required hundreds of people to build them, yet could only house a few dozen inside, suggests that only a select few were initiated into whatever rites took place among the stone pillars and animal carvings. If true, this would be yet another surprise: religious elites weren’t supposed to have existed until the establishment of sizeable farming settlements, thousands of years after Göbekli Tepe. As the prehistoric archaeologist Ian Hodder commented in the wake of Schmidt’s discovery: ‘all our theories were wrong.’34
28The finds at Potbelly Hill were certainly unexpected, but they weren’t entirely unprecedented. In fact, cracks had been appearing in the classic account of civilisation’s origins ever since it was first formulated in the 19th century. The first shock came in 1879, when an eight-year-old girl named Maria de Sautuola discovered Ice Age cave paintings in Altamira, Spain. These remarkable works of art directly contradicted the supposedly artless savagery that was thought to have existed during the Ice Age. Many archaeologists simply refused to believe their eyes and rejected the authenticity of these artworks, arguing that they were ‘stylistically too advanced to have been produced at an early stage of human development’. The influential French archaeologist Gabriel de Mortillet alleged that the Altamira cave paintings in Spain had been painted by priests in a plot to discredit the scientific study of progress in prehistory.35
The next big surprise came in the 1950s with the excavation of Tell es-Sultan, better known by its biblical name of Jericho. Led by the archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, these digs uncovered a Stone Age farming settlement, complete with a 28-foot-tall stone tower and a 13-foot-high stone wall, but no evidence of any pottery. This was another unexpected discovery, as it was thought that, in the development of civilisation, large stone constructions could only come after pottery. Then in the 1980s excavations at the Turkish site of Nevali Çori uncovered another pre-pottery town that had not only free-standing stone buildings but a variety of remarkable stone sculptures, including the remains of a totem pole, a statue of a bird-human chimera, a fragment of a stone bowl depicting two people dancing with a turtle as well as smaller versions of the T-shaped pillars that would later be found at Göbekli Tepe. Until this point, Stone Age sculpture was thought to consist solely of figurines of clay, bone or stone, small enough to hold in the palm 29of your hand. It was finds such as these that led Schmidt – who worked at Nevali Çori in the 1980s – to question the description of Göbekli Tepe as nothing more than a medieval graveyard.36
By now it’s clear that the old account of the origin of civilisation, in which complex society sprang from the development of farming, is seriously flawed. For a start, the lives of pre-agriculture hunters and foragers may not have been as brutal as once thought. ‘We used to think that hunter-gatherers led miserable, malnourished lives, trying each day just to survive,’ explains Ulf-Dietrich Schoop, an archaeologist at the University of Edinburgh. ‘But nothing about Göbekli Tepe had anything to do with survival.’ On the contrary, it and other sites in Southwest Asia show that their builders had plenty of time to develop complex beliefs, hone inessential skills like masonry and establish far-reaching social networks that would have served no purpose for gathering food. These finds force us to abandon the notion that hunter-gatherers must have lived simplistic and unchanging lives, cramped by the basic needs of securing food and staying alive.
The study of ancient trade networks supports this view. In Ice Age Europe, inessential items such as mammoth ivory, marine shells and amber were often traded across distances of up to 60 miles. As far back as 120,000 years ago, humans in Africa were trading the highly prized rock obsidian over distances of more than 180 miles. Similar trade networks would later spring up in Southwest Asia around the time of Göbekli Tepe, where archaeologists have found sea shells and baskets from the Red Sea in central Turkey, over 500 miles away.37
This archaeological evidence is backed up by anthropological research which shows that many present-day hunter-gatherers spend as little as twenty hours a week searching for food, and have more leisure time to enjoy than the average 21st-century 30European. This isn’t to say our prehistoric ancestors lived in some state of pristine innocence and perfect health, as New Age beliefs and fads like the paleo diet would suggest. Nevertheless, to dismiss all hunter-gatherer lifestyles as nasty, brutish and short is nothing short of caricature. The stereotype of the club-wielding caveman is especially overdue a makeover. For one thing, no archaeologist has ever found a prehistoric club – the notion that they must have carried them comes from the wild man of medieval mythology. For another, very few of them are thought to have lived in caves, and even then only as a temporary measure. Our prehistoric ancestors generally preferred to live in their own huts and houses, which had the distinct advantage over caves of not being inhabited by bears and hyenas. Archaeologists often dig in caves, however, because their sheltered environments preserve remains and artefacts much better than the exposed outdoors.38
The importance of farming as the catalyst for civilisation has also come under serious scrutiny. Clearly, given the sophistication of hunter-gatherer lifestyles on display at Göbekli Tepe, farming was by no means a prerequisite for complex social and religious structures, as was once maintained. But what about its much-vaunted health benefits? Recent archaeological work has now cast serious doubt even on this. By studying the skeletons of prehistoric farmers and hunter-gatherers, it’s possible to build up a picture of the lifestyles these people once lived – the activities they took part in, the injuries they sustained, the food they ate. These investigations show that, in many cases, the adoption of farming actually made our ancestors less healthy.
Nineteenth-century archaeologists – who, in case you were wondering, had little hands-on experience of subsistence agriculture – simply assumed that the advent of agriculture must have had a ‘healthful and invigorating influence’ on a par with 31the changes wrought by industrialisation.39 Had they attempted to recreate Stone Age agriculture for themselves they might have reached a different conclusion, one that any farmer today will tell you: farming is hard work. At many sites around the world, the uptake of agriculture in prehistory corresponds with a significant rise in joint pain and back problems, indicating that farmers endured a more physically demanding life than their foraging predecessors. Land needed to be cleared, seeds planted and grain harvested and processed. Permanent homes and granaries needed to be built. All of this took a heavy toll on our ancestors.
Moreover, farmers had to make do with a severely restricted diet compared to their hunter-gatherer neighbours. Early agriculture offered slim pickings: only a small number of crops had been cultivated and the few domesticated animals were typically smaller than their wild relatives. The drop in meat consumption made it harder to get enough vitamins, iron and zinc, and the corresponding rise in carbohydrates in the agricultural diet led to an increase in tooth decay. This unvaried, low-protein diet of early farmers has been linked to a sharp global rise in anaemia following the adoption of agriculture. Coupled with the strenuous working life, malnourishment stunted the growth of farming populations by as much as two inches.40
Other aspects of health also took a step backwards. Hunter-gatherers in the eastern Mediterranean typically lived in groups of less than a hundred and would often move between a number of temporary seasonal camps. Farming villages, in contrast, could have hundreds or even thousands of people living together permanently in close quarters, where they were at increased risk of contracting infectious disease such as smallpox, measles and rubella. Not only that, but living in close proximity to farm animals – along with new pests such as rats and mice 32– introduced humans to previously unknown diseases like bird flu and bubonic plague. (Humans repaid the favour by transmitting tuberculosis to cattle around the same time.) Moreover, previously pristine water sources around these settlements would have become clogged with dirt, increasing the number of parasites infecting our ancestors.41
Not only was farming a harder, sicklier way of life compared to hunting and gathering, it was a riskier one too. For sedentary farmers tied to the land, a bad winter or dry summer could spell disaster, whereas mobile hunter-gatherers in the same situation could simply up sticks and move to a more promising area. Food surpluses could be acquired, but stores of grain are also vulnerable to theft or damage. By studying pauses in enamel growth on ancient teeth, archaeologists know that early farmers suffered from periodic food shortages significantly more frequently than hunter-gatherers did. Women seemed to have borne the brunt of these lifestyle changes, taking on a greater share of food cultivation than female hunter-gatherers. Women in agricultural societies were also having children younger and more often. This made pregnancy and birth much more dangerous, to the point where female life expectancy actually drops with the adoption of farming. On average, women in early farming settlements in Southwest Asia were dying a full seven years younger than men.42
In short, farming is no longer regarded as an obvious improvement on hunting and foraging, and certainly not ‘the brilliant success … in helping men to survive’ that the influential archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe claimed it to be in 1944.43 Which begs the question: if it entailed so much toil and trouble, why did anyone bother with it? ‘Why farm?’ cried the palaeobotanist Jack Harlan in 1992. ‘Why give up the twenty-hour work week and the fun of hunting in order to toil in the sun? Why work harder, for 33food less nutritious and a supply more capricious? Why invite famine, plague, pestilence and crowded living conditions?’44 The short answer is that no one knows. A number of archaeologists argue that hunter-gatherers could only have submitted to the burden of agriculture as ‘a last resort’ due to unavoidable environmental pressures. But just what these pressures may have been is also obscure. Overpopulation, climate change and the extinction of big game have all been suggested, but none have proven conclusive, and it’s likely that different factors pushed people towards agriculture at different times and in different locations.45
What is clear, however, is that farming didn’t represent a clear progression in the history of humanity. Had extraterrestrials visited Earth 10,000 years ago it’s unlikely they would have singled out farming communities as being in any way more advanced than their hunter-gatherer neighbours. The hunters themselves certainly didn’t think so: rather than eagerly adopting agricultural lifestyles as the obvious ‘next step in the scale of human progression’, archaeologists have found evidence of hunter-gatherers living side-by-side with agricultural communities for thousands of years without feeling the need to adopt their way of life. And where it did occur, the shift from hunting and gathering to farming was not so much a revolution as it was a slow, gradual process, lasting millennia. For thousands of years following the beginnings of domestication, many early farming communities still relied on hunting and foraging to secure up to half of all their food. For a long time in Southwest Asia, groups would harvest both domesticated crops and their wild-growing relatives.46
