The Early Millennia

Let us begin with a fable. But unlike my other stories, this one has no textual basis and is in a sense only a flimsy guess explaining a basic fact of what people did in the Ancient Near East. It is like the Just-So Stories which the British author Rudyard Kipling wrote for children. They explained how the leopard got his spots in a reasonably coherent and pleasant way, but they would not work for biologists or anyone who knew much about leopards. My fable is based on a guess by archaeologists about why human beings domesticated plants and animals. This was the greatest and most lasting innovation in the Ancient Near East. Here is how it might have begun:

A Fable. Long ago and not so far away (say, 8000 bce in northern Iraq), there lived a family which had been doing quite well, thank you. There was a man and his wife and there were their three sons and three daughters, and there were also a couple of uncles who lived with them. Their wives had died in childbirth. The couple had been very lucky because almost all the children had lived to adulthood; this rarely happened in that time or place.

But they did not live as you or I live, Best Beloved (so Kipling). No, they wandered. They had no houses, and when it rained, they stayed in the rain or huddled in caves or under the overhanging banks of rivers. And they picked berries and vegetables and roots and they hunted antelope. They lived in a place and time when there were two seasons, a wet rainy winter followed by a hot dry summer.

They knew where to go to find the best stands of wild growing plants, and they became a little protective of this knowledge. Each late spring when the wild wheat matured, they would visit their favorite stand and pick it clean. And each late summer when the antelopes began to move from the nearby desert, they made sure to be in position to kill many of them.

The eating was good, and the life was easy. It did not take more than six weeks to gather all the wheat they could use in the whole year. But of course they had to carry the wheat with them to the next place they wanted to visit.

By good fortune the boys found wives, and the girls found husbands, and, as these things go, they began to have children, and many of them lived beyond their first years.

The uncles were concerned, and even the father worried. Perhaps there will not be enough for everyone. The mother was upset. “Of course there will be enough; there has always been enough,” she said.

The father said, “Yes, there has always been enough, but look at all the babies. Look at all the daughters-in-law and all the sons-in-law. This cannot go on. We must send them away.”

“Send them away?” The mother said. “Why don't you leave first?” She said this to the least pleasant uncle. “Or you,” she said to her husband, who looked away.

The mother thought it was a bad deal. She loved her grandchildren and liked to have them around. The father did too, she thought, but, a few weeks and a few moves later, the men, including the young ones, had all decided. The band would break up, and the young ones would no longer come along to the known areas in the upcountry. They would work their way down toward the plains and seek their luck down there.

The night before they were to go, the mother gathered her daughters and daughters-in-law around the fire. “My daughters, I know this may be hard,” she said. “You will not find the good stands of wheat and the fat antelopes we are used to; you may have very slim pickings, especially until you know the country. You know we can't all survive here, and there may be beautiful, wonderful fields and valleys beyond.”

The girls nodded sadly, some already with babies at their breasts, quite cute babies, though some sickly.

“But we know that wheat grows in its proper season from its seed, and I have saved some of the biggest and best from our last gathering, and here they are,” she said with pride, showing the girls several small sacks of grain. “You go down and find likely places, and you plant the seeds and make sure they have water, and they may grow even as our ancestral stands have grown.”

The girls looked doubtfully at the little sacks. They knew the mother had their welfare at heart and that she had always spoken against the separation.

Next morning the two groups parted, promising that they would find each other early the next summer at that very place, one of their favorites because the wheat stands were near and the running brook was full of fish.

The old woman fretted through the next year, and the elder band heard nothing from the youngsters. One of the uncles died, thank goodness, but there was more than enough to feed everybody.

When the appointed time came, the older group was camped at the lush brook, and there they came, the youngsters, looking on the whole quite well and well fed. There were some new babies, and the mother was very happy to see how big and healthy they were.

She and the daughters and the daughters-in-law convened to cook a meal, and the daughters and the daughters-in-law had brought along some wheat. But what wheat. Its kernels were much bigger than the mother had ever seen. Yes, the youngsters said, they had done as she had said. They had planted the seeds, they had made sure there was water, they had kept animals and humans away from them, and the wheat had grown much bigger and more luxuriant than they had ever before seen. The yield was three times greater than the wild wheat, and they had already planted the biggest kernels in hopes of an even larger crop.

The mother could not believe her eyes. The daughters and the daughters-in-law affirmed that the land below was not as good as the upland, but if you planted and took care of your food crops, you got much more than from the wild stands. The mother, when they prepared to leave after a few days of visiting and feasting, asked them for some of their seed grain and began herself to plant and water even in the uplands. The next holiday they celebrated together, everyone had bigger seeds. And the men had corralled some baby antelopes which they were raising to eat later.

And that, Best Beloved, may be how plants and animals were domesticated, not because people were actually starving, but because they thought they might later, because of what scholars call perceived scarcity. And the experimentations this called forth led to domestication, and domestication slowly, eventually, changed everything.