PRECONDITIONS FOR THE REVOLUTION
Especially at this point in our story, we must remember how culture and environment go hand in hand. Neither plants nor animals domesticate themselves; men domesticate them. Furthermore, men usually domesticate only those plants and animals which are useful. There is a good question here: What is cultural usefulness? But I shall side-step it to save time. Men cannot domesticate plants and animals that do not exist in the environment where the men live. Also, there are certainly some animals and probably some plants that resist domestication, although they might be useful.
This brings me back again to the point that both the level of culture and the natural condition of the environment—with the proper plants and animals in it—must have been ready before domestication could have happened. But this is precondition, not cause. Why did effective food-production happen first in the Near East? Why did it happen independently in the New World slightly later? Why also in the Far East? Why did it happen at all? Why are all human beings not still living as the Maglemosians did? These are the questions we still have to face.
CULTURAL “RECEPTIVENESS” AND PROMISING ENVIRONMENTS
Until the archeologists and the natural scientists—botanists, geologists, zoologists, and general ecologists—have spent many more years on the problem, we shall not have full how and why answers. I do think, however, that we are beginning to understand what to look for.
We shall have to learn much more of what makes the cultures of men “receptive” and experimental. Did change in the environment alone force it? Was it simply a case of Professor Toynbee’s “challenge and response?” I cannot believe the answer is quite that simple. Were it so simple, we should want to know why the change hadn’t come earlier, along with earlier environmental changes. We shall not know the answer, however, until we have excavated the traces of many more cultures of the time in question. We shall doubtless also have to learn more about, and think imaginatively about, the simpler cultures still left today. The “mechanics” of culture in general will be bound to interest us.
It will also be necessary to learn much more of the environments of 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In which regions of the world were the natural conditions most promising? Did this promise include plants and animals which could be domesticated, or did it only offer new ways of food-collecting? There is much work to do on this problem, but we are beginning to get some general hints.
Before I begin to detail the hints we now have from western Asia, I want to do two things. First, I shall tell you of an old theory as to how food-production might have appeared. Second, I will bother you with some definitions which should help us in our thinking as the story goes on.
AN OLD THEORY AS TO THE CAUSE OF THE REVOLUTION
The idea that change would result, if the balance between nature and culture became upset, is of course not a new one. For at least twenty-five years, there has been a general theory as to how the food-producing revolution happened. This theory depends directly on the idea of natural change in the environment.