THE TWO EARLIEST ERAS OF THE FOOD-PRODUCING STAGE
The food-producing stage seems to appear in western Asia with really revolutionary suddenness. It is seen by the relative speed with which the traces of new crafts appear in the earliest village-farming community sites we’ve dug. It is seen by the spread and multiplication of these sites themselves, and the remarkable growth in human population we deduce from this increase in sites. We’ll look at some of these sites and the archeological traces they yield in the next chapter. When such village sites begin to appear, I believe we are in the era of the primary village-farming community. I also believe this is the second era of the food-producing stage.
The first era of the food-producing stage, I believe, was an era of incipient cultivation and animal domestication. I keep saying “I believe” because the actual evidence for this earlier era is so slight that one has to set it up mainly by playing a hunch for it. The reason for playing the hunch goes about as follows.
One thing we seem to be able to see, in the food-collecting era in general, is a tendency for people to begin to settle down. This settling down seemed to become further intensified in the terminal era. How this is connected with Professor Mathiassen’s “receptiveness” and the tendency to be experimental, we do not exactly know. The evidence from the New World comes into play here as well as that from the Old World. With this settling down in one place, the people of the terminal era—especially the “Forest folk” whom we know best—began making a great variety of new things. I remarked about this earlier in the chapter. Dr. Robert M. Adams is of the opinion that this atmosphere of experimentation with new tools—with new ways of collecting food—is the kind of atmosphere in which one might expect trials at planting and at animal domestication to have been made. We first begin to find traces of more permanent life in outdoor camp sites, although caves were still inhabited at the beginning of the terminal era. It is not surprising at all that the “Forest folk” had already domesticated the dog. In this sense, the whole era of food-collecting was becoming ready and almost “incipient” for cultivation and animal domestication.
Northwestern Europe was not the place for really effective beginnings in agriculture and animal domestication. These would have had to take place in one of those natural environments of promise, where a variety of plants and animals, each possible of domestication, was available in the wild state. Let me spell this out. Really effective food-production must include a variety of items to make up a reasonably well-rounded diet. The food-supply so produced must be trustworthy, even though the food-producing peoples themselves might be happy to supplement it with fish and wild strawberries, just as we do when such things are available. So, as we said earlier, part of our problem is that of finding a region with a natural environment which includes—and did include, some ten thousand years ago—a variety of possibly domesticable wild plants and animals.