Prehistoric Men

by Robert J. Braidwood

I said above ([p. 105]) that my era of incipient cultivation and animal domestication is mainly set up by playing a hunch. Although we cannot really demonstrate it—and certainly not in the Near East—it would be very strange for food-collectors not to have known a great deal about the plants and animals most useful to them. They do seem to have domesticated the dog. We can easily imagine them remembering to go back, season after season, to a particular patch of ground where seeds or acorns or berries grew particularly well. Most human beings, unless they are extremely hungry, are attracted to baby animals, and many wild pups or fawns or piglets must have been brought back alive by hunting parties.

In this last sense, man has probably always been an incipient cultivator and domesticator. But I believe that Adams is right in suggesting that this would be doubly true with the experimenters of the terminal era of food-collecting. We noticed that they also seem to have had a tendency to settle down. Now my hunch goes that when this experimentation and settling down took place within a potential nuclear area—where a whole constellation of plants and animals possible of domestication was available—the change was easily made. Professor Charles A. Reed, our field colleague in zoology, agrees that year-round settlement with plant domestication probably came before there were important animal domestications.

INCIPIENT ERAS AND NUCLEAR AREAS

I have put this scheme into a simple chart ([p. 111]) with the names of a few of the sites we are going to talk about. You will see that my hunch means that there are eras of incipient cultivation only within nuclear areas. In a nuclear area, the terminal era of food-collecting would probably have been quite short. I do not know for how long a time the era of incipient cultivation and domestication would have lasted, but perhaps for several thousand years. Then it passed on into the era of the primary village-farming community.

Outside a nuclear area, the terminal era of food-collecting would last for a long time; in a few out-of-the-way parts of the world, it still hangs on. It would end in any particular place through contact with and the spread of ideas of people who had passed on into one of the more developed eras. In many cases, the terminal era of food-collecting was ended by the incoming of the food-producing peoples themselves. For example, the practices of food-production were carried into Europe by the actual movement of some numbers of peoples (we don’t know how many) who had reached at least the level of the primary village-farming community. The “Forest folk” learned food-production from them. There was never an era of incipient cultivation and domestication proper in Europe, if my hunch is right.

ARCHEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES IN SEEING THE INCIPIENT ERA

The way I see it, two things were required in order that an era of incipient cultivation and domestication could begin. First, there had to be the natural environment of a nuclear area, with its whole group of plants and animals capable of domestication. This is the aspect of the matter which we’ve said is directly given by nature. But it is quite possible that such an environment with such a group of plants and animals in it may have existed well before ten thousand years ago in the Near East. It is also quite possible that the same promising condition may have existed in regions which never developed into nuclear areas proper. Here, again, we come back to the cultural factor. I think it was that “atmosphere of experimentation” we’ve talked about once or twice before. I can’t define it for you, other than to say that by the end of the Ice Age, the general level of many cultures was ready for change. Ask me how and why this was so, and I’ll tell you we don’t know yet, and that if we did understand this kind of question, there would be no need for me to go on being a prehistorian!

POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIPS OF STAGES AND ERAS IN WESTERN ASIA AND NORTHEASTERN AFRICA

Now since this was an era of incipience, of the birth of new ideas, and of experimentation, it is very difficult to see its traces archeologically. New tools having to do with the new ways of getting and, in fact, producing food would have taken some time to develop. It need not surprise us too much if we cannot find hoes for planting and sickles for reaping grain at the very beginning. We might expect a time of making-do with some of the older tools, or with make-shift tools, for some of the new jobs. The present-day wild cousin of the domesticated sheep still lives in the mountains of western Asia. It has no wool, only a fine down under hair like that of a deer, so it need not surprise us to find neither the whorls used for spinning nor traces of woolen cloth. It must have taken some time for a wool-bearing sheep to develop and also time for the invention of the new tools which go with weaving. It would have been the same with other kinds of tools for the new way of life.