• "Hunter Gatherers" how humans lived before we learned to farm. One of the last groups of Hunter Gatherers in the world is shown.
• Neolithic Revolution -- Hayonim cave, northern Israel, has evidence that people lived there over 10,000 years ago -- the "Natufians."
• Ain Ghazal is a site in Jordan, a village from 9000 years ago until 7000 years ago. Why did the people leave the village?
• Dr Alan Wrigley suggests reasons why populations grow. He visited old churches for data.
• The modern world came from the Industrial Revolution. Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution are related. Why?
• The Industrial Revolution happened first in northern England and southern Scotland.

Nearly the whole history of the human race consists of being hunter gatherers. It is the natural form of life for humans.

Humans started out as "hunter-gatherers" who wandered the land, looking for edible plants and trapping or catching animals to eat. For at least 100,000 years, and probably much longer than that, the hunter-gathering life style was the way all humans lived. This way of life is difficult and probably fewer than 5,000,000 people lived on the earth during this period.

The video shows one of the few remaining groups of hunter gatherers on earth, the Shom people of Botswana. These people live in the extremely isolated and remote Kalahari desert where their ancestors had almost no contact with any other humans for many thousands of years.   Alec Campbell, one of the scientists who has become their friend, says in the video "You must be completely at one with this environment to be able to live here."  The Shom people gather roots, tubers(similar to roots), seeds, fruit and nuts from a variety of plants. If they want meat, they must set traps and one family may have several traps set out at once. Because they know how to make the traps, but more important, because they know exactly where and when to put the traps, almost every day they will catch a bird or small animal and get a small amount of meat.

The traditional Shom shown in the video live far from the cities and towns of most Botswani people. They do not plant, do not work metals, keep animals, weave, bake, brew, make pottery, have mutual fund porftfolios or build permanent houses. They have no schools and do not read or write, although they have a lot of oral traditions, folklore and stories.  They are very intelligent and kind. Of course, they have to be! Anyone who is stupid, or anyone who doesn't cooperate and respect his neighbors will soon be eliminated in this kind of difficult environment -- it takes brains and mutual support to survive!

The Nation of Botswana is a very interesting place. The country has little money, but the people there have made a tremendous effort to modernize their country, and many Botswani students have come to the USA to study (some to JWU!). On the other hand, Botswana has been ravaged by AIDS, adults there have a very high rate of HIV infection and many have died of the disease. That is a tragic situation.

Neolithic stone tools from Greece. About 12,000 years old.

The Neolithic Period (from Neo = New and lithic = stone, for New Stone Age) began many thousands of years ago as humans learned to make better tools from stones. It began to end about 10,000 years ago when humans learned how to farm (the beginning of farming is called the "Neolithic Revolution"), began settling down into towns, and began learning new skills -- hunter gatherers continually move from place to place, so they cannot practice skills such as brewing, baking, pottery making, weaving, boat building, fishing with nets and traps, and metal work. Those skills were only developed slowly as people settled down. Villagers first learned how to work metals and tools made of copper, then bronze (copper mixed with tin), then iron replaced stone tools. Iron requires much more sophisticated metal working than copper, so it took time, but eventually people in Africa, Europe and Asia each worked out a method for working with iron.

Of course, it took a long time for all these new skills to travel around the world. Farmers in the Eastern Mediteranean area were farming 10,000 years ago, but Indians in New England only learned to farm about 1000 to 2000 years ago, and a few small groups of people around the world still exist as hunters (such as a few groups of Eskimos, a small number of isolated Amazon Indians in South America, and the last few remaining Shom and other Bushmen people of Africa -- perhaps a few 1,000s of people in all.)

Franchthi Cave. details about a cave which was continuously occupied from 20,000 years ago to 3,000 years ago, with pictures and descriptions of various things found in the cave. Evidence found by archeologists shows that during the time the cave was inhabited, humans learned how to farm and how to raise domestic animals such as sheep and goats.

Another famous site from this period is Stonehenge. We have to remember that even those these people had little technology, they weren't stupid - they were just as smart as us, or on the average, maybe even smarter, because stupid people don't survive long in tough situations!

Stonehenge in England

"The Neolithic Revolution" -- the invention of farming is called the Neolithic Revolution.

When we started learning to farm, the population started to grow.

The Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave A cave in France. In 1994 cave explorers found beautiful paintings done by Neolithic Hunter gatherers deep in the cave. The famous photo at left shows the artist's tracing of his own hand done 31,000 years ago!

Photograph: Dr. Ofer Bar -Yosef

Before 10,000 years ago the Natufians gathered all kinds of food from the forests, wetlands and grasslands that surrounded the cave.

Some scholars believe that the climate became drier about 10,000 years ago and this change forced the Hunter-Gatherer people to settle down and live only in their best areas, gradually developing farming skills to supplement the food they collected.

In the video, the narrator points out that the archeologists had "a precious find of three burnt grains of barley" when they excavated the cave. This is wild grain that the people were collecting, but eventually they learned to plant and harvest it - that is, they became farmers.

Barley seed - Barley was probably the first grain intentionally grown by humans. It is easy to grow and produces a good crop of grain which is easily ground into flour. Also, wet barley ferments very rapidly -- in other words, soon after humans started harvesting barley, they probably accidentally discovered beer. Barley was the main food grain of Europe until about year 1500 C.E. -- the folks in Europe did not have corn, and wheat was very rarely used before that time - wheat seeds are very hard, too hard to grind without windmills and water powered mills which were not available in many areas until after year 1300 C.E. or so. For that reason, bread made from wheat flour was a real luxury before that time. Today about half of the barley grown is fed to animals and half is used to make beer and ale. In beer making, the barley seeds are moistened and allowed to start to grow. The seeds contain starch which is converted into maltose and other sugars by enzymes in the growing seed. After a day or so the seeds are roasted and ground up. That is "malt." When malt is mixed with yeasts the yeasts ferment the sugars to make alcohol. Hop plants are added for flavoring.

Eventually as climates continued to change and populations grew, the people probably had to give up hunter-gatherer life completely. By that time they were keeping herds of goats, and growing crops. From the Francthi site linked above, we have direct evidence that people started keeping sheep and goats about this time. (How do you think we could prove that the people were keeping and raising goats instead of just hunting them?)

In the video, a group of Bedouin tribespeople are shown. A few of them still live a life reminiscent of their ancient ancestors of 5000 - 10,000 years ago! The archeologist in the film makes a point that the Bedouins survive because they are very few in numbers, so they do not overcrowd the land. She says that at the ancient town at Ain Gazal, the town failed to survive because they had too many people. They used up all their resources and died out!

EXHIBITIONS | JORDAN | The Neolithic Village of Ain Ghazal

Ain Ghazal -- A Neolithic village -- The video makes an important point about the ruins at Ain Gazal.

The village at Ain Gazal was occupied from about 9000 years ago to about 7000 years ago.   When the villagers first settled there, they knew how to make plaster and they did a very good job of building parts of their homes with plaster.

Plaster is made from limestone, a common white rock. You must dig out the limestone rock, then burn it in a big fire. This takes a lot of wood. When it has been heated and roasted, the rock must be ground to powder. That is the plaster. You combine the plaster powder with water and then it hardens to form a white, rock-like material which of course we still use today.

When the people at Ain Gazal had been there for a very long time (nearly 2000 years) they stopped making plaster and moved away. Why? 

One clue is in the hearths (fireplaces) of the village. In the oldest houses (7000BC) the floors are made of very fine plaster, skillfully shaped to form neat little round fireplaces for wood fires that held fragments of burned wood and wood ashes. They are still in good shape after 9000 years! But in the younger (5000BC) hearths -- the ones that were made shortly before the village was abandoned -- there is no wood ash. The younger floors are not plaster, but instead they are made from white rock pounded into pieces and mixed with mud. Those floors have fallen apart -- they were not true plaster. And in the hearths, the remnants of the fires and ash are from burning animal dung or waste.

You have to realize that this is a very important detail. No one would cook their food with a dung fire if they could get wood! And, these people were starting to be farmers. What should a farmer be doing with dung? He should be using it for fertilizer, not wasting it by burning it up in a fire! Think what that means -- they burned dung to cook their food because they had run out of wood. They didn't have any other choice.

It seems pretty likely that the Natufian village failed because the population was too large for the amount of wood, food, and resources that the people had available to them. 

Population Growth

Population first began to increase more rapidly when people settled down in villages and women began to have babies at younger ages.

People in villages generally:

• have a more regular food supply, so their children are healthier and fewer children die.
• "wean" (stop breast-feeding) their children at a younger age than hunter-gatherer women. Breast-feeding temporarily reduces a woman's fertility, women who are breast feeding take longer to get pregnant, but women who stop breast feeding generally get pregnant again sooner. So, when families live in villages instead of as hunter gatherrers, the women are pregnant more often, have better, more reliable food, and have more babies. The babies are healthier and survive better, so the population grows.
• have more resources. An farm area of only 1 kilometer square(about 0.4 square miles) can grow enough food to feed 50 farmers, but in an area like the Kalahari, it may take an area of 400 square kilometers (roughly 150 square miles) for there to be wild plants and animals to feed 50 hunter-gatherers.  When populations grow, there is no longer enough land to support them if they do not farm.

So, when hunter-gatherers stop moving, their population goes up, then there are too many of them for the land to support, so they must become farmers to survive.

From about 10,000 years ago until about 200 years ago, all of our ancestors, all the people in the world were learning to be farmers.  Only a few isolated groups like the like the Shom and San, the Inuit and a few others failed to get the message.

From about 1300 - 1500 AD in Europe, some new economic systems developed which changed the way farms worked. To give a simplified explanation, what happened was this:

• before about 1300 AD essentially all land in Europe was owned by knights and the church, but after 1300 more private individuals who were merchants and traders (not knights) started to own land.
• when private individuals could own land, one of the first things they did was fence off the land and prevent other people from using it.  The whole process of owning, buying and selling land, and putting up fences, became known as "enclosure."
• land that was "enclosed" was often improved by the owners. As the owners started to improve their farms, the result was that agricultural productivity became much greater. There was more food, more animals, and especially, more wool which could be sold for cash to buy up more land. 
• Western Europe had a cultural custom which kept the population from expanding too fast -- the custom said, no one should get married until they could afford their own home. But, with much more wealth around, young people could afford their own homes sooner. After 1500 people started getting married much younger.

This is where Alan Wrigley comes in. He's the guy who went to the churches and checked out the "registers" -- the books of old birth, marriage and death records -- to see what made the population grow. In England these books were kept in every neighborhood starting in the 1530s. When Wrigley examined the Registers the main thing he found out was --

• in the past it wasn't so much deaths which change the population. The population didn't mainly grow because fewer people are dying, or people die younger or older. Instead...
• what does affect the population is, how young do women start having their babies?  If women start having babies at a younger age, then they are likely to have more babies, and the population grows. That's the big thing he proved.

After 1500 -  1600 AD the population of Europe was probably expanding. So, there were more people around, but fewer people were needed on the farms because the new farming methods produced more food with less labor.  The increase in population created many problems, such as a severe shortage of lumber and firewood in England. Also, there was a surplus of labor because fewer people were needed to work on the improved farms. Many country people went to the cities seeking work.

Population growth was one of the reasons why the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain. In Britain (England, Scotland and Wales), a combination of factors created a new way of life.