The five thousand years following about 10,000 B.C. must have been very difficult ones, the theory begins. These were the years when the most marked melting of the last glaciers was going on. While the glaciers were in place, the climate to the south of them must have been different from the climate in those areas today. You have no doubt read that people once lived in regions now covered by the Sahara Desert. This is true; just when is not entirely clear. The theory is that during the time of the glaciers, there was a broad belt of rain winds south of the glaciers. These rain winds would have kept north Africa, the Nile Valley, and the Middle East green and fertile. But when the glaciers melted back to the north, the belt of rain winds is supposed to have moved north too. Then the people living south and east of the Mediterranean would have found that their water supply was drying up, that the animals they hunted were dying or moving away, and that the plant foods they collected were dried up and scarce.
According to the theory, all this would have been true except in the valleys of rivers and in oases in the growing deserts. Here, in the only places where water was left, the men and animals and plants would have clustered. They would have been forced to live close to one another, in order to live at all. Presently the men would have seen that some animals were more useful or made better food than others, and so they would have begun to protect these animals from their natural enemies. The men would also have been forced to try new plant foods—foods which possibly had to be prepared before they could be eaten. Thus, with trials and errors, but by being forced to live close to plants and animals, men would have learned to domesticate them.
THE OLD THEORY TOO SIMPLE FOR THE FACTS
This theory was set up before we really knew anything in detail about the later prehistory of the Near and Middle East. We now know that the facts which have been found don’t fit the old theory at all well. Also, I have yet to find an American meteorologist who feels that we know enough about the changes in the weather pattern to say that it can have been so simple and direct. And, of course, the glacial ice which began melting after 12,000 years ago was merely the last sub-phase of the last great glaciation. There had also been three earlier periods of great alpine glaciers, and long periods of warm weather in between. If the rain belt moved north as the glaciers melted for the last time, it must have moved in the same direction in earlier times. Thus, the forced neighborliness of men, plants, and animals in river valleys and oases must also have happened earlier. Why didn’t domestication happen earlier, then?
Furthermore, it does not seem to be in the oases and river valleys that we have our first or only traces of either food-production or the earliest farming villages. These traces are also in the hill-flanks of the mountains of western Asia. Our earliest sites of the village-farmers do not seem to indicate a greatly different climate from that which the same region now shows. In fact, everything we now know suggests that the old theory was just too simple an explanation to have been the true one. The only reason I mention it—beyond correcting the ideas you may get in the general texts—is that it illustrates the kind of thinking we shall have to do, even if it is doubtless wrong in detail.
We archeologists shall have to depend much more than we ever have on the natural scientists who can really help us. I can tell you this from experience. I had the great good fortune to have on my expedition staff in Iraq in 1954–55, a geologist, a botanist, and a zoologist. Their studies added whole new bands of color to my spectrum of thinking about how and why the revolution took place and how the village-farming community began. But it was only a beginning; as I said earlier, we are just now learning to ask the proper questions.
ABOUT STAGES AND ERAS
Now come some definitions, so I may describe my material more easily. Archeologists have always loved to make divisions and subdivisions within the long range of materials which they have found. They often disagree violently about which particular assemblage of material goes into which subdivision, about what the subdivisions should be named, about what the subdivisions really mean culturally. Some archeologists, probably through habit, favor an old scheme of Grecized names for the subdivisions: paleolithic, mesolithic, neolithic. I refuse to use these words myself. They have meant too many different things to too many different people and have tended to hide some pretty fuzzy thinking. Probably you haven’t even noticed my own scheme of subdivision up to now, but I’d better tell you in general what it is.
I think of the earliest great group of archeological materials, from which we can deduce only a food-gathering way of culture, as the food-gathering stage. I say “stage” rather than “age,” because it is not quite over yet; there are still a few primitive people in out-of-the-way parts of the world who remain in the food-gathering stage. In fact, Professor Julian Steward would probably prefer to call it a food-gathering level of existence, rather than a stage. This would be perfectly acceptable to me. I also tend to find myself using collecting, rather than gathering, for the more recent aspects or era of the stage, as the word “collecting” appears to have more sense of purposefulness and specialization than does “gathering” (see [p. 91]).
Now, while I think we could make several possible subdivisions of the food-gathering stage—I call my subdivisions of stages eras[5]—I believe the only one which means much to us here is the last or terminal sub-era of food-collecting of the whole food-gathering stage. The microliths seem to mark its approach in the northwestern part of the Old World. It is really shown best in the Old World by the materials of the “Forest folk,” the cultural adaptation to the post-glacial environment in northwestern Europe. We talked about the “Forest folk” at the beginning of this chapter, and I used the Maglemosian assemblage of Denmark as an example.